CAIRO: Thanks in part to an increasingly developed ICT infrastructure, some companies in Egypt, in line with a global trend, have seen the workplace become more virtual and agile in the past few years. According to a recent report from the Luxembourg-based Regus and Unwired Ventures called “Measuring the Benefits of Agility,” this new type of workplace stems from technological advancements, innovations in global management practices, and increased emphasis placed on establishing a healthy balance between professional and personal lives. As a result, “work” is increasingly becoming “something you do” as opposed to a “place you go to.” “Companies and their people” the report predicted, “will fundamentally re-evaluate the proposition of work and in turn challenge the nature of work and the workplace,” leading to what may be an extinction of the traditional office. For their part, companies in Egypt — particularly multinationals, large-scale local companies and those in the IT sector — have experienced substantial transformations in their work environments in recent years. Like companies across the world, certain Egyptian workplaces are no longer dominated by the traditional “at the office from nine to five, five days a week” schedule, IBM Country Manager Amr Talaat explained to Daily News Egypt. “It is very rare for our employees to come into the office five days a week,” he said. Instead, “giving flexibility to employees,” for example, by allowing new “mothers and fathers to work flexible schedules,” is very important in the modern work environment, he added. Nowadays, agility, mobility and the ability to work virtually and remotely enable companies to increase productivity and promote a healthy balance between the professional and personal lives of their employees. A healthy “work-life balance is very important,” Talaat continued, especially given that IBM Egypt, and companies across Egypt, “hire lots of young people [who have] other commitments in life.” Ziad Ammar, PR senior team leader at Vodafone Egypt, added that in efforts of making the company more agile, Vodafone maintains “four office buildings” across Cairo, which allow its “employees [to] work remotely from different locations when needed.” These offices are also “equipped to conduct video conference calls” with clients and colleagues worldwide, Ammar explained to DNE. And if employees cannot make it into the office, for example, due to Cairo's notoriously arduous and long commute times, which Ammar estimated at 90 minutes for the average Vodafone employee, they can easily work from wherever a phone signal is present, as each “employee has laptops, VMC cards [and] mobile phones.” ICT matters Egypt's booming ICT industry has been a critical element enabling companies like IBM and Vodafone to increase their capacity to promote agile workplaces through remote and virtual work. According Omneia Helmy, lead economist at the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, from 2009 to 2010, ICT was Egypt's fastest growing sector, climbing an impressive 13 percent. Along with improving infrastructure, prices have also become more affordable. “From 2002 to 2010, prices in the Egyptian telecommunication sector decreased 61 percent,” Helmy explained to DNE. However, for the majority of smaller, more locally focused Egyptian companies, it's business as usual, Helmy commented. “I don't think the concept of [an agile workplace] is widely spread in local firms here in Egypt at all,” she admitted. According to Mustafa Bakier, president of a small stationery company, technological advancements have not dramatically changed the way his company conducts business. “As being the scale of a small sized company,” technological advancements “do not help with [becoming more virtual or agile].” Still, Helmy said, the concept of becoming more agile is a “helpful idea, due to traffic concerns, saving energy and improving productivity.” For the future, small and medium-sized companies in Egypt will be able to capitalize on the growing ICT infrastructure should they choose to, for the infrastructure is being developed at a rate commensurate to potential demand, Helmy explained. Despite the obvious benefits gleaned from highly virtual workplaces, there do exist some downsides, she cautioned. “There are definitely some negative impacts. Working from home and virtually deprives individuals of valuable face-to-face contact gained by working with teams in an office,” she said. The Regus and Unwired Ventures study backs this up by showing that according to a survey it conducted, “only 9.7 percent of people in [large] organizations would like to work from home.” However, the study outlined that there is a clear “expectation that the younger workers, the millennial generation and those still at school, will embrace virtual working and reject the traditional office” even more than the current generation.
