I love articles forecasting the future. There is no accurate way to predict what will happen but it is fun to watch someone make foolish predictions!
Based on that premise, let me take a crack at gazing into the future myself!
According to a survey by FlexJobs, 9 million US employees work from home at least 50% of the time.
The average telecommuter is 46 years old.
Women have equality with men in telecommuting.
In a majority of US metropolitan areas, the desire for telecommuting is greater than the desire for public transportation as the commute option of choice.
CNN reported that the Federal Government is the largest employer of telecommuters.
So what will it be like in 100 years?
The current crop of management that is stuck on the old ways will be gone. We will be into the 3rd generation of management from now.
Workers will be located all over the world but will easily integrate as one team.
There will be meetings in virtual conference rooms with holograms of each person gathering of the meeting. Video cameras will show each person and you will be able to look around and watch each person (so much for working in your jammies!).
There will not be any expensive office buildings in expensive downtown areas of cities.
Over 50% of employees will be commuting. The other 50% are those employees that cannot work remote (e.g., construction workers, warehouse workers, police officers, etc.).
Most work these telecommuters will do will be automated so time spent filling out forms and other boring tasks will be eliminated.
Social interaction with other employees will be easy and natural with video tools that bring the employees together. We will see video cameras that provide a 360 view of the employee so they can be “shown” in a meeting like as a hologram.
If there is an occasion where the employee truly needs to get together with others physically, then they will get into their driverless cars and work while they are driven down the freeway to the meeting place.
There will be virtual assistants that are not real people but artificial intelligence software that will help the employee get their work done. These assistants will put presentations together, plan their schedule, remind the employee of issues due, send out automated messages to other people when information is needed, help the employee with their presentation (think of listening to the presentation and giving a critique of the speech).
Speaking of presentations, PowerPoint will be a 3D presentation system that will automatically interrogate the employees’ email and determine what presentations are needed. Then the software will generate the presentation and show it to the employee for review.These will full video presentations that will look like a movie and can be pulled together in minutes.
These will full video presentations that will look like a movie and can be pulled together in minutes.
Phone calls and meetings will be evaluated by an AI system creating action items automatically and sending out meeting notes all created from the discussion in the meeting.
Invitations for another meeting will go out automatically based on the discussion in the meeting. Attendees have automated systems that will determine their availability for the next meeting and the date and time for the next meeting will be figured out automatically.
Of course, I could be dead wrong. we probably won’t have a laptop but will be wearing the computer as a little tiny box buried somewhere under our skin.
We won’t have any more leisure time but we will be so incredibly productive!