Boston-based Eagle Investment Systems calls it the "high performance workforce."
We call it “the office of the future now.” Their company priorities shifted from employees sitting in a cube to what's happening in the virtual world. Now it's all about information flow, data, collaboration and in a dynamic, ad-hoc fashion.
Eagle sells tech software to the financial industry (and they are in the top 100 firms doing this). With about 600 employees and contractors, about a year ago they moved to a new headquarters.
That's when they changed their outlook about IT. They killed office phones. They side-railed email. Gave everybody tablets and web conferencing. They even turned the walls of their building into whiteboards for web conferencing.
In any room in the building you can actually doddle your thoughts on the wall. Then via portable Bluetooth-enabled wands and Cisco WebEx meeting, you can invite everyone in the company (anywhere ) to see and interact with your wall doodles.
Every 40 feet Eagle built "huddle rooms" where employees go to work together, he says. Employees’ own-cubicles are only 150 square feet each because it’s not about working alone. They never have to fight over limited conference room space; there's always a wall available with a monitor for web conferences.
They use software-phones (telephone becomes just another application and phone numbers can become part of any app). Eagle uses Cisco's Jabber and WebEx software, for IM (7500 IM sessions a day), and for web conferencing. Their employees wear portable Plantronics headsets and speakerphones like other companies’ people sport entrance badges.
Eagle killed off e-mail when they built a new portal application where staff interact and can create projects by simple drag-and-drop files. Eagle says it used to take up to two weeks to e-mail people, gather materials from multiple computer systems and get everyone onboard with a project schedule. Now it’s only two days to get to the same place.
Status updates is a digital signage solution: monitors display status throughout the building so employees can always find each other even when on walk-abouts.
Sounds like you need to be an investment banker (or the people who sell tech software to investment bankers) to afford this. Not really…and work experts predict this si the way most of us will work five years from now.
Say good-bye to your big office, email addition, and your wall-coverings. The future takes no prisoners.
Go Eagle Investment Soars with New Office Environment
