The future: popular working locations

The year after the COVID-19 pandemics started showed how delusional is our confidence in the fact that it is impossible to change the way we work. WFH (Work From Home) abbreviation has become an integral part of our everyday life. Today we will clean the dust from our crystal ball and will try to foresee what working places can become popular in the future.

Let's start with the obvious. Office spaces are unlikely to completely disappear in the near future. Even the tech companies that were the first to quarantine in the US and Europe have begun gradually inviting employees to return to office spaces. The only question is that employees are very reluctant to take such an initiative from employers since after a year of work outside of the office, people got used to independence in choosing a place of work (after all, many didn’t work from home, for example, some were moving to other cities and even countries).

While traditional office spaces are losing their popularity in the Western world, coliving and coworking spaces continue to be in demand. Probably, the reason is that even the most notorious misanthropes need their own "flock", because humans are herd animals. Let’s recall 2020 and the sensational story of WeWork, the commercial real estate company which failed the investment deal with SoftBank; eventually, this story is also known as "the easy money" and "a failure like nothing else in the history of startups." All this led to a huge drop in the company's capitalization almost before going IPO. But at the same time, WeWork not only survived but also remained quite an attractive project for investors who continue to invest their money and believe in the idea of ​​coworking.

Last year’s experience has shown that home is becoming the most popular place to work instead of the office. With all the benefits of the home environment and no travel costs spent between home and office, work from home has exposed many risks and challenges. From the quite obvious impossibility to control the presence of an employee at the workplace (there was even a video on the network when one of the employees was pre-recording video for zoom calls) to the risks of losing confidential information due to the employee's ignorance or negligence. The employees most often complained that they began to work more, and quite often, that the working day became irregular.

The third most popular place or rather places of work during the pandemic can be travelling. The form itself may be different: an employee can come to a new place and work from it for a long time (due to this format, the demand for long-term rental housing services has increased since it doesn't matter where to work, you can change the "stone bag" to the seashore or ocean) or choose the option of work in a constant movement (several model workshops offered different versions of motorhomes adapted for this work format). The only drawback of the second method may be the instability of the Internet, because even Startlink from Elon Musk doesn’t guarantee a stable connection without a stationary placement.

Humanity is increasingly looking in the direction of other planets; Elon Musk promises swift colonization of Mars, although, we still have to deal with many problems on the way to it. With all this, we can assume that in the future, space will become not only a source of Internet connection (besides Startlink, several more companies are deploying their satellites to provide online access services) but also a "home" for those daredevils who decide to leave the earth's gravity and go exploring other planets (it is quite possible that the Red Planet will become the second home for the human population).

Virtual reality can hardly be called the future, because there are already a number of user solutions that help to fully realize the workspace using a virtual reality headset that replaces a set of several monitors. Still, such practice remains among geeks, who follow the latest trends and technological innovations, but Facebook's interest in virtual and augmented reality suggests that in the near future a significant number of users will completely switch to work in virtual reality.

As always, we want to emphasize that this article is based only on a subjective vision of what the future of jobs can be for us. It is quite possible that robotization and artificial intelligence, which we have already written about in our series of articles "Technologies of the Future", will make it possible to create not only "factories with the lights off", but also "offices with the lights off", which will make the concept of work in its current form absolutely useless.