I recently tweeted about Facebook’s super-cool office space in Menlo Park, California. They have made an effort for their space to encourage creativity, collaboration, and hard work by their engineers. I know many organizations are looking at Facebook and other similar leading businesses for ideas on how to run better. They are modeling how to build-out space to create high-productivity workplaces. There are a lot of meeting areas, a lot of space designed so that people will bump into each other. A lot of food. A lot of art. There’s even a video arcade and game area. In effect, they’ve created an entire little community of different types of space, in order to enable their employees to experience a wide variety of stimulating work environments. Facebook is in a league of their own, but their example will resonate for many firms. Luckily, many urban areas have a wide variety of workplace amenities like shops, restaurants and interactivity areas. Unfortunately, most people are stuck working at just one location for most of the time. It could be different. Mobile technology is enabling it to be different.
Early adopters of the nomadic professional “swarm” are already working from multiple locations. Workers spend time at client locations, meeting colleagues for lunch, attending a networking event at a function space in the evening. Of course people are working from their cars, from hotel lobbies, from home. Today’s Boston Globe ran an editorial about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, praising her for publicizing her flexible work pattern – she is actually leaving the office at a reasonable hour to be with her children at dinnertime. And she is working from home since she can. It’s good for this to be acknowledged as “the new normal” and get some editorial support.
More and more people will continue to build on this trend. As the Globe put it: “It’s the quality of your work that should define your success, not the precise amount of time you spend in the office.” Indeed, a traditional office may even be getting in the way of your work. I say it’s time to embrace the new flexible and temporary nature of work. The mobile professional swarm is growing.