Dude, where’s my office?

When the telephone was invented, it was almost a mystical, magical device. The earliest commercial phones initially used liquid transmitters or supplied their own electrical source. A technician had to come out and test the battery in the phone to make sure it was still functioning.

As phones became commonplace, technicians no longer added value to a sale by ensuring the phone would function but by working on ways to help run the business. Conference calling, call hunting, divert to mobile, integration with address books, customer relationship management (CRM) and so on.

Unified communication is now an established field and, once again, businesses are looking to take technology to the next level. The quality of the workplace is now a key driver in recruitment for millennials and technology is expected to be part of the fabric.

Resellers are expected to know not just about their vendors, but how the technology can enhance working conditions and support popular theories of workplace productivity.

One of the foremost leaders in blending technology and workplace is the heralded Aussie tech company, Atlassian. It has revolutionised the way it thinks about office space. For one thing, the building manager is called “the head of real estate and experience”. He doesn’t report to the CFO anymore but to the chief people officer (once known as HR) and “the office” is defined as anywhere someone needs to get work done.

“The workplace is about to go through a perfect storm. Technology is disrupting everything. With the death of the PC, hardware advancements and increased workplace mobility, there’s incredible change,” says Bren Harman, Atlassian’s aforementioned head of real estate and experience.

“The whole definition of a work-place is changing. We’re moving from an office worker to an any-where worker.”

Harman is responsible for coming up with workplaces in airport lounges, public transport, hotels and other opportunistic locations for 400 people in Sydney and 300 in San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Amsterdam; and Manilla. The only way he can provide these workplaces is on top of a solid technology solution that has been designed to support Atlassian’s lofty ambitions, which is no easy task.

Moving real estate into HR and away from the CFO means cutting costs is no longer a factor – it’s about staff retention.

Harman’s “experience team” don’t see facilities as the end deliverable, he says. “We’re interested in how people interact and enjoy the services we provide. It’s about delivering a whole experience for staff.”

The company has doubled in size every two years, so change in the workplace is a constant. As the company iterates through stages of growth, Harman has to keep reviewing two drivers: “How do we measure use of the space to know whether changes are supporting the business or otherwise? And how can we use our workplace to reinforce cultural change or different changes in behaviour?”

Peace of Mind Technologies (POMT) has the enviable role of fitting out Atlassian’s cutting-edge buildings. POMT started out as an AV provider and saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between the physical construction of offices and the IT department. “A lot of designers will talk about the physical, virtual and behavioural and all three have to come together for the workplace,” says Jeremy Pollak, the director of strategy and development.

Will there be offices in 15 years?

“Absolutely,” Harman says. “But it depends what you do in the office. While people will spend hours out of the office, you need to come back. There’s a human desire to belong.”

Sholto Macpherson is a journalist and commentator who covers emerging technology in cloud