Telecommuting was supposed to change everything. Powerful computers, video-conferencing and services like Skype would allow employees to work from home, and home could be anywhere. Traffic congestion would be reduced, and the traditional workplace model – and thus the office real estate market, in both urban and suburban locations -- would be transformed. A wired world was poised to change the way we think about cities.
The trend has indeed played out in an incremental way. The US Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans
working from home soared 41 percent in the last decade, to 13.4 million. That’s 9.5 percent of all workers working from home at least one day per week as of 2010, up from 7 percent in 1999.
Yet the promised transformations never quite materialized. Innovation and collaboration and working with clients in the modern-day workplace requires face-to-face contact. As anyone who has worked from home knows, having kids around the home office is a challenge all its own. The very term telecommuting seems already outdated, like the earliest flip-open mobile phones.
There’s a new trend in the workplace, however, that really does seem poised to change corporate real estate: the rise of the
mobile workforce. A growing number of employees don’t have the need to be in a cubicle at headquarters – but they are not staying at home, either. They are deciding where and when to meet with clients or fellow workers, as it suits their schedules, and employers are letting them do so.
"Employees are leaving work to get work done, and technology lets them. They have a phone and connectivity, and they are decoupled from the desk,” says Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of
LiquidSpace, which coordinates "on demand" work spaces and meeting rooms nationwide.
On the whole, says Gilbreath, who participated in a panel called the Work-Life Revolution at the
Meeting of the Minds in San Francisco last month, there is no substitute for coming into headquarters. It’s just that the ideal location may change – favoring urban environments, with all their amenities and propinquity, over suburban office parks.
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