Times of great crisis are often times of great change, and have a habit of showing us what can and should be done differently. Crisis also speeds up changes that have been coming for a long time.

Over the past ten years, many of us have been hearing terms such as ‘remote working’, ‘unified communications’ and ‘digital transformation’. But we never fully grasped what all of this meant, and how these words will affect our daily lives.

In the past month, we have all come to understand these concepts, adapting to our new reality, locked out of our offices and rising to the challenge of working from home. Some of us have been championing changes to how we work for years, and have been developing new systems and technologies to make the workplace function better, enable working from home, and make commercial buildings more sustainable.

This crisis will forever change how we work, but for the better. Irish companies and employees will be re-examining every aspect of how they work as the crisis has shown just what is possible.

In the next five years, we will see three major changes to the way we work and how our workplaces function.

In Association with

1 – Embracing New Technology

The explosion in the number of employees working from home in the past month is shining a light on new technology that enables people to work better and work smarter. A great example of this is connectivity to the cloud. The cloud can be mind-boggling and mystifying, but you shouldn’t get caught up in the complexity as the concept is simple.

The cloud is simply storage of data and information on the internet instead of on traditional local storage on hard drives. This makes it very easy for employees to work from home and access work files. It is also incredibly flexible, cost-efficient and often much more secure than traditional data storage.

This crisis has also been showing us the need for other new technology, including improved video conferencing, or more specifically Unified Communications (UC) solutions.

Microsoft Teams and Zoom have overtaken Skype, but the market is wide open for a truly professional platform. Businesses are now realising that they can manage just fine with video calls instead of long trips, racking up enormous expenses and CO2 footprints each year.

For those companies that have not yet moved to the cloud using systems like Citrix, Office 365 and Google Docs, and UC systems such as Zoom, Chime and Microsoft Teams, this crisis has been a huge struggle. This makes it almost impossible to work in lockdown and a daunting task to catch up in the post Covid-19 workplace.

Another new idea is health screening. Our company, Hereworks, offers a temperature screening platform that alerts employees if they have a high temperature. These ‘fever cams’ help prevent the spread of infections and drastically reduce sick days per year in large workplaces.

2 – More Remote Working Hubs

There is a vast section of the workforce that has been greatly enjoying the freedom and flexibility that working from home offers. Without the long commutes, no public transport and being able to spend much more time with your family, the attraction is easy to see.

However, this lockdown is also showing us that many people will never want to work from home again. Many are missing social interaction with colleagues, the workplace culture, and being able to bounce ideas and problems around with others.

Having a shared workplace is crucial to creativity, productivity and new business development. After all, work is a key part of the work-life balance.

So how do we marry the competing needs of employees and businesses? In the next five years, we will see a huge growth in the number of remote working hubs around smaller towns and cities outside Dublin. These will allow people access to much more than just desks, but meeting rooms, proper video conferencing technology, interactive innovation spaces and colleagues they see on a daily basis.

With the correct immersive technologies, these hubs will allow much better environments for co-creation, where people create and ideate together in a way that is impossible in front of a laptop screen.

3 – Smart Buildings

While many businesses will embrace remote working, the majority will still opt for large offices in central locations, but the Covid-19 pandemic is showing us how these offices could function better.

There has never been a greater focus on gathering data on peoples’ movement and who they come into contact with. The workplace is one arena where data analytics have yet to be harnessed and put in service of the people that use the space for their health, wellbeing and job satisfaction.

People will still want and need to go to the office, but perhaps not as much. On a given day post Covid-19, there will be significantly less people in the office than before.

With tangible insights and space analytics we can put this freed-up space to other uses, such as meeting rooms, social spaces and innovation hubs that improve health and wellbeing. This in turn could increase productivity or simply save on real estate costs.

Data has the power to transform our workplaces and we are beginning to see employers embracing safe data and gathering technology in the workplace.

The real value for companies is in integrating all systems and gathering data on how the people and building interact with one another. The data is then used to greatly enhance the efficient use of space, yielding massive energy savings while at the same time improving user experience, productivity and increasing satisfaction among staff.

By directing people to areas of the building that suits occupants’ individual preferences, it can benefit employees’ mental health by better responding to their needs.

There is no limit on the uses data analytics can have in making workplaces better. As human building interaction becomes more commonplace, we will see this data used to inform the design and construction of the future workspace, where the building is developed around the people and technology within, to better enable them both.

+ Tomás Mac Eoin (pictured) is Chief Executive of Hereworks and McKeon Group