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Interview with Chelsea Perino

Interview with Chelsea Perino With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? Working in the flexible workspace industry puts us in an interesting position because during times of economic instability, many businesses turn to flexible workspaces to help them cope with downsizing or restructuring of their teams. Particularly with this current crisis, we are seeing businesses begin to re-evaluate their workplace strategy; the openness to employees working remotely is increasing significantly, however conversely the importance of the office has never been more obvious. For The Executive Centre, we see ourselves as a strategic partner to all of these businesses that are trying to future-proof their business by using flexible workspaces to reduce CAPEX costs and lease terms, and to build agility into their portfolio. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? Video conferencing tools will become an essential system for every business. The ability for workers to connect, communicate and collaborate remotely is more important than ever before, and having a platform that allows for information sharing, “face to face” interactions, and that facilitates remote collaboration has readily become a focus for major corporates. In addition, providing employees with secure and highspeed WiFi networks to ensure they are able to do their work efficiently at home will also be crucial. How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? Businesses will begin to incorporate ‘remote working’ policies into their official employee handbook, enabling employees to work from home or other remote locations without fear of judgement. A larger focus on mental health and wellness will also take place, ensuring that even if employees are not allowed to come into the office, that they still feel connected to their colleagues and to the company, that they still receive mentorship from upper management, and that they feel secure that not being physically present in the office will not negatively impact their career growth or reputation within the organisation. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? The main challenge is overcoming the pre-conceived notion that working from home/remote working means employees are less productive. Organisations must change their perspective so that they’re able to empower employees to be as motivated when they work from home as when they are in the office. At the same time, working remotely challenges the work-life balance concept as suddenly the barrier between work and home disappears. Employees need to make a conscious effort to still separate their ‘work’ time from their ‘life’ time to avoid burnout. Last, the connections/relationships formed as a result of face to face interactions is challenged here, so an even greater effort must be placed on creating alternative channels for employees to connect with their colleagues and upper management. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? A greater focus on creating secure, fast, reliable networks that employees can access remotely is something businesses should start investing in now. One of the challenges of WFH is that not everyone has the infrastructure in place to be productive, and much of the time that has to do with network stability and security. How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? The ability to learn from experts about the strategies they are implementing to future proof their business will hoping be inspirational for organisational leaders and will help them build resilience into their own workplace strategy. The opportunity to network with global professionals will also be hugely valuable, especially right now when everyone is looking for new business opportunities but are limited in terms of travel. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Richard Costin

Interview with Richard Costin With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? Bisley is a Global business with offices in North America, Middle East, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands and obviously the UK. Although the impact of COVID-19 has and will continue to impact our business, we have managed to continue to receive orders from overseas as the crisis hit countries at different times and also started to relax lockdown at different times. We are very fortunate that the quick decisions that we took to both close and slowly phase the opening of our business, it allowed our orderbook and manufacturing process to continue. During lockdown we saw high volumes of orders from the Public Sector and also our customers that were supplying via their on-line retail sites. The UK must go back to the office, but the office will look very different, large corporates will rota staff and also allow them to work from home. Although we did see spikes of orders these were more reactional to the situation and not strategic. In the near future, companies will review what is actually required for their staff to work from home and businesses will consider whether they really need the office space they have today. For smaller businesses, I believe they will continue to work in an office environment rather than work from home. The Public Sector will have a mixture of home and office working, but they will not go back to the office as before due to the large number of people working in small working environments. This is my view for the UK, other countries will want to go back to the office and not necessarily work from home. In Germany, the vast majority of our customers continued to trade and was only 8% down against normal activity. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? Online ordering and online communication with the customer will be vital, Amazon have hugely benefited from this situation as they communicate and provide a service that exceeds customer expectations. More online service options will be required rather than simply providing a product. Making life easier for the customer, providing solutions to their challenges using technology, albeit either face to face or offering a virtual solution. In addition, web technology is getting smarter, customers want to engage virtually but ensure they can experience an easy shopping facility and can track their orders and be communicated to at all times until the shopping experience is complete. Bisley provides a meeting pods in various sizes they are soundproof and also bacteria resistant and cleanses the air quality, kills viruses through light technology whilst providing a wellbeing for the working environment. We are starting to see huge interest due to the focus on returning to work How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? Change management is vital, during these challenging times staff will always be concerned whether they have longevity in their employment. During Lockdown, many businesses have used the furlough scheme in order to survive, but at the same time as they start to phase staff back to work, they have been measuring efficiencies, productivity and cash management. Most businesses will have established that they can actually do more with less, therefore companies will start to use this period to change their business for the future and use this period to reduce headcount. However, post furlough staff will remain unsettled until business economy recovers. Although many companies can also see that they do not necessarily need to bring their staff into city centres and do not need their current large office space. Many have provided certainty to their staff and have informed them that when they can go back to work as normal, they can structure their work life balance and work from home for periods of time. New HR policies and staff welfare will be important to individuals, but this is dependent on what continuity commitment businesses can provide and will vary on the business sector. Depending on each sector, if manufactured sales volumes do not pick up to the businesses revised sales and operational expectations, I do not see how much commitment business can provide. However, there should remain in place a staff welfare scheme to assist and to ensure the overall culture is open, honest and transparent. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? Again, this is dependent on the sector we operate in, for the production of office furniture, manufacturers have and will continue to evolve in the products they produce. New home office products will be more common and large corporates will have new framework agreements in place with key suppliers that can provide a total solution at various levels. This will be similar within the public sector, but I believe SME business will continue to work from the office but have technology in place to interact with their customer base. Larger businesses such as the financial sector, many staff can easily work from home, but accessing their central systems has seen some security cyber issues. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? In order to manage the security of company’s IT for staff that work from home or from remote working locations is fairly straight forward. Most companies outsource their IT security to specialist providers, these companies will set up a secure file network and access to systems, Penetration Testing will be apparent and will operate 24/7 365 to protect from cyber threats. Email phishing is more common, guidance will need to be issued and monitored on a frequent basis

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Interview with Zafar Aziz Osmani

Interview with Zafar Aziz Osmani With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? Future business world is impacted by three fast changing factor i.e ever increasing Technology Revolutions, growing role of Artificial Intelligence and Covid19 disruption. Many current business models, processes and human value creation is likely to become redundant. Many jobs will be extinct and many new ones will emerge requiring a totally different set new competencies and skills.Future of work and organization success will depend on leaderships ability to quickly adopt to the New Norms and be flexible to change at the fastest speed. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? Organizations ability to harness and leverage the new technology will heavily depend achieving excellence in connectivity and speed of data management . Ability to benefit from the big data will be a great contributor. How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? HR will have to take a proactive leading role in Change Management. They will need to achieve success in the interest of organization survival. The new slogan they need to internalize and build in organization DNA will be “No Change – No Organization”. Leadership and employees mind set management will be the toughest challenge for everyone. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? WFH due to Covid during last few months has brought many learning lessons and challenges. The future is going to see WFH as a reality and optimization of balance between WFH and actual need and utilization of the office space. Remote Work and Virtual Employees will have similar problems requiring creative solutions from the HR Leadership How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? Cyber security challenges are a reality today and will continue to be a growing challenge in the future. It will be like an unending war between hackers and the software engineers. Organizations have to continually keep reviewing the cyber security effectiveness frequently and keep enhancing the security capability. How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? The Future WorkTech Forum provides a unique opportunity for the business organizations, the leadership teams, the HR gurus and all the participants to open their minds about the challenges and opportunities to benefit from the emerging challenges and creative solutions that they need to be aware and adopt quickly for the success of their organizations. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Andy Swan

Interview with Andy Swan With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? This is a really interesting, exciting and challenging time for any organization. Obviously many organizations and jobs have been put at huge risk by the impact of the pandemic, but for those looking to the future, a choice needs to be made over whether to focus on adopting some of the changes that recent events have enforced and accelerating future strategy, or attempting to get back to what was previously ‘normal’ as quickly as possible. At MAT Studios, we always aim to work at the forefront of progressive working practices, so we’re driving hard to adopt and adapt in our business. If this can happen so fast in 2020, who knows what could be next. Be ready! According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? There are key emerging technologies, but realistically, those which create a holistic and integrated platform to enable work and organizations will always be better than any single solution. There are so many individual technologies out there, covering everything from collaboration to storage, communication and productivity, but the key thing is taking a step back and mapping what your organizations really needs to achieve and the best possible structure for enabling its people to thrive. From there, shortlist platforms and technologies, then look to integrate them, automating linear tasks where possible to allow the humans in your organizations to focus on the human elements. I have some strategies and recommendations, but rather than write an essay here, I’m always happy to share if people want to talk! How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? For a number of years, people like me have been promoting the idea of change as a constant, rather than a series of once-off projects. We need to rethink our organizations to be as lean and adaptive as possible, with the flexibility to innovate and iterate fast. In an evolving world, that means constant change is inevitable – it’s part of organizational evolution. The importance is the focus. People (customers or employees) remain the focus of any organization and providing your teams with the tools and structure to do their best work at any time should always be the strategic priority. When people thrive, the organization thrives too! There is now so much data connecting wellbeing with productivity, creativity and how forcing people to work in rigidly structured ways is counterproductive. The secret is starting with freedom, then creating the absolute minimum possible structure required by the parameters of the business. Don’t start with control, then add tiny freedoms, that will always fail – change your thinking! What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? Let’s take a different look at this question. The greatest challenge is a resistance to change from leadership and a hesitance to give up control. It requires a fundamental rethinking of the employee-employer relationship and will only work if the right people are employed by the right organization in the first place. With global employee engagement rates around 15%, we know that we’re starting from a position where there’s a long way to go. The risk is that this will seem too hard and many organizations won’t invest in the journey. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? Technology will underpin all of this and offers improvements in all of these areas when adopted and integrated effectively. The key to working with the right technology providers is to ensure that they have these contingency plans in place and that you adopt their technologies in a careful, integrated and secure way. Incrementally adopting individual platforms and leaving gaps between them increases risk. Design for your organizations as entire coherent ecosystems, don’t just adopt with a scattergun approach. Most importantly though, remember, no other organization is the same as yours, so create an approach that is designed solely for you, not an off the shelf solution to something so important. How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? The Future WorkTech Forum puts all of this on the table for discussion, with experts who are already doing it, researchers who are discovering trends and innovators who are pioneering in new trends. From design to adoption, to change management and so Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Mohammad Firdaus Juhari

Interview with Mohammad Firdaus Juhari With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? The future of work will primarily require 2 things. Firstly, the technology. As business operations will depend more and more on technology, it is important that the new technologies can be easily adopted by the majority of employees. Secondly, the data security. Work from anywhere also means that the data will roam outside of your corporate network and policy-based and technological measures should be considered to secure your business data. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? Clearly within our sight right now is the collaboration platforms that allow the employees to work with internal and external parties using different types of form factors (e.g. mobile, tablet, computers) and across diverse work setups. These platforms should also be designed with zero-trust model to isolate business data within trusted environment and total transparency to boost integrity among the employees. How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? The acceptance of future work culture is the most important key. Organisations should imagine a realistic work culture that is contextualised with their nature of business or industry. Certain industries like tech or consulting can have better tolerance towards work mobility compared to industries that require on-site presence such as banking or production. Once they have the clear picture then only, they can design their change management plan and new HR policies. The benefits for employees might also need a review as the uncommon benefits such as unlimited holidays, full remote working, device or internet allowance could weight even more than bonus, medical or car allowance to attract talents. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? I would say data security. As the data roam outside of the corporate IT network, different approach has to be used to ensure the data remains secure. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? Organizations should think how to make the security level of their IT networks more mobile. When we talk about remote working, we’re talking about decentralization, diversification and extension of office environment. The security controls that corporations have put in place in their office IT network lose their grip when employees work from home. The challenge that all corporations have to answer is how to hold the grip regardless of the locations of their employees. Again, I’m a strong supporter of zero trust model and on top of this, I also encourage that corporations to start seriously giving privilege to cloud-based IT management and security solutions. How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? Very timely as I believe many corporations are strategizing their plan to cope with the new normal and this forum would seed some ideas for them. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Cedric Warde

Interview with Cedric Warde With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? In my opinion, organisations across industries will need to redefine the way they operate to increase productivity and achieve cost efficiencies. They will need to adapt their processes, culture and systems to enable business continuity and resiliency. Offices will transform into simple meeting places where face to face meeting will need to happen for strategic or critical projects. Employees expect to conduct their responsibilities outside their office, which mean they will require seamless access to corporate applications as well as collaboration tools using any device and from anywhere. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work?Covid19 played a critical role in accelerating digital transformation, particularly in developing markets. Automation, cloud, and as-a-service models are quickly becoming the new norm and are changing the way employees work, collaborate and deliver value to their end customer. As organizations are rethinking their business models in house technology team’s contribution, will lie in the value they deliver to the business versus in the services they deliver. How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? In my opinion, change starts at the top of every organisation. For an organization to adopt to the new way of work, companies should adapt their culture, processes and systems. A change management program will need to be put in place and supported by the board of directors that encompasses various work stream covering people, process and technology across the various functions of a organisations. People across the organisation will need to contribute to the change if we expect them to adapt their behaviors and way of working. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? The challenge in my opinion is how to deliver an engaging employee experience to maximise productivity effectively without jeopardizing the security posture of your organisation critical assets.In addition to technology, companies will need to adapt their culture and processes where trust and accountability will take precedents over physical presence and, number of hours spent in the office. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? Companies will need to redefine their cybersecurity strategy to enable digital adoption and to build trustworthiness with their end uses, employees and partners. In fact, digital business has inverted access requirements, with more users located outside of an enterprise than inside. The borderless enterprise must be protected at all modern entrance gates. This extends from the network edge and the corporate firewall outward to mobile applications and the cloud, and inward to every employee and every device. Trust lies in every market relationship. People buys from people they trust. Cybersecurity breaches can have a detrimental impact on a company’s reputation. In fact, the conversation around security is shifting from being perceived as a IT risk to a business risk and to a competitive differentiator that will enable confident decision making and growth To ensure business continuity, CIOs need to initiate a digital trust framework that goes beyond preventing attacks and that enables organizations to resiliently rebound from adverse situations, events, and effects. As a result, CIOs need to enhance their visibility and resiliency by focusing on delivering 4 key cybersecurity outcomes: Vulnerability, Identity, Trust and Threat Management” How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? For a long time “The Future of Work” has been a concept. Today it is the reality. companies that do not adapt will eventually disappear. They will lose their competitive advantage and struggle in attracting and retaining talent. There is no right or wrong answer. The key is to listen, engage and share lessons learned that will benefit other peers. Future WorkTech offers the right platform for likeminded to share their experience and contribute to shaping the new way of work. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Selveen Muniandy

Interview with Selveen Muniandy With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? Many operations will be based on staff working from home, as such operations will be run managed / controlled virtually According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? Virtual office / cloud / online security / digital payment How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? Less face to face training /engagement session, more online. KPIs / balance score cards will be fine-tuned to new norm. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats? Cost of infrastructure, laptops, VPN, online office, etc. Broadband connection at home may not be as good / as strong. Online meeting will be challenging when everyone wants to talk! How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? Have strong policy, change management and governance How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? Understand the new norm, how to adapt / adjust personal and work live. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Javed Abbasi

Interview with Javed Abbasi With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? The work is for sure affected but the good thing is that people have adopted to new technology very quickly. There are certain businesses related to hospitality and travel they may not recover in near future. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? There are number of technologies like RPA and Digital worker which can take over the very quickly.Online Education has picked up very well and online education technologies are booming. Dedicated education apps are also making its way to mainstream. 5G technology is very crucial with high demand of bandwidth due to remote working and demand for quality communication, IoT and Low latency applications. Now more content will be shared, watched and consumed on mobile devices. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) role will increase in communication solution; the best example is Blue Jeans software for communication. RAN virtualization will also pickup to ensure more flexible, agile and cost-effective network. I also see IoT Solutions and smart devise to be used along with Remote Sensors and Monitoring Solutions. For the very remote places and fields, I also see satellite based tracking solutions to make instream.” How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? I’m not very much comfortable with HR polices are revised and changed. However, we cannot blame them this is more responsibilities of the owners and Board of Director. HR themselves are the effects. This issue need to addressed at much higher level. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models? We have to ensure security at the three logical levels are addressed; first, at the endpoint, second, during transit and third, at the hub or the center. Various endpoint solution which were used earlier for Mobile Device Management (MDM) need to used to ensure that the endpoint security, data leakage and data eavesdropping threats are minimized. For data in transit, all sensitive communication should be VPN based. We need to ensure we have scalable VPN concentrators, portals and gateways to handle a large number secure traffic.We also need to ensure secure backend. In addition infrastructure to find out whether it can handle the expected traffic and can ensure that security policy is enforced before catering for any remote request connection need.We can also consider having access to whitelist applications during and block all non-essential services. Special measures need to be taken for spear-phishing campaigns, fake websites, as result of increased risk of a cybersecurity incidents. There are widespread ransomware incidents when large parts of the workforce are working from home.Online Training and awareness it the key otherwise any irresponsible click will ruin all security measures. Proper backups and DRP must be in place to restore vital corporate data and systems” How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? I think that such forum is must to enhance the future learning environment and learn from the experience of other. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Interview with Steven SIM Kok Leong

Interview with Steven SIM Kok Leong With the prevailing global crisis, what is your personal opinion on how the future of work will affect your business operations? The future of work will be fully digitised. Smart cities would be accelerated realities than visions, riding on industrial revolution 4.0. Digital transformation is accelerated with cloud adoption on the increase. According to you, which emerging technologies will be most crucial and relevant to the dynamic changes at work? There will be an increase in digitalisation efforts for complete paper-less systems and an acceleration in cloud collaboration platform adoption as employees go mobile. Emerging technologies in the realm of Cyber-Physical Systems such as Industrial IOT will also be most relevant to automation with remote supervision and oversight. How do you think change management and HR policies will cater to the needs of employee welfare and engagement to effectively adapt to the future work culture? HR would want to better engage employees and build identity and cohesiveness in a virtualized format, digitizing more work processes including the adoption of digital signatures as well as provision benefits to support secure work from home including the purchase of workstations to be based at home. What are the main challenges in evolving into the future of work operations with respect to WFH, Remote Work and Virtual Employees formats?Cyber security threats have increased multi-fold with WFH as the boundaries of the corporate network get extended beyond office buildings into less-protected digital homes. With the increased attack surfaces, hackers are targeting hastily established but misconfigured cloud setups, badly secured VPNs and weakly designed authentication systems as they are increasingly exposed to the Internet. How do you suggest organizations will deal with business confidentiality, cyber threats, safety and security concerns which are crucial factors for the changing work operating models?Adopt a risk-optimisation approach towards cyber threats. One of the foremost activities that organisations should perform is to address social engineering attacks which is the primary modus operandi for advanced persistent threats. Having the right security mindset and adequate cyber hygiene awareness inculcated into employees is an important foremost layer of defense. The acceleration into a cloud-first strategy also entails careful risk management prior to leaping into the cloud as cloud-based breaches increase alongside. A holistic risk management program needs to be in place ranging from enhancing risk identification to adapting key risk indicators. How do you feel attendees will benefit from Future WorkTech Forum? Attendees will gain better awareness and insights into learning about and protecting against the cyber threats of the Future Work new normal in a risk-optimisation approach, from protecting your personal privacy to securing your work collaboration platforms. Like Tweet Share Share Share

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Forget Paperless, Are You Ready for the Touchless Office?

Forget Paperless, Are You Ready for the Touchless Office? Touchless tech can give members confidence in shared workspaces. Facebook is pioneering AR workstations and virtual avatars. Connectivity is key to enable touchless tech, but cost is a limiting factor. Source – https://allwork.space/2020/06/forget-paperless-are-you-ready-for-the-touchless-office/ Remember the paperless office? For years, we were told advancing digitisation would banish our photocopiers and paper-reliant processes. While we have reduced our reliance on paper, it never happened. Now, thanks to the impact of COVID-19, a new buzzword has hit the headlines. The touchless office. But is this just more pie-in-the-sky dreaming, invented by catchphrase junkies with nothing better to do than try to flog their luckless VR systems? The touchless office isn’t a new phenomenon either. From QR codes to biometric access systems, workspaces have scratched the surface with these technologies for years. Now, as people get increasingly nervous about the spreading germs, touchless technologies could help workers regain the confidence they need to return to the office. From this perspective, this shift to touchless tech makes sense. Germs can live on a surface for 48 hours and 80% of infectious diseases are transmitted by touch. Want to know something really disgusting? 1 in 6 people also admit they don’t wash their hands every time they go to the loo. Any device that requires a human touch to operate it is now a potential infection point. Touch-free tech Some touchless technologies are relatively simple and readily available, allowing us to use a gesture to activate a device or carry out a task. Automatic doors, for example, use motion sensors to seamlessly open when someone walks towards them. Touchless soap dispensers and toilet flushers rely on a wave of your hand to activate. But what about automatic blinds, air-con systems and AV displays? These all usually rely on remote controls, which are handled by the masses. Touchscreen hygiene is another important area, which is a longstanding issue and one we must address in the age of COVID-19. This is where sound recognition technologies could help. Using voice-enabled commands, you could simply ask your office blinds to lower or increase the temperature of your office. Building control apps are another potential way to reduce the number of touchpoints in your office, where you can control your office environment with the swipe of a smartphone. A handful of apps already exist to allow you to control workspace HVAC systems, elevators and lighting, photocopiers and vending machines through your smartphone. Your smartphone could also help you practice social distancing. Made by the United Nations, the 1point5 app notifies users when someone enters their 1.5 metre radius. Some wearables are also being retro-fitted with social distancing management and monitoring technologies. Real estate company Cushman & Wakeman has also designed the “Six Feet Office” concept to demo how existing offices can be transformed into socially distant workspaces. The space includes subtly marked-out zones to keep people separated at a safe distance and encourages workers to navigate the workspace in a clockwise direction. Workplace access is another key area where touchless technologies can provide members and visitors with a digitally managed experience. Some access control systems allow individuals to navigate through checkpoints using a QR code or another mobile-based access key. Others are experimenting with biometrics – but privacy concerns must also be addressed before you implement this technology. You’ll also need to link all these technologies. Richard Morris, director at proptech company technologywithin, said: “Connectivity is key, so in order to enable a truly contactless office you need a fast and reliable internet connection.” “A number of operators are also looking at better utilising the data they capture from their centres and how this can be deployed to help minimise contact in the workspace. For example, data can help to determine the number of people in the building during the working day, where the heavy footfall is, and how space is being utilised. “By properly capitalising on this data, not only can landlords and workspace operators ensure that they are getting the best use of their available space, they can make certain that the health and wellness of their clients is paramount to their operation.” Enter the AR Augmented reality (AR) is another route to the touchless office, removing keyboards and other workstation-based germ magnets from the office entirely. Facebook is reportedly experimenting with futuristic desk set-ups where virtual, customisable screens float in the air and Codec Avatars of employees enhance social interactions in the virtual realm. A recent Tech@facebook blog post states: “We envision a dynamic virtual work environment anchored by genuine social presence. Next-generation devices would give people infinite workspaces with configurable virtual screens, whiteboards, and other visionary tools. You could work alone or collaborate in a persistent meeting room with remote coworkers like you were all sharing the same physical space, and with all of the nuance of in-person conversation.” Yikes. Personally, I’ve missed in-person conversations and no amount of VR trickery is going to convince me otherwise. If you are wondering what a real touchless office may look like, then you may want to look at the headquarters of the Bee’ah waste management company in Sharjah, UAE. According to recent reports in The Guardian, the building has been designed around “contactless pathways” where employees don’t need to touch a surface as they walk around the space. Facial recognition technology automatically opens doors for occupants. Lifts, blinds, lighting, and ventilation call all be operated with a smartphone and you can even order a coffee using one. But a 100% touchless office may not be feasible for some operators. Morris added: “There are already some examples of fully contactless offices around the world. However, not all operators will want to go down this route, largely due to costs and the fact that, for many people, the appeal of workspaces is the opportunity for human interaction. It is more likely that there will be a mix of contact and contactless, with certain technology – especially tech that supports health and

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