Torin Douglas has reported on business matters for over 40 years, including 24 years as the media correspondent for BBC News (until 2013). Before joining the BBC, he wrote for the business sections of The Times, the Independent, the Economist, the Sunday Times and Campaign, and presented LBC Radio’s media show, Advertising World. He was also one of the founding editors of Marketing Week and the launch editor of Creative Review.

Poet, columnist, enemy of all that’s difficult and upsetting. Matt’s way with words has taken him from Totnes to the All England Tennis Club via Radio 4’s Saturday Live, The Edinburgh Festival and the work section of the Guardian

As the UK continues to wrestle with an uncertain economic and trading relationship with the rest of Europe, a new report from the RSA’s Future Work Centre has modelled four different scenarios for the future of work in 2035. The Big Tech Economy, The Precision Economy, The Exodus Economy & The Empathy Economy. Each scenario has positive and negative aspects, reflecting increasingly widespread scepticism about what new technologies will bring to the global workplace in terms of rewards, job security and societal gain.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. The sentient workplace will explore the enablers behind this trend, how it will drive smart decisions and where companies will realise benefits as the battle of talent intensifies and focus shifts to contextualised employee experience and computerised technology.

Effective, resilient organizations, the ones that will survive the turbulent next decade, will be the ones that can constantly metabolize real-time incoming information. They have the capacity to learn fast and can respond by constantly finetuning and fluidly reforming themselves. At Microsoft, we believe the best way to unlock this is by harnessing human energy around shared purpose, by amplifying human ingenuity and leveraging the human network!

In this informative session David will tell us how the flexible workspace market has evolved from the early days of grey serviced offices into one of the fastest growing phenomena in property. Find out what has changed, what’s driving the tremendous market growth and what’s next for the industry.

Think about how the way you work has evolved. Chances are it’s no longer 9 to 5. And it’s not all in one office. Work today requires collaboration and involves teams spread across time zones. Organisations everywhere are seeking stronger employee engagement and customer experiences to enable more productivity and greater business agility. More effective collaboration helps organisations work smarter.

As the ante is upped in providing more and better workplace experiences, so we are entering the era of super experience. This session explores the impact of experience design on the property industry and offers tips on activating the super experience. These include taking a people first approach, offering a more flexible portfolio of experiences and curating new skills and new technologies.

As she just returned from travelling to four continents and beyond 14 cities in one month with the hope of bringing back the origin of knowledge in her suitcase, the Willy Wonka of Design and Science-Dr. Ben Hayoun- will stop by WORKTECH to share mysteries behind her practice and production of the impossible, but also her experience performing and reenacting the life of political theorist Hannah Arendt.

Whether it is a question of reducing downtime or optimising systems in order to save time and money, IoT is rapidly impacting on all aspects of our business lives. It is not possible or indeed desirable to fight such a widespread revolution in business, which means that management should embrace development so as not to fall behind. Smart offices and agile workstyles mean higher profits, more satisfied employees and better companies.

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Evidence is growing that light doesn’t just help us see – it impacts how we feel and behave. Human-centric lighting (HCL) aims to use the power of light to improve how we live and work. By tuning light to support our circadian rhythms and emotional needs, we can promote human comfort, wellbeing and performance.

At GSK, we believe that the workplace should be a health enabler because when we feel at our best, we perform at our best. We have built a Workplace Performance Hub in our HQ and with our own people, we are testing the impact of the workspace on wellbeing, satisfaction and productivity. Using case study data, we demonstrate how objective evaluation of your working environment influences employee health, wellbeing & performance.

Employee workplace experiences, not physical assets, are disrupting real estate. Corporate workplaces are now needing to create a high performing agile culture, in a rigid complex workplace. This session will explore how organisations can make their physical assets smarter using a holistic approach to systems integrations & IoT ultimately to provide a frictionless workplace experience. Improve your workplace culture by understanding the behavioural data and empowering employees to effortlessly interact with their environment.

Devinder Bhogal will take you on the journey of the Deloitte’s workplace transformation in the UK and Switzerland. She will share how Deloitte has not only changed the space, but the entire workplace strategy, revolutionising the space to reflect and positively impact the changing work environment. This session will evaluate the impact and outcomes from smart buildings and explore Deloitte’s journey to new ways of working.

Large organizations are generating high added value in terms of operational efficiency and employee satisfaction throughout its real estate portfolio, by relying on real time occupancy insights. Experience best practice examples from companies such as EY, Swiss Re and Zurich Insurance.

Tech-enabled workspaces create and hold an extremely valuable commodity which has the power to make them even more efficient – data. But how can businesses make the leap from data-creating to truly data-driven environments, where insights make way for intuition?

Cloudbooking will bring together experts from the technology and data-led industries to discuss whether organisations are effectively accessing, analysing and utilising the vast amount of workspace data available to them. What role does data-driven decision making have in establishing and informing key metrics for business success?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal retired as a four-star general after serving nearly four decades in the U.S. Army. During that time he worked with countless leaders, at every level of effectiveness, and pondered an ancient question: “What makes a leader great?” coming to realise there is no simple answer. Since retiring from the army he has taught leadership courses at Yale University, joined the boards of various private companies and non-profits and authored three books. He joins us at #WORKTECH London to explore the ‘myths and
realities’ of what makes a great leader.