Who remembers when the office was full of offices, pre open plan?

By the time I started work it was a company perk to get an office when you made it to a certain level in the organisation.. from memory you got an office, a company car and a car parking space all at the same time

What followed was the open plan office – join your team – be part of the conversation – stand up / hear the discussions – be present and support your team. The company car remained but you too had to be in early to get a space in the car park unless you car shared.

How the world has changed – today we are all in our own offices / maybe we are sharing it with our significant other or our home schooling kids – maybe it’s our shed, our bedroom or our kitchen but no one from our team is anywhere near us.

We are now all logging on to our virtual “offices” .. meeting rooms are now “join – audio on – video on” and let’s share a PowerPoint deck. We do get quality “office time” on our own to think – if we can get organised enough to not accept back to back “join me” calls

This global event similiar to the year 2000 and the deployment of the PC has got all of us talking about “teams” in the same way that we talked about word, excel and access back in the deployment of the PC era

We are all embracing teams – and starting to experiment with virtual collaborative workspaces – never have so many post it notes been posted, synthesised and plotted on 4 box grids in such little time. And hang on what happened to the many post it notes and flip chart paper that was quickly rekeyed into PowerPoint to play back to management meetings.

Blink and you won’t notice that the world has changed and you have too and going back to the old world is as likely as going back to the green screen and the typewriter before it .. come on let’s make a huge leap forward..

We can do it …