What will the future workplace look like?

Mark Dixon : "Lower costs, your people like it, it helps the environment – three boxes ticked."

The latest brake on London’s workforce, the recent two-day Tube strike, has once again focused firms' thoughts on how to deal with having a significant part of their staff unable to make it to the office. In February, UK-wide snowfall also caused companies to re-consider how to deal with major transport problems affecting its workforce.

One answer to problems such as these is for employees to work either from home or from a dedicated workspace designed specifically to address a business need for a location, with IT laid on for staff to work from.

One of the leaders in these type of premises is rented office provider Regus. Computing talked to Regus Global chief executive Mark Dixon at the launch of its Berkeley Square site in London, and discussed how future the workplace could address the need for mobility, and the need to cut down on excessive international travel.

How did Regus come into being?
Mark Dixon: It was 20 years ago. I couldn't believe how difficult it was for people to set up an office from scratch and work from it, and I thought there's got to be some way of doing this. However, the conventional real-estate business then, and still today, is a very un-customer friendly place. So whether you’re a large company or just a start-up - it's pretty daunting, with lots of hoops to jump through and very expensive. Effectively you have to set up in a high-quality building and provide a space that people can come in and use, how they want to, for the amount of time that they need, at the right price.

What type of firms use your services?
Large corporations make up about 50 per cent of our client base globally. That's companies such as Glaxo and GE – some of the biggest companies in the world. The other 50 per cent is made up of smaller customers and individuals – around 10-15 per cent, with the rest - 35 per cent - being small businesses. Large corporations use us like branch offices and for market penetration – which is very effective, since it only requires small groups of people. They are using us just like a business tool which you pick up when you need it. You can get an account easily, and you could book an office for just an hour. You could compare it to Vodafone – we have monthly programmes, we do pay-as-you-go programmes, we do price plans for corporations, who are likely to sign up thousands of people, or book thousands of days in a single go.

You're reviewing all your business centre facilities - what trends have driven this?
Technology has completely revolutionised how individuals work and how companies employ people. If you look at this from a company point of view – the workforce is increasingly working from home some of the time. If you now roll in the recession with companies wanting to cut costs, they are saying: "We simply don't need fixed office space the way we used to." We can have people working from home, but we need to supplement that with a drop-in workplace where from time to time they can come out of the house and mix with other people. So they either go into the corporate head office and meet, or go to a drop-in business centre such as Regus. We have seen a threefold increase in mobile worker product sales compared to six months ago.

The second aspect of this is that individuals want to work from home, especially employees in their late 20s, early 30s – and onwards. It's very popular for this age demographic, because they can be closer to family and children, and work more effectively. They are not forced to commute, just to sit in front of a computer and make phone calls every day of the week.

Third, there is the pressure of the environment. Clearly the savings to the carbon footprint for corporations are huge if you are stopping people having to commute or reducing their travel, along with having less fixed-office space. Lower costs, your people like it, it helps the environment – three boxes ticked, and that to us has meant huge demand for these solutions.

Are there spikes in demand for these centres when for instance, there's a transport strike or a major weather problem?
Yes definitely, so you have to reserve them. We have an online reservation system, so you might reserve your place on a day when there's some kind of transport strike on, or if there's bad weather stopping your staff from getting into work. We have about 1,000 buildings and locating them in major transport hubs such as railway stations are a must. For examplem take stations in Tokyo. We have centres there – in fact railways stations in Japan are so big, we have centres on each side. Similarly we have workspaces in London's major railway hubs - Euston, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street, Waterloo, and Victoria.

Do you think businesses might prefer people who want to work from home to work in a dedicated business environment, rather than at home which can be subject to lots of distractions?
What firms are doing is they are using all three places. Companies are keeping some offices, as drop-in places for their workforce. They may take more permanent space with us – approximating to something like a branch office. Here in Berkeley Square we have about 600 workplaces. They will combine this with flexible working where people connect from home.

People who are on the road most of the time would use a centre like this, and we have 140 other places across the UK. The whole idea is that the location of the place is convenient where you can work and be productive. You don't want to have to drive too far out of your way to get to it, otherwise you're losing productivity.

Why did you choose Polycom for the telepresence system?
Our relationship with Polycom goes way back and we were one of the original pioneers of public room videoconferencing. We started soon after the original units came out from Polycom and PictureTel about 15-16 years ago.

These videoconferencing units are gaining popularity during the recession, as firms look to save costs and work with fewer people, and therefore have to be productive. So they can't afford for these people to be flying around the world all the time.

We also know that this customer base wants something more than just the standard videoconferencing, which is very good for short meetings, one-to-ones, and small groups of people at both ends of the video link. What it's not good at is longer meetings, such as board meetings or more intense presentations. Telepresence can step in here and give something very close to a face-to-face meeting. You can connect any of your people based all around the world in seconds, and it can give a very effective meeting, at a relatively low cost.

Who's providing the network connectivity for these places?
In the UK and Europe it's BT, and in the US it's Level 3, but the new telepresence options being launched in our Berkeley Square workspace will have multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) fibre connectivity provided by Cable & Wireless.