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by harry goldstein
The paradigm shift to virtual offices is already happening, and even we, the Children of the PC, may not be fully prepared. With companies trying to cut overhead costs, more and more of us are working at home and "telecommuting" or booking rooms in "office hotels." At this stage of the game, however, these alternative work environments leave some feeling cut off from the very office culture many of us thrive on.
Salespeople might be comfortable booking an office at a "hotel" when they need to use office space to knock out a sales report, prepare for a convention or catch a superior up on what's happening in a particular sales territory, but people who work at home most or all of the time don't even have the illusion of working in an office, of being "part of the team." I'm sure that a lot of folks absolutely love rolling out of bed -- morning breath, tousled hair and all -- brewing up a pot of coffee, firing up the computer and getting to work. It's also highly probable that a lot of those same people have trouble dividing their time between domestic concerns -- taking care of the kids, for instance -- and work.
Even more difficult is learning how to manage your time when no one is there to look over your shoulder, when there is no whistle that goes off in your head when the clock strikes 5:00, signaling the end of work. The whole day stretches ahead of you like an empty banquet table that you have to cover with the fruits of your labor. I suppose people adapt. After all, who wouldn't want to control the pace of their work in the comfort of their own home? But what kind of rent are employees and companies paying for the virtual office? And how is home-work changing the fabric of our culture, when people stop bumping into each other at the copy machine or chatting over a cup of coffee?
The kind of isolation that telecommuters experience might change drastically in the next five to ten years, with the advent of virtual Web-like workspaces. Engineers and architects are already learning how to use cyberspace to collaborate with each other on design projects using virtual reality markup language (VRML) -- enabling colleagues to walk through plans for a new office building or a jet engine. Web sites like Worlds Inc. and The Palace are helping people manifest themselves in a pseudo-physical form -- avatars in virtual communities.
And videoconferencing, primitive as it may be (it's often more like watching a slide show than video), is yet another step towards drawing geographically dispersed people together into a shared space. Lotus Notes, and software of its ilk, lets far-flung co-workers share and make changes to documents and financial reports. Very likely, these technologies will be combined in such a way that collaborative work environments will become as common as conference rooms and cubicles. And, possibly, some visionary software engineer might come up with a way of allowing people the freedom to express their own personalities via their digital avatars (check out Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash for a very plausible version of the future -- one that the people at Microsoft are working to usher forth).
Beyond virtual work environments, we should all be ready to adapt to a keyboardless computer interface. Voice recognition programs are getting better, and soon a lot of us are going to be learning what used to be the exclusive skill of executives -- the art of dictation. The mouse will probably be replaced by something that reads our eye movements, subtracting our hands from the equation. Maybe, 100 years from now, we won't even have to talk to each other, much less actually "go to work" -- our brainwaves will be jacked into the work environment, our ideas and opinions translated directly into action, the "hive" consciousness reaching its apotheosis in the buzz and whir of The Machine. Perhaps our brains, or at least the brains of our grandchildren, will adapt to this kind of interaction -- all in the name of efficiency. A brave new world, indeed.
But not one I really want to live in. This kind of ultra-high tech dystopia, where we are all isolated yet networked together, is only one path technology might take. Imagine an empty, silent Manhattan -- its canyons of office towers deserted, the vitality of the city dispersed out to the suburbs like a dead man whose life's blood has trickled out his pores. Or a Manhattan repurposed for residential living (it's already happening, as a large chunk of vacant real estate near the Wall Street area has been re-zoned for residential). Why do we need offices or office buildings or downtowns if we're all working from home? The service industries will move out where we are -- as will the low-wage jobs for people who haven't had the benefit of a decent education and are relegated to working for minimum wage, commuting out from the repurposed downtowns, while 'burb-shackled knowledge workers wait for their pizzas to be delivered.
Of course, that's just one scenario. Those of us in traditional office settings have a say in how and where we work -- that's how telecommuting got off the ground in the first place. If the consensus is that physical offices are obsolete, then we should facilitate the transition to something else by encouraging management to explore different options. But we should make one thing clear from the start: The time we spend working should be proportional to how efficiently we can do our jobs -- the less time it takes for us to do our jobs, the more time we should have for leisure.
At the turn of the century, people worked 60-80 hours a week; now the average work week is 40 hours. With the staggering pace of technological innovation, one would think that Americans, at least, would be able to work fewer hours. Unfortunately, corporate America has opted to re-engineer and downsize, so instead of spreading around fewer hours among more people, companies dump more work on fewer people. In an effort to cut costs further, corporations are outsourcing. That's an Orwellian euphemism for cutting people out of the office and setting them up in their homes or transient worker hotels, with everyone cranking out work at least 40 hours a week, usually more. If we choose (or are forced) to work from our homes, we need to gain something besides the dubious comforts of staying home. We need -- and have literally earned -- more time.
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And we need to be aware of what we're giving up: The daily contact with people who share, if not a common goal, then a common circumstance and the sense of camaraderie that results; the clear physical, if not emotional, divide between the office and home -- no more "taking work home" or "bad days at the office," it'll all be the same; the simplicity of communicating with body language, a quick gesture or roll of the eyes; and perhaps most importantly, the very immediate feeling of being part of something larger than yourself, of working with other people.