ABSTRACT
The Future of Work Conference proposed that physical and reasoning tasks are increasingly being done by machines alongside people, enabling people to work on more strategic things rather than look at spreadsheets. The business environment of the future needs to trust people and technology and provide flexibility and choice for employees to connect with complementary skills across a network, to work together on challenges, to learn fast, unlock their passion and improve performance. Successful co-working environments curate authentic experiences; ubiquitous Wi-Fi, great coffee, healthy food and services, alongside networking events, and demand for them is exploding. Companies should create environments–both physical and virtual–that help employees to develop new connections and also to strengthen their existing relationships, as it is well proven that traditional work environments of rows of desks are obsolete for this kind of working. Many firms already build their workplace environments with the common areas strategically positioned to allow workers to 'bump into each other'.
