The Future of the Workplace: business colonies
Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.
What do you know about the term ‘business colonies’? What do you think it means?
What kind of workplace do you like to work in?
Rather than workplaces, some predict there will be business colonies.
With a lot of people doing project work, companies may have difficulty having one project after another ready for normal style full time employees, so business colonies will be the solution.
Business colonies can be described as a kind of an evolution of our current co-working situations that we have today”.
Business colonies could operate how the movie industry has been operating for years.
When the movie industry starts a new movie project, it will get writers, directors, actors and crew. All these people come together for the project and once that project is over they move on to another project. It is likely that business colonies will operate like this.
Future business predictors such as Frey suggest “Some of these business colonies will be virtual; some of them will be physical, or a combination of both,” he says.
“But the way they will work is they'll have a project manager ready who will bring in the projects and people will go there to pick up piecemeal work, and these projects could be really short term projects for an hour or two, or they could be long projects that might last for the next six months to a year.”
Frey says some of the business colonies will be structured around particular areas such as nano tech, biotech, games development and IT, or large corporations could experiment by setting up their own business colonies.
Outside of the corporate walls (company surroundings), large corporations will staff the colonies with one or two project managers and then they will basically lob projects over the corporate walls into the colony.
Frey predicts people in the colony will scramble around to get the work done and send it back and wait for the next incoming project.
So this type of structure tends to be put together freely and for a lot of people it'll be disconcerting because you won’t have your career path that you can map out like you did in the past, he says.
“But people that are good at this will excel in it and it doesn't mean that all jobs are going to go away, it'll just mean that there is relatively more of this and relatively fewer long-term hiring positions out there.”
Guessing meaning from context (the words around that word or phrase).
Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. The answers are below the table.
|
project work |
A |
1 |
Change over time |
|
evolution |
B |
2 |
Jobs that are parts of a larger one |
|
virtual |
C |
3 |
To throw |
|
piecemeal work |
D |
4 |
Not comfortable, worrying |
|
structured |
E |
5 |
People work together on one assignment or one job |
|
lob |
F |
6 |
Run around to get something, run quickly to save |
|
scramble |
G |
7 |
To make a plan |
|
disconcerting |
H |
8 |
Organized , how things are grouped or put together |
|
map out |
I |
9 |
almost something |
A=5, B=1, C=9, D=2, E=8, F=3, G=6, H=4,I-7
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