Office shake-up
Who's been sitting in my chair?

Back in 1993 when advertising visionary Jay Chiat opened the New York Chiat/Day office without permanent desks, he was mocked. But now, whether you call it hotdesking, hotelling or just plain old shared workspace, the non-territorial office is a way of life. A growing number of advocates say it reduces costs, increases productivity, enhances teamwork and saves energy.

IBM decided to go non-territorial in its Toronto office in 2007 because anywhere from 30%-60% of its space wasn’t being utilised on an average day.

Last year Australian architectural firm Hassell won top prize at the 2010 World Architectural Festival for fitting out Melbourne’s ANZ bank HQ, a workplace for 6,500 employees that focuses on what Hassell’s Peter Black called “‘zoning’, not ‘homing'.” Around 55% of the space is shared, with 45% dedicated to cellular offices. Since studies show a desk in a typical office is occupied only 70% of the time, says Black, 70 desks suffice for 100 employees. “Even if you take a 15% margin of error and provide desks for 85% of the workforce, that’s still a real-estate saving of 15%, which is a big chunk of money.”

The whole non-territorial office concept has been in the news recently following German giant Siemens’ relocation of its US headquarters from a traditional building in New York to Washington DC, where around 1,950m2 of floorspace is completely open plan. This follows the "advance mobile working and non-territorial design" that it has already implemented at its outposts in Brussels, Frimley (UK), Vienna, Munich and Toronto. Even Siemens' US CEO, Eric Spiegel, puts away his belongings so other people can use his office when he isn’t there.

Shantanu Khosla, managing director of Procter & Gamble’s Indian operations – which generate $800m in annual revenues – has gone even further: he has no office at all in the Indian P&G headquarters in Mumbai. Khosla's workstation is part of a completely open-plan workspace; he can use one of several "huddle rooms" for meetings; and says he doesn’t miss his “cabin” at all. Cincinnati-based P&G’s global policy has eliminated level-linked perks such as reserved parking and has nixed all private offices.

The non-territorial workspace is now spawning its own firms and products. A company might bring in consultants to help smooth the way for employees making the transition into a new workspace designed by specialist office furniture outfits.

At their non-assigned stations, employees might communicate through one of the newest collaborative phone and videoconferencing devices, such as the Aastra BluStar 8000i, which enables them to share desktop PC content and transfer data from their mobile phones and Bluetooth-enabled devices while videoconferencing.

At the end of the day, those employees might then turn offtheir Humanscale Diffrient Lights, special hot-desking lamps with sockets for their laptops and smartphones, then pack everything up in the new Lesco Hotbox 101; designed to hang offtool bars and third-level screen systems, it has a built-in security lock and holds both files and laptop. Not so much work today? Then they may have brought a smaller MobilBox instead.

Jay Chiat saw the future, and it’s here.

Online market
Ms Saigon

Relying on the internet for accurate information about health and wellbeing might strike some in the West as risky, but Vietnamese women’s appetite for reliable information and peer reviews has made community website HerVietnam.com a smash hit. Traffic now stands at more than 600,000 visitors a month and international brands such as Clinique and Sony Ericsson are major advertisers.

The website, targeting the 12 million or so professional Vietnamese women aged 20- 35, was created by French-American former management consultant Juliette Miremont Morton when her family's year-long tour through Asia stopped in Ho Chi Minh City. “It struck me how little proper information people have [here] on healthcare and parenting,” says Morton.

"There just aren't sources of information. Even things like knowing Coca-Cola has caffeine in it and might keep you up at night if you drink it late, people don't know that. Or that you're supposed to take a full course of antibiotics. The media here isn't seen as very trustworthy – it's mostly government or advertorial. There's not much real editorial, so it's not hard for the internet to stand out. The idea was to provide quality information to women, and it's evolved to cover a lot of other topics, like beauty and fashion."

The site, run by 10 staff, has grown fast. It’s been three years since it was launched, and as well as catching local women’s eyes, it was quickly spotted as an investment opportunity by European network auFeminin.com, majority owned by publishers Axel Springer. In return for a 30% stake in the site’s parent company, Vina Woman, auFeminin put US$250,000 into the business, which it sees as a springboard into the high-potential southeast Asian market. It also provides content for translation and adaptation for local readers.

In urban Vietnam about half the population uses the internet, according to research by Cimigo, and with one of the youngest populations in the world, the ranks of net-savvy consumers are swelling. Free Wi-fiaccess is almost ubiquitous, and as the cost of computers falls, more people are logging on from home rather than relying on access in cafes; 71% of internet users have a home internet connection, according to Kantar Media. And women especially are taking the web to heart. In research sponsored by Sony Ericsson and the media planning giant GroupM, Vina Woman found that among women web users, 86% go online for information before they buy fashion items, and 92% check online for information about consumer electronics.

But what’s held back the site, Miremont Morton says, is the sluggishness on the part of advertisers in Vietnam to latch onto the popularity of the internet. While online spending is growing fast – up 47% last year – it’s still only about 3% of total advertising. “That represents opportunity,” she says. Online spending currently goes almost entirely to the big-traffic portals, as it did in the Western world until a few years ago, when advertisers began seeing the value of niche, engaged audiences. There are signs that the tide may be turning, however. Morton says potential advertisers who dismissed sites with fewer than a million monthly users just a couple of years ago are now picking up the phone.

Cottage industry
Virtually employed

During the industrial revolution, women used to find flexible part-time work doing sewing piecework and small-scale product assembly at their kitchen tables. The internet has triggered a rebirth of this phenomenon, but this time, women and men alike are whipping up marketing plans, organising parties and conducting business research for executives and entrepreneurs who are pushed for time but don’t want an assistant on staff.

Virtual assistants – available for anything from $5 an hour from an India-based outfit to as much as $100 an hour for a US-based VA with specialist technical skills – represent a booming sector, profiting from the large pool of unemployed post- recession skilled workers and businesses’ reluctance to hire full-time staff.

The VA service sector evolved from work- from-home typists in the pre-internet days, and while many still provide basic office services, others do far more. Want a daily call to nudge you to the gym? Holidays researched and booked? Even basic product design and brainstorming, finding a lost dog, teaching algebra; there’s a VA for that.

Berlin-based Strandschicht offers small German marketing and media firms service VAs from Eastern Europe. GetFriday, based in Bangalore, has about 200 people with various skills, many of them graduates, working in shifts to match clients’ waking hours. Individuals and small businesses each make up about half of their clientele, dotted throught 50 countries. CEO Sunder Prakasham says doctors, lawyers, artists and academics are signed up. Local rivals – inevitably riffing offthe Robinson Crusoe- inspired name – include AskSunday and Tasks EveryDay.

Justine Curtis launched My Virtual Assistant in the UK in 2003. Her core team of five now runs a six-figure business that has sold four franchises in the UK and has attracted interest from would-be franchisees in France and Dubai. Recently, she’s launched the UK Association of Virtual Assistants, which has a code of practice and 150 members.

Maryland-based Sharon Williams, owner of The 24 Hour Secretary, is founder of an annual convention for VAs, who she figures number more than 28,000 worldwide, about 60% of whom are in the US. She draws a line, however, between teams of self-employed VAs and the bigger outsourcing businesses that use overseas staffand doesn’t include them in her tally.

Where Williams and Prakasham are in agreement is over the increasing complexity of clients’ requests. “The trend now is to be much more tech savvy,” Williams says. “There’s a surge in clients wanting social media campaigns, they want to get into online video and want advice on that, they want to know about cloud computing and mobile too. Lots of entrepreneurs haven’t embraced all that yet and they need someone to do it for them.”

Hi-tech pioneers
The Arab springboard

It's rare to associate Arabs with Israeli hi- tech, since they currently make up less than 4% of the sector's workforce. But with the help of entrepreneur Smadar Nehab and her non-profit organisation Tsofen (Hebrew for 'secret code'), the industry is starting to flourish in Arab areas. Nehab's objective is to help Arab engineers to enter this lucrative field and enjoy similar benefits to those that she received as a Jewish Israeli.

A cluster of start-ups has emerged in Nazareth, the industrial zones of Nazareth Illit, Tefen and Gush Segev in northern Israel, and in the Bedouin village of Hura, part of the Negev region in the south. One of the most notable is Alpha Omega of Nazareth Illit – founded in 1994 by Rim and Imad Younis – which has developed a technology that helps alleviate the symptoms of neurological and movement disorders.

The couple employ 27 workers and export devices worth $7m-$8m a year, or roughly 60% of Israeli-Arab exports.

Another six companies are part of the NGT Technological Incubator, established in Nazareth in 2002 with the help of Israel's chief scientist in a bid to encourage Arab employment. According to Israel's Industry, Trade and Labour Ministry, their combined exports top $10m a year. By and large, Arab entrepreneurs tend to employ Arab workers, but not exclusively.

With 500 workers, Babcom Centers – an Israeli-Arab outfit that specialises in outsourcing business services such as call centres and software development – is one of the Galilee's major employers. Indeed, the country's largest computer-services firm, Matrix IT, has a controlling interest in the company.

In February, President Shimon Peres launched the Ma'an Tech initiative in conjunction with American multinational Cisco Systems and in partnership with about 20 leading Israeli and international hi-tech corporations that are committed to recruiting Arab graduates for professional positions. One of its first actions was to introduce a website for screening, training, and matching hi-tech companies with Arab job-seekers.

"Tsofen's goal is that the next stage in the growth of this industry will be based on the integration of Arab society into the Israeli sector," says Nehab. "This will benefit Israel's economy as well as making it a more just society."