2021, the office of the future?

The year 2020, with an unrelenting Covid-19 pandemic, has forced many companies to reconsider their relationship with the “office”. By choice, and more recently by obligation, “distancing” or teleworking has become part of daily life for many employees and the self-employed. After nearly a yearlong trial period, opinions diverge between wanting to keep the comfort of your own personal cocoon and the ease of reaching your colleagues…

In wanting to return to the office, we are mainly looking for an excuse to leave our home. Seeing our colleagues again, chatting over coffee, going out for lunch ... Teleworking in itself does not seem to be the problem. It brings its share of advantages that many of us have taken a liking to: fewer hours wasted in traffic jams, closing files from the sofa, flexible schedules that make it easier to reconcile everyone's agendas.

The trend of remote working is not new. While its origin dates back to the 1970s, it gained popularity in the early 2000s with the emergence of laptops, the internet, and email. Today, it is encapsulated by the acronym: “WFA” for “Work From Anywhere”. The current health situation therefore only underlined what was already known: employee productivity is not adversely affected by teleworking. On the contrary, we see that it even tends to increase by 10% to 20% on average.

A meeting that freezes in the middle of a presentation, a colleague without a camera to save bandwidth, a sentence that we believe we understand but we have only half-heard ... Our internet connections are not always our best allies. An estimated 35% of employees do not have sufficient infrastructure to work from home efficiently ... And that’s before even talking about IT security issues, a nightmare for IT teams.

With coworkers full of energy, creativity and anecdotes to share, the comfort of a living room and space for your bubble, high-performance wifi and a balanced lunch at midday? You should probably go to the Silversquare nearest to you ... Immediately! Coworking spaces designed by local artists, a community of brilliant entrepreneurs and service with a smile. Ask yourself, if the alternative combines what you've appreciated in recent months along with what you need going forward, what’s stopping the office of the future from becoming your office of 2021?