5 office trends for 2017

For those who like milestones, we’re five sixths of the way through 2016, which means (and we know you don’t want to hear it) but Christmas is just round the corner.  With CityFibre launching gigabit ultra-fast internet to Bristol in February, turbocharging businesses throughout the city, Nick Gray gets you thinking about plans for the year ahead:

1. Video will be the first choice for communication

With work life balance more prevalent than ever and businesses reducing travel budgets as video conferencing improves, time in the office will be more efficient and more global, without leaving your seat. 2017 will be the year when we’ll put aside our self consciousness and embrace video, both within teams and to customers and suppliers.

Our office infrastructure is better than it’s ever been, even for small businesses. Logitech has made great strides in making video conferencing a slick, high-definition experience rather than a poor alternative to personal meetings. Microsoft, with their release of the latest upgrades of Skype for Business in September, is also doing its best to shrink the world and make face-to-face communication that much easier. Microsoft’s data indicates 100million meetings a month are held via Skype conversations. Google already has ‘always on’ video connections with its team through Hangouts which means you can switch to someone’s video channel just like walking up to them at their desk.

2. Your office might be your house…but it probably won’t be!

Plenty of people love the idea of working at home but millennials, emerging into the workplace want just that…a workplace. They want to collaborate and be surrounded by people to learn with and from. So while you’ll need to be able to dial in the experienced new mums in your business and the talent that lives miles away, you’re still going to need an office to nurture your emerging workforce to stay ahead of the game. Hand in hand with this is the prevalence of homely materials in new office design, bringing in wood and plant life to work interiors to informalise them.

3. Cloud storage will mean we can take advantage of a global opportunity

Brexit meant bad news for our autumn holiday plans but means that Bristol is now a very attractive place to source services, from some of the finest businesses in the world already based here. It’ll be time to turn it to our advantage and look at where we can start competing against businesses in Europe for services, exporting our expertise and products.

For this you’re not only going to need video but to store your files on cloud-based services like Google Docs to make it easier for information to be shared, stored and accessed at any time of day across the globe.

4. Flexible furniture will enable fast change

So if we’re all honest – we probably need to be sat next to a different group of people at the end of this year than we did at the beginning. Teams develop fast to take advantage of new opportunities, management need to move around the work with different teams on new projects. The surge in flexible work furniture which can be reconfigured to suit these changes has been reflected into the universal move to laptops and tablets to be able to wirelessly connect when these changes happen. If you’re buying new stuff – think about how you might want to use it in 12 months or three years.

5. You’re going to be controlling your office remotely

2017 will see the proliferation of the ‘Internet of Things’ which means we’ll be controlling the temperature of the office from our phones. We’ll be able to switch off our lights remotely when no-one is in the building and new security systems will mean we can watch live on security cameras wherever we are in the world. Jump ahead to 2018 and we’ll be using the tech to link our fit-bits to whether we need to have a sitting or standing desk position that day and it will move automatically for better team wellbeing.

In conclusion…

The big question is, as technology evolves, can our digital infrastructure keep up? There is already evidence that the demand for 4k/Ultra HD and HDR is increasing faster than the bandwidth many companies can cope with. Worldwide data traffic is exploding, with global usage expected to reach 121billion gigabytes a month by the end of next year. Bristol is a gigabit city and with almost 100 businesses anticipated to be connected by the end of the year, how long will it take for others to take the leap?

Businesses in Gigabit Cities can swap landlines for cheaper and smarter VoIP telephony and cutting-edge HD conferencing tools. CityFibre is available through Triangle Networks thought-out the centre and in many of the main business districts. Find out if we’re near your business here and register your interest right here www.cityfibre.com/Bristol.