Future of work, while on the move.

Working while travelling isn’t new, but in future can it be a more productive?

We are already 1 month old in the new decade. Of the many things getting transformed rapidly, mobility is definitely at the core. Moving from A to Z is becoming efficient, sustainable and safer. With advancing technologies and changing demographics, the way we work is also under rapid transformation.

New possibilities are knocking the door, when these two domains intersect. I’m equally excited to explore some of the possibilities and give a structure to think of new ideas.

First, let us see how the dynamics of work life are changing for the better, when travelling while working has become essential.

WORK

Digital nomads : Remote working teams

People are longing for life outside of the office cubicle. They would want to travel to see new places, meet new people and seek variety of experiences.

Faster mobile networks and internet penetration has made remote work a possibility. A tribe of remote workers are already common, like Buffer, Zapier etc.

Employees won’t need to be in the same location. This will make it easier for the next generation workers to choose to live anywhere, rather than find a job and then move to a city with that job.

Empathy : meeting real people

Gone are the days when people are working just for the money. Organisations abide by certain value system and share a vision to the employees. The vision instills a sense of purpose and drives them to perform better at work with satisfaction. The impact of their work is what matters to the folks.

Gone are the days when people are working just for the money…they are empathizing with their customers…

Teams are travelling across the globe to meet their real users, find the real problems of their target audience. They are empathizing with their customers, observing them in their environment, listening to their problems and going back to drawing boards to design apt solutions.

We at Volkswagen, meet our real users to question, take feedback on our solutions regularly. In my previous company, our team regularly travels to the customers locations to meet them personally at their offices and at conferences to listen to their issues and develop perfect solutions.

All this while they are constantly connected and working with their base team off shore.

On the way : working from home or office or in between

With increasing commuting times in the cities and unexpected interruptions to a regular day, many companies are offering liberal ‘Work from Home’ options. It is proven that the productivity has increased with WFH (Work from Home ) and even more with 4 day work weeks.

With digital communication tools like Slack, Uber Conference, Skype etc WFH has become easier. Asynchronous communication enables non-interruptive , disturbance free pockets of work time. People can attain focus and be efficient too. Smaller groups working out of a cafe, or co-working spaces has become a norm.

Few companies also have distributed teams across several locations in the same city or across multiple cities. Also most of the companies offer transportation. Ofcourse wading through peak hour traffic some folks accomplish tasks on the go.

Nature of work : in the Information Age

If we look at the way most of the work done in this information age is of 4 types : Thinking, Creating, Communicating and Collaborating.

MOBILITY

Now let us look into the aspects of Mobility and how its going to change. For the sake of brevity I will be only exploring Cars as predominant mode of transport.

You might have heard the buzz word CARE or CASE w.r.t cars.

C — Connected , A — Autonomous, R — Ride Sharing, E — Electric

It is pretty obvious what each area is , and how it is going to affect the way we travel.

When it comes to Autonomous Driving it is more complex and promising. There are 5 levels of driver dependency , Level 0 being the most dependent and Level 5 being driver absent.

I have mapped the Autonomous Driving Levels on to the Nature of Work we do.

Autonomous driving creates tremendous opportunities for the Work to happen while on the go.

Performing most of the work and related activities from the car, becomes a basic expectation in future…

Autonomous cars will help us in 3 basic areas of work

Productivity : Taking out the burden of driving, taking out the attention from road , gives more free time to be creative and productive.

Seamless Experience : The fillers (commute) between home and work need a smooth transition and being ready for the upcoming more engaging work. Getting the ‘work about work ‚ done in the car.

Freedom: Freedom from the monotonous is a privilege you get when you can work from anywhere.

WORK + MOBILITY

To acheive a seamless user experience while working on the move, we need a union of 3 factors

Infrastructure or Hardware : New Cockpit design, dashboards, newer vehicle designs, digital hardware etc

Digital and Communication Technologies : Cloud connectivity , High speed mobile communication capabilities etc.

Autonomous : Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Let us see some possibilities.

Tools to Think , Create, Communicate and Collaborate :

Source : IDEO Design

Some of the popular tools like Paper53, Procreate, Autodesk Sketch etc could be fused into the dashboard of a car to enable more ideating and designing.

Microsoft’s Surface like table can be a good collaborating tool that can find place in the autonomous vehicles.

Cars will soon have full view dashboards showing up a lot of information to the driver and the passenger. This huge real-estate could be effectively used to perform lot of work like managing email, project planning and communication.

BMW’s Connected drive, is available today for various work related activities like :

• Skype call
• Meetings
• Mails
• Custom Voice Assistant

Similarly there are new partnerships sprouting between Software Cloud Services and Automotive companies. We have seen Microsoft Azure Cloud services making a partnership with Volkswagen AG and previously with Harman, Volvo etc.

Already Services like Microsoft Office 360 are available in several vehicles allowing drivers to view calendar, upcoming meeting, take skype calls etc.

Again, all this is w.r.t cars alone. Flights, trains, buses etc open up a whole new world of possibilities.

With all the upcoming developments, it is only becoming better to make us more productive and to give us more free time.

However, it is ever more important than before that , what do we do with all the free time at hand ?

:)