With technology permeating everything that we do, it’s led to significant transformation in the workplace—specifically, how, where (and who) is working and what work employees do. The speed of change and disruption across industries has also caused greater uncertainty as many businesses rethink the way they harness their talent and real estate.
For one, automation and artificial intelligence will change many job functions and render others irrelevant across different industries—particularly jobs and tasks that are manual or process driven. JLL research has found that as a result, the future workforce will be divided into three segments: core employees, freelancers and consultants, and jobs that are automated.
Core employees will be concentrated in smaller and fewer locations, ideally in central business districts with transportation and amenities concentrated nearby—reducing their energy and resource usage. This smaller core workforce could mean smaller office footprints requiring less energy from power and less waste generated.
In parallel, the emergence of the ‘liquid workforce’—freelancers, consultants and more—means potentially less commuting and perhaps a cleaner way of working. The need for flexibility to accommodate the uncertain operating environment and more project-based work could require more modular fit-outs and by extension, possibly less materials and waste in the building process.
Sustainability and smart buildings
We’ve already seen how many forward-thinking organisations have already adopted more efficient real estate management in the form of smart buildings and smart offices.
This is essentially powered by the Internet of Things to drive efficiency and real-time optimisation of building operations such as automatic monitoring and optimisation of air conditioning—of particular interest in Asia, where indoor as well as outdoor air quality is a perennial issue.