Home office of the future

Business guru Charles Handy believes that traditional offices are too like factories and force employees into leaving because they are so depressing to work in, dulling their human spirit, according to an interesting article in the Guardian newspaper. "Organisations do need a hub, a place to call home. But [in future] it will look much more like a club," said Handy, "a place for employees to meet and converse rather than sit at a desk." But I was particularly taken by what John Glascock, professor of real estate finance at Cambridge University had to say, that people view homeworking as demeaning and some kind of post industrial revolution-hangover on the basis that working at home somehow lessens the pleasure of being at home. Instead, he believes that staff will be given their own office budget to use as they think best, even if that means a home office, partly because of the miniaturisation and portability of computer technology so that, for example, memory sticks will become mobile offices in themselves. "As technology gets better," he says, "it will impose less on your house."