Page 9 - Diffuse Work

FACTS AND FIGURES 9
OCCASIONAL REMOTE WORK
Companies can’t support remote work, but allow employee to work remotely for a short time.
10% CHARGED
SELECTIVE REMOTE WORK
Companies don't redesign work, but instead replicate office structures in digital form. Communication
is assumed to be synchronous.
30% CHARGED
REMOTE FRIENDLY WORK
Companies start to invest in equipment for their employees. Work is distributed and communication is asynchronous, but fixed working hours remain.
50% CHARGED
DIFFUSE WORK
Companies are distributed geo- graphically and communication is synchronous and asynchronous, giving employees autonomy to work where and how they want.
SMART WORK NIRVANA
The ideal state. People are rewarded for their outputs rather than time spent working and everyone can find a better work life balance.
EVOLUTIONARY LEVELS OF DISTRIBUTED WORK
FULLY CHARGED NIRVANA
99% CHARGED
We can define the diffuse office as a multidimensional space suitable to support the effectiveness of a dynamic workforce, which takes from Remote Working a degree of independence from a predefined physical space, from Agile Working the idea that productivity is the result of a strategically defined and task oriented process, from Flexible Working the possibility of managing personal time and finally from Smart Working the extensive use of technology.
It is the technological component that plays a particularly vital role in this new era. During lockdown, we witnessed exponential growth in the use of platforms for video conferencing, which developed their services and features to meet the new needs and expectations of an audience obliged to work from home4.
Even more importantly, it was the incredible success of collaboration platforms, such as Slack or Trello, coupled with the rapid adoption of tools such as Mural or Miro by companies and schools; digital whiteboards which became places for knowledge sharing and virtual brainstorming for teams and individuals. Not surprisingly, these platforms also offer predefined exchange and collaborative templates which are based on the most common Design Thinking, Agile or Kanban5 tools.
None of these tools was invented solely for the lockdown6, but the rate of their adoption during this period has been massive and allowed
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Evolutionary levels of distributed work
Data: based on “Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy”, by Matt Mullenweg, 2020.