By Chris Stott. High Throughput Satellite (HTS) is impacting the modern world in many surprising, or perhaps not so surprising ways.   The provision of new broadband anywhere anytime is amazing.  For example, it’s changing not just the way we work, but where we work. For example, we’re thinking of expanding the work of our London Office and this has led us through a whole series of conversations thanks to satellite broadband on where we work so much as on how we work effectively here in the early 21^st Century and what kind of work space are we looking for.

It’s been a really interesting thought journey and if you’ll allow me, I thought I’d share some of our thinking as this whole question of the new workplace affects all of us, our customers today and tomorrow, and on to their customers, etc.…and the ore HTS the better.  I’m also hoping you’ll please comment to tell me how wrong we are and that way together we can generate an on-going conversation on this topic of how we work today and will work tomorrow.

Again never forgetting just how much of this is being fueled by the great leaps in broadband connectivity being brought to market by satellite and how this is changing the modern work environment for some (admittedly not all). 

Our present offices are in Houston, Cocoa Beach, London and the Isle of Man.  We’re a small, but effective team leveraging modern communications to be as connected and productive as possible. (‘Are you an effective team? Why yes we are, Sally’)

So far, so good and it keeps getting better with every new wave of technology. We’re what Harvard Business School called a ‘virtual team’ back in 2000. A rarity back then, but increasingly the norm now. With this London expansion in mind, it started us thinking about what actually is an office these days?  Where do we work? What has the office become?  What kind of workplace do we need in the age of broadband?

From the turn of the last century at least on upwards through to the 1980s an office was a place to clock in, keep your paper, to be seen looking at said paper by your boss, move paper around, hold meetings, and make phone calI.  It was an address at which to receive more paper in the mail.  You may also have other people there to help you organize the paper and to type letters and to answer the phone for you.  Fashions changed.  Ticker tape machines moved on to Telex machines.  Some offices even had their own libraries.  Phones stayed pretty much the same.  People stopped smoking at their desks. If you were super important you might even have a Dictaphone. Did you have a typist?  Do you remember people having typists?  Even secretaries? 

In the 1990s this began to change as offices became a place where people started to evolve from using analog to digital media (electric typewriters to computers for example). So in addition to being a place to keep paper, hold meetings, have people type letters for you and answer the phones for you…add a fax machine or two (steady on now)…and receive mail, the office became a place where companies found themselves in a technology race for productivity with new business machines.  Having a computer on your desk was a status symbol, even though most people didn’t know how to really use them yet.  Don’t forget, this is before the Internet.  The first commercially viable mobile phones started to appear. The IT department was born...yet more people on hand to fix the things you didn’t know how to use…Oh, and someone to manage the new IT department and their phones and their paper and their people.

People worried that this move to business machines would mean mass unemployment.  They felt threatened by computers.  Did you ever wonder why they were mostly all beige?  A very unthreatening color.  

Then in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s a generational shift occurred as the children who grew up playing computer games in the 1980s who did understand computers came into the work place and everything digitized even more rapidly.  The Internet moved into the work place.  These new workers began to ask questions like: why do we need all of this paper? Why do I need someone to answer my phone for me?  What’s a fax machine?  Who are all of these people?  What do they all do?  We have how many people in the basement to work IT support?  Why are we paying rent to house and feed them all?  

They still used phones and of course still needed a place to have meetings…but they began to use mobile phones more than landlines.  Sending emails to each other.  Shock and horror! Not buying stamps.  Whole fleets of delivery dispatch riders felt a cold tingle down their spines.  Casual Fridays was born and heralded the coming death of the business suit. (BTW - I’m still waiting for the Nehru Jacket and polar neck to appear – hey, it is the 21^st Century after all!)

Then in the 2000’s change really began to shift gears with the advent of broadband and smart devices and the kids of the kids who played computer games started arriving at work too. Work became more focused on what you did digitally on line with data as opposed to writing that data onto paper and sending it back and forth to people…killing carbon to burn carbon…especially as more in the workspace became used to this and those who with a passion for ‘arborcide' retired (that savage practice of killing trees just to make memos on the photo copier on the proper use of paper in the copying machines) and took huge boxes of old paper home with them to sit in the attic to the delight of future archaeologists. 

Then Silicon Valley really did not help at all by making the work place appear a fun, relaxed, enjoyable and productive place to be (a shameful play to make you stay at work longer and to work harder) and instantly creating a whole wave of workplace jealousy whose back lash continues today.  Yet, they hit upon a truth: you don’t have to be strapped to a desk in a cube to be productive, far from it.  Free the body, free the mind.  Free coffee and food too.

Then throw in a financial crash like the world has never seen before…and everyone began to question the concept of those high rent buildings full of people and the old office began its road to extinction. Not quite Fight Club, but not far from it.  Speaking of roads…let’s not even mention the billions of hours lost commuting to and from the company edifice every week.  Though people still had a need to get out of the house and ‘meet’ somewhere during daylight hours to feel productive.  We’re still social animals after all and staring at each other on a screen just doesn’t always cut it.  

Coffee shops became the equivalent of refugee camps for many in the workforce…shocking aspiring writers who’d been hiding in them for years…while again driving home the lack of the need for a large high rent building full of people arriving late and spending all day hoping to go home early.  They could all now pretend to be hipsters writing a novel in a coffee shop while really being part of a start up or telecommuting...which if you ask me is more fun.  Food, coffee, power, WiFi, free parking…and a bathroom…is the new office?

Which brings me to my point…where is the modern workplace today? Where is it heading? Is it a tower of glass and steel or a stroll through the park with smart phone in hand and blue tooth in ear?  Have you noticed that everything that used to be on our desks, from Dictaphone to rolodex to computer, is now on our phones? So the workplace becomes where we are we most productive? Is this what the modern workplace is becoming? 

Is it now wherever our laptops and smart phones are…is that where we are headed?  They are with us near all the time, so we are working near all the time?  Do people still work  ‘nine to five’? Telecommuting is now a natural thing.  Casual Fridays have now become Flex Fridays.  Broadband is freeing the body to free the mind. 

We leave a room and pick up our laptop and take it home…that empty room is no more our workplace than an equally empty room across the street.  We are our company, not a building.

The proverbial ‘silver lining’ on the ‘Cloud’? (Sorry, couldn’t resist that)

Yes, we still need a place to work with coffee, a bathroom (in that order) and access to broadband and plugs to charge our devices.

We still, so far, need a physical mailing address.

We still need a place to meet people as they arrive.  A nice place with coffee and bathrooms and a meeting room.  A place befitting our company image that supports our work and our clients.

Yet, has the virtual company now become the virtual office?  Used only when needed?

With all this said and done, we are now looking for a well managed modern executive suite with nice meeting rooms and private workspaces and broadband, that we can use as a mailing address with space available when we need it.  Or should we break down and go for an architectural edifice of glass and steel with a huge spot lit photo of me as you enter the building?  I know, the horror…

The times they are a changing and this kinda changes the direction of the conversation a little bit…and the future of the office.

What do you think?

Christopher Stott is Chairman of the SSPI and also Chairman & CEO of ManSat.
www.mansat.com