Virtual Offices: The Debate continues........

A virtual offiice Environment that can actually enable a lot of savings of resou

My last article was about Virtual offices and many people read that and gave me a call. First of all I would like to thank them for pondering over my article and also reciprocating by calls. Certainly, not all of them were in agreement with my idea, and it really happens because then and only then you come to know about how feasible an Idea ease when you patiently listen to agreements and disagreements towards them with proper justifications. 

Many people of the senior clad could not really digest the fact that if everybody worksFROM HOME ( even if the situation allowed it to be so) then what would happen to the office environment? Well I agree to them. They are right. 

However, my question is "Are we really at a situation to afford the luxury of creating an office environment in a costly metro city by compromising the convenience of so many talented people, increasing carbon footprint and then being a reason of the inflation?"

Do we want this to happen?

Let us see this in a larger perspective. In a Metro city like Mumbai, say, there are a lot of people who atleast take 1 to 2 hours to reach their workplaces everyday. People who are using public transport or using vehicle of their own, travelling to the office only do to some soft work for 8 hours over the Laptop and the Internet daily spend 4 hours of productivity in a mundane activity like city travelling. When most of them do that what happens in a city like Mumbai is anybody's guess. Traffic jams, road congestions and stress. My question over here is why cannot these works be done from the comfort zone of their home using a broadband connection? This also gives around 4 hours of extra productive time minus the stress of travelling. Should this not be done in a city like Mumbai or Delhi, where the authorities are hell bent on saving resources and space? Why should weREQUIRE IT parks, big and mammoth in size when the same can be done from people's homes? Why put this load on the city? 

We see the city expanding and more and more people staying on the outskirts of the city, while on the other side the commercial hubs mushroom in the centre creating more of a clog in those places. People of this city of a population of 12 Million complain about it being crowded not realising that the crowd problem can be obliterated just by introducing this very good concept of virtual offices. This also puts less load on the public transport system which is already collapsing in Mumbai and so we can have quality development of the same. We will have better roads and with a lot of space to drive our cars when we need it. 

A country like India with a population of 1.25 billion is a major contributor in the carbon footprint creation in this world. There are a lot of expectations from the matured Indian population to actually play a very important role towards decreasing the same. Virtual offices exactly brings that to picture. Less use of fuel due to less travelling. Travelling 20 kms daily one way and 40 Kms round trip is about travelling 1000 Kms a Month. This is resulting to a consumption of 70Ltrs of Fuel per car. 70 Ltrs per car!!!! That is huge. Introduction of virtual offices will save this for you. Less consumption of Fuels leads to less demand. We are no more in the medieval age where weREQUIRE to be at a specific place to do our work. Our works have become more integrated and digitized and connected to work from anywhere, so why go anywhere? Why not save the going part and save money and fuel? 

There was a question about the debate of meetings. Well today we have so many tools to conduct the meetings online in a very effective way. To be global it is not necessary to be a globetrotter. Travelling should be a leisure activity than plain business. Let us ask ourselves. Are we not mature enough to come to a consensus over a meeting using the electronic / online system? If not then why do we even call ourselves developed. The beauty of technology is to use it in every area in the most judicious way to make a good world. However, this is not happening. This is being prevented from happening causing stress and burn-out on the population, causing inflation, causing inflated demands of things which are not actuallyREQUIRED in so much abundance in the digital world. 

I am still open to questions, rebuttals and criticisms towards my views....But would also request dear readers to think about the larger interest. 

Cheers

Kalyan