Working for leisure
by Simon Jones

In the future workplace Big Boss could be watching your every move.

Today's workplace is creating ever increasing demands upon us. To fulfil our own personal idealised image of happiness - a well-furnished house in a nice part of town, an impressive car, and exotic holidays a plenty, for instance, we realise that we need to earn more money. So we put in more hours and hope that one day we will get that promotion. And when we eventually do, we realise that the job carries more responsibility and that means working more and more hours... and then we wonder where our leisure time has gone.

As we become at the mercy of the mobile phone, the cut-off point between work and leisure gets more and more blurred. A survey carried out by a office equipment supplier found that British bosses work an average of 60 hours a week. In Germany this increases to 70. Globalisation and easy transportation have helped to make business on the move commonplace. Even hours that were previously frittered away staring out the window of the train are put to good use with the aid of a laptop computer and the mobile phone.

We place the same structuring on our home life as our work life to make full use of the seven or eight hours left, when sleep is accounted for. Every hour is calculated to take account of our social life, sports or fitness activity, with television swallowing up an average of four hours for most of us. This economic use of time will take a more important role in the future, if leisure time continues to diminish.

We will see centres emerge where our leisure time activities converge. A public place for meeting business or social contacts, with a restaurant or cafe, gym, library, Internet access and cinema all under one roof. It makes sense, commercially, to group everything together like this, to provide a hook that keeps people there as long as possible. With everything there that customers need, they won't want to leave.

The virtual office

Working from home is increasing in popularity as a means of escaping from the drudgery from nine to five office life. Why work under the constant surveillance of your boss when you can work in front of the TV in your carpet slippers. Armed with all the office essentials - telephone, computer, e-mail and fax, many workers believe they can work as effectively as their colleagues in the office. Being able to work wherever you like: from a busy metropolis to a picture postcard village, and not having to endure the daily grind of commuting, make working from home an attractive option. If you so wish, you can even work on a canal boat, like one internet firm in the Midlands, UK.

So what will become of the office of tomorrow? It is possible that many could vanish into cyberspace becoming a new wave of virtual offices. To minimise office overheads in inner-city areas, companies will implement a work force made up of a network of home workers linked by an advanced communication and information system. A central processing computer would be controlled by the manager who sends out work schedules and oversees the activity of each employee.

As a successor to the Web Cam, a video screen would be created, as the need for more natural form of interaction than e-mail or telephone becomes greater. Capturing the mood and expressions of work colleagues, managers would have the ability to view several employees at once on their screen. Employees would be encouraged to feed any information that may be useful to fellow workers into the computer to make the company work more effectively. As the company's life blood, the computer would contain a record of all conversations and correspondence for future reference and hold confidential information such as accounts in password protected areas. With daily life captured in microscopic detail, the case for sacking employees in the office of tomorrow could be more clear cut.