Johannesburg, 01 Jun 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic will forever reshape workplaces – from how buildings are designed, right through to where, when and how people work.
This is according to Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory and adjunct professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business.
Prof Singh, who is the key thought leader in a new series of business webinars presented by Nutanix, says the pandemic, which is expected to dip and surge for years to come, will drive massive change in the office environment. Physical offices will have to be redesigned around considerations such as the contamination risks of elevators, escalators, bathrooms and reception desks, for example.
“In cases where people have to be physically present in a place of work, we will see a redesign of workspaces, with the use of more copper because it kills viruses, the return of cubicles and the reduction of densification,” he says.
However, he expects businesses to be surprised at the large numbers of workers who will not be needed to work in the traditional office space in future. “We now realise there’s actually no practical reason to have anyone in an office for transactional work. We will see a shift to work from anywhere and ‘anywhen’ – where a lot of work shifts in time and space. This then will see the boundaries dissolving between permanent, temporary and contingent staff. The new office will be similar to a beehive – where most of the work is done outside of the hive, but the hive remains the nexus. Less real estate will be needed and large offices may well be repurposed onto housing and factories in future.”
ICT becomes operations driving force
These dramatic shifts in working environments will require a great deal of innovation and the right technologies, he says. “Technology is the glue that holds everything together. To adapt to this new environment, it must do so in robust resilient way with no latency – which is why the cloud is so important.”
ICT has been preparing for this unprecedented environment for years, Prof Singh says. “In over 20 years of sitting on boards and risk and audit committees, I have never seen anybody planning for a pandemic. Fortunately, ICT has been working on digitising the enterprise for the past 10 to 15 years. Suddenly, here we are, amid a pandemic, and it turns out technology is saving the day.”
Paul Ruinaard, Regional Sales Director Sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix, says those organisations that were digitally native have been able to pivot quickly to new ways of working. For others, adapting to the changes is more challenging. They are being supported by IT and ICT vendors: “IT companies are working to pivot organisations into digital enterprises extremely quickly – in fact. some IT people are reporting that they have never worked so hard in their lives,” he says.
“CIOs and technical people now occupy a large seat at the executive table, helping business to use technologies to transition rapidly. But many businesses are still challenged in understanding what the new normal looks like, how operations should change and what technologies should be applied.”
To help businesses understand and adapt to the changing environment, Singh, Ruinaard and an expert panel will outline the future of the workplace in a webinar hosted by Nutanix on 18 June. The webinar, part of the Nutanix Connect series, will address the future of headquarters and workspaces, and outline how to operationalise and enable remote workforces.
For more information and to register for this event, please click here.
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