Perspectives from Paris: a new take on productivity and purpose at work

The new Cisco Paris office, located in the heart of the city’s vibrant ‘Triangle d’Or’ business district, provided the perfect backdrop for WORKTECH’s latest French-focused event, showcasing the evolving landscape of work and technology. The space, which opened in December of last year, combines several buildings from different periods into one collaborative arena. Sustainability, accessibility and innovation were the concepts at the forefront of the retrofitting process.

Taking place on Thursday 4 April, the conference delved into a host of future-facing themes, ranging from intelligent buildings and generative AI implementation to wellbeing and productivity in the modern-day workplace. Here’s how the themes panned out:

Redefining productivity

Will the future of work be human-centric? To what degree will AI take effect and shape our working world? And where do we all get our inspiration from? These were the questions addressed in the first talk of the event, led by Rythmik Co-founder Olivier Dubuisson. With a focus on generative AI’s power to redefine what productivity looks like in the modern workplace, Dubuisson explored the diversity of opinions surrounding AI and its increasing role in workplace activities.

Explaining that AI functions in an extremely large domain, affecting vast amounts of the working world, Dubuisson considered how AI could offer a helpful digital experience: from automating routine tasks and facilitating communication and collaboration, to designing intelligent workspaces and supporting personal training and development even assisting with natural language processing and championing health and safety at work.

And yet, there remains a diversity of opinions surrounding increased use of AI in the workplace. There are those who argue that AI cannot have creative capacity, termed by Dubuisson as the ‘evangelistes dystopiques’, and those who view AI opportunistically, as a way of automating tasks with the sole purpose of making or saving money – the ‘evangelistes utopiques’. We don’t yet know which vision of the future will prove correct, but the main takeaway from Dubuisson’s keynote was that an experimentation mindset is essential when dealing with AI.

Designing for everywhere working

Philippe Paré, Managing Director at Gensler France, considered the office in its capacity as a useful space – one that conveys purpose and projects inclusion. Drawing upon the Gensler’s Global Workplace Survey, Paré noted several interesting trends that are coming to the fore as we progress in the hybrid era.

In contemplating how work and the workplace are evolving, Paré highlighted that today’s employees are highly mobile, working across different locations such as client sites, third spaces, coworking spaces, home, and the office.  When employees do come to the office, they require diverse spaces that cater to their needs. Gensler research indicates that four types of spaces are important: spaces for individual work, spaces for creative group work, spaces to reflect and restore, and places to connect and recharge.

But what’s not working? Paré suggests the modern workplace, although effective for working with others in person, as well as learning and socialising, falls short when it comes to providing space to work alone effectively. With Gensler research suggesting that 73 per cent of time working alone requires a high level of concentration, the lack of spaces for individual work needs to be addressed. The ability to choose the space in which you work from is an incredibly powerful contributor to employee engagement and effectiveness, requiring a reconsideration from companies around whether they are providing a wide enough range of workspaces.

A four-day working week

Philippe du Payrat, Co-founder of 4jours.work (the French partner of 4 Day Week Global), spoke to the benefits of a four-day working week. Reducing the number of hours spent working in order to free one day a week whilst receiving the same pay has a host of advantages, according to du Payrat. Not only does it positively affect employee engagement, but the positive impact on employee retention and recruitment is a plus, too.

Engagement and employee wellbeing is deteriorating alarmingly rapidly. According to data presented at the conference, an employee misses an average of 24.5 days each year due to sickness (up 75 per cent in the last 12 years), and 34 per cent of employees suffer from burnout (three times as many as before the COVID-19 pandemic). Could the four-day work week be the answer?

Similarly to the UK, France is piloting versions of the four day working week. So far, over 400 businesses have implemented reduced working hours, affecting over 10,000 employees. It has not been limited to a particular type of industry; rather, it has been adopted across a variety of sectors, ranging from commerce to construction.

What’s next for the future of work?

An afternoon talk given by Daniel Prado, Design Principal at AECOM, considered the different methods of working in the modern world and how these might evolve. Explaining that the current model of working 9-5 is outdated, Prado pointed to a survey that shows being granted a level of flexibility and decision making in where to work is extremely important to employees, and many would seriously consider changing jobs if such flexibility was no longer afforded to them.

Prado also commented on the blurred boundaries between work and personal life that has been encouraged by home working. Hybrid and remote working are hangovers from the pandemic, and can sometimes lack strategic guidance. Organisations, therefore, are having to redefine what it means to be online and Prado suggests that now is a good time to invest in the wellbeing of employees in an attempt to actively reduce stress and burnout and ensure that this blurring of boundaries doesn’t go too far.

The conference highlighted that the French workplace is ripe for reinvention. Opportunities to redefine the boundaries between work and life are at the forefront of the workplace agenda, and organisations are actively implementing strategies to balance worker wellbeing and business output. Is this the end of the 9-5 work week? Paris seems to think so.

Find out more about WORKTECH Paris here.