Page 5 - Diffuse Work

FACTS AND FIGURES DIFFUSE WORK
Before lockdown, the idea that everybody could work remotely seemed a very distant proposition. We know different now. Yet the new reality of work does not mean we no longer need the office ..
The concept of remote working and its relationship with the development alongside communication technologies is nothing new. In 1973, Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer, proposed a near future in which many employees would not leave their homes to go to work, with no need to waste time on long commutes to their offices, offering them enormous benefits in terms of saving their time and energy and improving their quality of life.1
It took at least another ten years before the first experiments began. It was only really from the 2000s, with the advent of broadband-enabled laptops and 3G mobile phones, that there was a genuine affirmation of remote work as a viable alternative to traditional office work.
Since then, models and definitions have proliferated to the point where we can choose between work from home (WFH) and work from anywhere (WFA),2 flexible and smart working and various hybrids and variants. The outcomes have been contradictory at times and the adoption of remote work has often fallen short of both its expectation and potential.
But this merely confirms another of Jack Nilles’ predictions: that technology (at his time still immature) would not be the limit to the success of remote work. Instead it would be held back by cultural, organisational and managerial inertia.
What no one, not even Nilles, was able to predict was that a virus would upset the status quo, making remote working not merely an option, but a necessity for more than half of the world's employees, while also catalysing the rapid adoption of new technologies that not only allowed people to communicate more effectively but collaborate in real time too.
The upheaval in people’s working lives gave them all a chance to experience the pros and cons of remote work, many of them for the
How the workforce is distributed in a diffuse office
FACTS AND FIGURES 5
ANYWHERE DIGITAL SPACE OFFICE