The OFEc panel of industry experts was brought together to research and debate the impact of social change and technological advances on UK business.

The OFEc’s report, The way to work: space, place and technology in 2016, focuses on the forces of rapid change, low predictability and high risk that characterise the current business environment, and identifies the five key drivers that businesses must embrace to ensure greater control over their future:

• Innovation: Maintain an external focus and engage with others outside your organisation, your sector as well as your customers.
• Culture: Create a culture that recognises and complements the values of increasingly empowered employees at all levels. Build on successful core competencies as well as recognise and respond quickly when things can be done better elsewhere.
• Leadership: Re-evaluate the role of management in your organisation. Look for ways to make management an enabling force for activity taking place across the organisation, rather than solely a decision function.
• Operation & technology: Create a map, planning for future changes. Allow for various possible outcomes and ensure that there is capacity inside or outside your company to explore and exploit these.
• Regulation: Work with others in your sector, and your regulators, to develop models of the workplace of the future – and collaborate on building the most effective regulatory regimes for them. Develop an understanding of and engage with the relevant interest groups and NGOs that increasingly influence policy making.

Robert Ainger, founder member of OFEc, commented, ‘Change in business is happening so rapidly, arguably at a faster rate than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. The rate of change can be intimidating, but it creates opportunities. The challenge is asserting some control so businesses can use the situation to their advantage.’