Feature Do you have to have an office?


If you were starting a knowledge-based business today, would buying, renting or leasing an office in a commercial building be a priority? The technology to support home, decentralised. mobile or hybrid working is now mature, with the promise of more to come. Let us take a look at a new technology that will probably deal with some of the outstanding issues in audio and video conferencing.


Goldman Sachs chief executive and chairman David Solomon recently said: “Homeworking is “an aberration that we’re going to correct as quick- ly as possible. “I don’t want another class of young people arriving [re- motely] that aren’t getting more direct contact, direct apprenticeship, direct mentorship.” So not a fan.


So why has the traditional office been seen as essential for a ‘proper’ busi- ness, even though the costs of acquir- ing and fitting out an office places a huge financial burden on a young busi- ness. But many managers have said they are worried young professionals have been deprived of informal learn- ing they would usually gain in meet- ings and overhearing conversations. The alternative to the traditional of- fice for many new businesses is work- ing from home but this is noy without its problems. Leesman, the workplace research experts found that 72 per cent of under-25s do not have a ded- icated space to work in at home and struggled to connect with colleagues. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, surpris- ingly it is actually younger workers in their twenties and early thirties were the age group most looking forward to returning to the workplace after the pandemic.


One of the main reasons for this is that the office workplace performs a social function. Psychologist Robin Dunbar writes that: “If [young workers] don’t have a base with a ready-made group of friends to branch out from, where else can they find friends in a city where they know no one?” Work relationships are not just about com- panionship. They offer networks and learning how to navigate an organisa-


tion, determining where the real power lies behind the formal hierarchies and job titles.


Filling the gaps


So while technology offers the means to communicate and collaborate, something else is needed to fulfil those societal and behavioural needs. The team that developed Microsoft Teams has accepted the challenge. While it has sometimes seemed, during the pandemic, that the office has become invested with magical powers, trans- formed from a white-collar factory to the answer to every work problem from apprenticeship to creativity. This rose-tinted takes no account of the wasted time, cost and stress in- curred


of a science fiction novel, does it not? From Tuesday onward, this will no lon- ger remain fictional, as Microsoft has announced its newest meeting space, Mesh, a service to build apps for peo- ple to collaborate in augmented real- ity.”


in commuting to and from offices. A partial and pragmatic solu- tion has been found in the develop- ment of ‘hybrid’ working. A hybrid future means equipping workers with the skills to navigate a career that in- cludes remote working, but this only a partial fix. Microsoft’s thinking de- pends on turning the problem on its head – if we can’t take the worker to the office, what about bringing the of- fice, or at least the office environment, to the worker?


Microsoft Mesh


This month, Microsoft has launched Mesh as the way to reinvent meetings by creating environments in which: “You can actually feel like you’re in the same place”. Soumyadeep Sark- ar asks: “Imagine being in your room and attending office meetings as a hologram. Sounds like something out


Microsoft Mesh is a cloud-based mixed reality meeting room allowing people from remote locations to be a part of a shared holographic experi- ence using mixed reality devices such as Holo Lens. Microsoft plans to inte- grate the platform with its other en- terprise products including Teams and Dynamics 365. Mixed reality headsets overlay a virtual world or object over a physical world or object. Mesh will be an Azure service and associated soft- ware development kit. Select custom- ers can start testing the Mesh cloud service now in preview before it be- comes available for all.


A bold new vision for ‘mixed reali- ty’ technology, which could create a greater sense of connection between people when they’re meeting in the digital realm as avatars. Microsoft has provided a lot of details about Micro- soft Mesh, describing this innovation as “a new mixed-reality platform […] that allows people in different physi- cal locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many kinds of devices.”


Adding a bit more detail, a Microsoft blog post mentions that Microsoft Mesh will “enable geographically dis- tributed teams to have more collabora- tive meetings, conduct virtual design sessions, assist others, learn together and host virtual social meetups. Peo-


14


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28