Tech Talk Tuesday

In the last month, Forbes released an article asking the question of how our race will maintain its innovative spirit in a world drenched in data. The answer to this is pursuing employee-driven innovation works; which means allowing your employees to pursue the projects that inspire them, so long as they make money. The ability to be creative at work is an important factor for the happiness of many individuals, both the workers and we who will eventually benefit from their amazing inventions.

Here are just some of the incredible technologies fueling our office culture:

Office Voice Assistants

An Alexa, Google assistant or other voice-controlled robot could soon make its way into your office, though this is being faced with various responses from workers, offices and critics everywhere.

We know voice assistants have been around for a while now, but we’re featuring them this month to talk about how the working world is reacting to them in the current moment, now that the hype has started to die down and we can begin evaluating voice assistants as a help or hindrance rather than a curious commodity or water-cooler conversation point.

Many people fear that voice assistants are going to make offices more chaotic and noisier, which is understandable. Using a voice-controlled assistant to the best of its ability is going to require more workers to talk more often throughout the day, which means more noise.

Amongst various other factors that frequently interrupt the focus of office workers, noise is one of them. Open-plan offices are still on the rise, but many workers feel that their productivity has been thoroughly stunted by the noise and distraction of it all – and these distractions will only increase with the rise of voice-controlled assistants.

On the other hand, there are productivity benefits to using voice-controlled assistants in the office, such as the fact that the average person can type approximately forty words per minute, but we’re capable of saying 125 words in the same space of time.

As a result of the increasing use of voice assistants in all walks of life, we are starting to see our habits and environments adjusting to a world with voice-controlled assistants in them. This has sparked a wave of further inventions and ideals for what the ultimate forward-thinking office might look like.

Here are a couple of changes occurring in offices as a result of voice assistant implementation:

Hybrid Offices – Offices which combine open plan with a sense of privacy with semi-cubicle designs.

Noise Cancellation – Noise-cancelling headphones are becoming a must for office workers. There is now a huge push to develop more sophisticated noise-cancelling AI to help support our workers struggling in open-plan offices.

Smart Lighting

Another concept which has been around for a while, but we’re seeing changes to its uses in the workplace. You can now combine smart lighting with your voice-controlled assistants to ensure that you are wasting the minimal amount of electricity in your workplace, which is all-important if you’re eco-conscious or looking to win an award for running a green business.

Biophilic Offices

Our understanding of the human psyche and what makes us happy and productive is leading a change in offices across the country. It has been found that those workers with a view of nature, access to natural daylight, desk plants – and various other visual elements that remind the individual of nature – spend less time away from work on account of their health and are, overall, far more productive than their counterparts.

Interestingly, data is giving us a new appreciation for the natural world and taking us away from a future where a cyberpunk aesthetic controls daily life, and instead towards office blocks intertwining plant life with privacy, voice assistants and smart lighting solutions to produce maximum efficiency and happiness in the office.

If you are updating your office with voice assistant compatible tech to stay on the bleeding-edge of office culture, then you might require some IT recycling for the disposal of your now unnecessary equipment. It is your responsibility to look after your client’s personal information, which means you need to be sure that it is disposed of in a responsible manner. We have years of experience dealing in IT equipment so you can trust us to get it right for your company.