The Future of Work & Home
by Jenny Ambrozek
Fellow TheAppGap contributors Jim Ware and Celine Roque are my usual sources of the latest in the future of work spaces and teleworking. However, the Financial Times Weekend House & Home section, May 9 has an interesting piece by New York area based “global trendspotter ” Marian Salzman on what the house of the future might look like. Relevant here is the author’s forecast for attention to home workspaces.
Under the timely heading ” Online and employed” Salzman begins:
“Thanks to the economic crisis, we’ve seen growing interest in the efficiencies of working at home via online networks linked to internal office servers. If your tasks are primarily computer-based and you aren’t needed for hour upon hour of in-person meetings, what’s the sense in commuting several hours a week just to sit in a different room in front of a different screen to do the same things?”
then points to attention getting human resources group WorldatWork, projections indicating:
“more than 28m Americans now work from home at least one day per month and the number is expected to rise to 100m by 2010.”
The article cites a recent Economist magazine report to make the case for the ecofriendly nature of telecommuting:
” if the 33m Americans who have jobs that could be done from home were to stay there instead of driving to work, US oil imports would drop by more than one quarter and carbon emissions would fall by 67m metric tonnes a year.”
Listing two further trends:
“Growing numbers of consultants and freelancers are assembling careers from multiple projects and using a laptop as a business portal.”
And,
“although women are still demanding top education and job options, they are increasingly willing to stay in the house more, taking a break for a few years to start a family or to work part-time from a home office, redefining the workday as one that happens during their children’s naptime and after bedtime, for instance.”
the writer concludes that private home offices are an essential element of future homes.
Did Marian Salzman get it right in describing future societal and work trends and implications for home building? All your insights welcomed.
~ Jenny Ambrozek
