What’s the role of the European Union on the workspace? How can they support it and how can they thwart it?
"The main task for Europe Union is contribute to R&D and policy developments in new working environments designs and in organisation of work in the networked knowledge-based economy.
It incorporates innovation to facilitate creativity and collaboration, to resource-use efficiency, value-creation and extended work opportunities for all. It fosters grid technologies in new working environments and organisations, targeting towards integrated applications and platforms." http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/atwork/about/new_work_environm/index_en.htm
Focus is on the areas of
- eProfessions and individually driven working,
- new workplace designs,
- knowledge management in media-rich working environments, including mobility and multimodality,
- collaborative work and organisations and
- ambient organisations and new organisation of work.
Furthermore, to contribute to this mission the European Commission New Working Environment Unit has established Collaboration@Work to next generation collaborative working environments, comprising innovative technical solutions as well as socioeconomic and policy-related aspects. "Collaboration@Work aims at improving human abilities to work collaboratively, thereby increasing creativity, which, in turn, will boost innovation and productivity, as well as support new value creation forms." http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/atwork/collaboration_at_work/index_en.htm
Collaboration@Work vision on the future workspace is as follows:
"Next Generation Collaborative Mobile Virtualised Working Environments focuses on workers interacting with their environments and collaborating with each other, having access to all the (also virtualised) resources (including also assisting robotics) required to carry out their tasks and enhancing their capabilities. Among these resources, the key is the knowledge of the co-workers to complement in dynamic groups the needed competences and skills to carry out the task in a efficient way leading to increase on productivity, and generating innovative and creative solutions." http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/atwork/collaboration_at_work/index_en.htm
In our opinion the EU can contribute to the future workspace in the following order:
- Funding infrastructure project across Europe
- Policy development in the fields of labour policies and general principles like free movement of people and goods.
- Finding the right balance between public owned and privatising of companies.
- Focus on innovation and the knowledge economy.
- Create world-class educational institutions across Europe.