Flexibility and Infrastructure Define the New World of Work

Work is moving from a location to an activity with the advent of smartphones, tablets and cloud computing.

Business has always been about the work, of course, but for much of the past hundred years being an employee was as much about putting in time at the office as it was about what actually happened at the office. Just to be at your desk during office hours was enough in many cases.

 Those days are over. With increased mobility and schedules that no longer respect an “end” to the workday, work is properly moving back to its foundation: Having a job is about getting work done, not about where the employee is physically located.

For BT Global Services, this shift has been palpable.

“The biggest change is in the culture,” noted David Dunbar in a recent white paper on the changing nature of business, general manager of flexible services for BT Global Services. “In the last decade, BT has driven relentlessly towards an objective-based management culture. It’s moved away from ‘management by presence’ to ‘performance management,’ and it’s about enabling and empowering people.”

Unified communications has played a big part in this transformation.

“Clearly technology has progressed at a tremendous pace during this time and enabled much greater flexibility,” added Dunbar. “We can log on to any of our internal systems anywhere and with any device. I’ve just been working from home and updating my team’s half-yearly appraisals. We can order a car or file expenses from an office hot-desk, an internet café or an iPad at home.”

For Dunbar, this shift requires two key components: The right infrastructure to enable this flexibility, and the culture to support it.

“To put it another way,” he wrote, “the tools are the dance floor, but it’s the people that are doing the dancing, and it’s up to the leadership to give them the permission to dance the best they can.”

When it comes to infrastructure, one key component is a unified communications platform that can create a virtual office no matter where the employee is located. This includes chat and presence options, and collaborative spaces. But the cornerstone is business VoIP and a virtual PBX system that glues together remotely working employees.

A Virtual PBX means that employees can receive and transfer calls to colleagues when they are not in the office just the same as they used to do when sitting next to each other. It means they are connected to the business even when geographically separated from the company’s “office.” A virtual PBX is that dance floor that employees perform their work on.

But the second half, as Dunbar noted, is the culture.

“The emphasis has changed with just as much focus on what happens inside our offices as on more traditional home and mobile working, to make sure that everyone is working flexibly – not just coming in to a set seat, in a set department, every day,” he wrote in the paper. “That way we can break down some of the barriers between functions. Often an HR person only sits with HR people or a finance person only sits with finance people. It’s like a salesman who never meets his customers! And it blocks organizations.”

The world of work is changing, but not everyone has made the adjustment yet. Those that have made the jump have put in place the right infrastructure for flexible work, and have allowed it to flourish with the right adjustments to the corporate mindset.

Edited by Alisen Downey