Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1186724
21.11.19 10 BUSINESS Five top workplace Enhancing the employee experience by providing an enjoyable and efficient working environment is a common goal for most firms. Technology is a key part of workplace design, but new systems or devices must be properly considered, taking into account the impact on all employees. Here's a lowdown of five of the top tech trends making their way into workplace design As the public moves to 5G networks new services using them will no doubt appear. HR should consider how these could be used to speed up processes in the workplace. Environmental psychologist and honorary senior lecturer at University College London Nigel Oseland says HR could use this tech to get around the challenge of balancing the collaboration and networking benefits of open-plan offices, with concerns around keeping confidential conversations private and employees free from unnecessary or unwanted distractions. "It could be good where you want to reduce speech intelligibility in open-plan spaces or in rooms where you want privacy," he adds. Sensitive employee on a Li-Fi connection. ity between devices reconfigure office of the technology e increased speed of 5G could enable significant ad- vances in the use of collaboration tools, such as high-defi- nition video conferencing and potentially even holographic meetings. Vodafone has demoed this in public and the po- tential is huge – from meetings and catch-ups to complex training scenarios or professional development courses. e technology could become common in large open- plan offices to help avoid sound overlap between different departments. Penelope Harrell, marketing lead at Remark Group, which provides this, gives the following example: "If the sales team is directly next to the accounts team their areas can be split into two zones, and the sound masking within the zone that needs most confidentiality can be turned up to provide more privacy." e security Bharat Mistry, Trend Micro explains: than other wireless tained in a physical solid objects such "Both the light den or covered ronments where wireless devices 5G is the next evolution in cellular network for mobile de- vices, with speeds of around 600MB per second and very low latency. At present 5G rollout is in the early stages and is limited to certain handsets, but soon enough it will be as common as 4G. lso called sound masking, white noise tech involves in- troducing audio into a work space to provide a continuous background noise to mask other distracting sounds or cre- ate privacy for conversations when in public spaces. Li-Fi, or Light LEDs to transmit data is transported of brightness that 5G White noise tech Li-Fi What is it? How will it affect the workforce? What should HR do?