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The workplace of the future

Forget science fiction, future workplaces could resemble images from centuries past.

Ask any IT or telecommunications firm what the office of the future is going to be like and you are likely to get a realistic but fairly short-sighted answer, mainly because they need to sell the products at their disposal now. However, ask a crystal-gazing professor and he or she will have a wider grasp of the concept.

Professor Jeremy Myerson, who runs a ‘Tomorrow’s Office’ course at the Montfort University predicts: ‘Thanks to modern technology, we will have gone back to a more natural pre-industrial, pre-modern way of life by the mid-21st century. The modern office is inflexible, structured and encased by technology. But as communication equipment shrinks, we’ll be able to carry round all the information we need in something as small as a credit card. Open-plan, desktop and computer-linked systems will become things of the past. And going to work in these weird buildings that we call offices will seem as quaint as chucking sewage into the street.’

One leading IT services provider believes that we will become less and less dependent on the office concept itself. Technology will have disposed of cables and offices. Like our ancestors, we will be making all those important business transactions in coffee houses. Twenty years on, we won’t need vast numbers of people working in large offices, so we can move back to the coffee table to do our business. What we all need to ask ourselves though is: will we want to work office-less, will we be able to take on the sociological implications, whatever they might be?

5.1. What main point is the writer making about the workplace of the future?

a) The future development of technologies will force redefinition of what it means to be an employee in an office encompassing the application of technological changes to building a new work environment.

b) A holistic workplace of the future will entail an agile and adaptable work ecosystem that can be achieved only by returning to the past in terms of providing conditions for natural face-to-face and impromptu communication and collaboration.

c) The office of the future will be mobile as the tools for storing and exchanging information improve thus fostering teleworking and making cyberspace the bedrock of the workplace.

d) The office of the future will provide tools, systems and information applications that will help employees to manage their work productively as well as will ensure knowledge creation, flow and retention.

5.2. Write out all the examples you can find of verb forms referring to the future. Which form is used:

a) to make a general prediction?

b) for prediction probably based on present evidence?

c) for a repeated activity around a point in the future?

d) for an action that will be finished before a point of time in the future?

e) for an action that will fairly certainly take place?

f) for an action that may or may not take place in the future?

g) to indicate future ability?

6. You will hear part of a radio programme about how offices may be designated to suit different types of workers in the future. For questions 1-8 complete the sentences. You will hear the recording twice.

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1. A. Read the short extract from the interview and recognize any constructions expressing Future Actions.
2. ARE YOU PAYING TOO HIGH A PRICE FOR THE FUTURE?
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4. B. Put the verb into the most suitable form with future meaning, Present progressive or Present simple.
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8. Future profession
9. Future Simple or Future-in-the Past?
10. Future Simple.
11. FUTURE TENSES
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