IN THE OFFICE
One way of describing the function of the office is the administrative back-up for the organisation. Everyone involved in a business operation has to refer to the office from time to time. Even in the first minutes of the day the office comes alive. The salesperson telephones from a customer’s shop to find out some details about prices, or discounts, or delivery dates. A customer telephones to find what has happened to the order he sent in last week. The short-listed applicants for the new Quality Control Manager’s job turn up for their interviews with the Personnel Manager. The company secretary arrives earlier than usual to ask whether the agenda for the Board of Directors’ meeting later in the day has been typed yet. And the office junior brings in the morning mail which he has opened and sorted, and which now needs to be distributed to the various managers. There is a great variety of tasks undertaken in the office and the staff engaged in these operations need to know a great deal about the business. For example, when customers visit the office or telephone, they naturally expect the staff who deal with them to be knowledgeable. They expect their enquiries to be dealt with courteously, promptly and competently. Receptionists may occupy a comparatively lowly position in the organisational hierarchy, but they create the vital first impression which often determines whether we get the order or not.
The importance of the office is obvious. It is the hub of the communications network for the whole organisation. Technology affects the whole of business, not least the office, and the concept of a completely paperless office is beginning to emerge. Already on many executives’ desks there are keyboards or other devices to communicate with the computers which control all the electronic de-vices in the office. Electronic files are replacing conventional filing cabinets, and copying machines are appearing together with a variety of printers able to print anything from letter-quality characters to four-colour diagrams. Telephone systems are now incorporating a host of facilities from an answering service to video-conferencing.
Video-conferencing involves executives separated by hundreds and per-haps thousands of miles, discussing problems face-to-face on television screens. This in turn conjures up the notion of clerical workers performing many of their daily tasks away from the office, so that offices of the future are not only going to be paperless. They are also going to occupy less space, require fewer staff and al-low much shorter working weeks.
These changes will affect a large number of people. The introduction of robotic production lines in factories and new technology in offices will change the way men and women work, and the roles they expect to fulfil. There have al-ready been great changes in the traditional patterns of employment due to new technology, and this seems likely to continue, with implications for both sexes.
Whatever happens as a result of the new technologies, the role of the office will be changed rather than diminished. Most office workers of the future will find themselves seated at multi-function work-stations able to exercise control over routine purchases, sales, market research, production runs and accounting procedures. In other words, we can expect a centralisation of decision-making powers, with the office becoming even more emphatically the very hub of the business.