Current trends in business and technology show that the way employees work — where, when, why and with whom — will change completely over the next decade and bear little resemblance to work as it stands today.

Here, we outline two ideas presented by Gartner about the future direction of the workplace and how organisations can prepare for it.

We Working - the new name for agile teams

This philosophy will encourage businesses to create small, flexible, autonomous and high-performing teams that form, converge, act and dismantle as assignments change. Fuelled by autonomy and trust among teammates, with these kind of teams the need for middle-line managers will be considerably reduced.

The physical and hybrid workplace dominated by the digital dexterity of employees

Extreme digital dexterity will ultimately be the modus operandi for how employees work over a decade. It is thought by Gartner that by 2028, employees will use avatars, language software, conversational interfaces and real-time dialect translation to work and speak with team members across languages, borders and cultures, with almost no loss of context or meaning.

Employees will develop some kind of personal toolkits of virtual doppelgangers – virtual counterparts, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) software and devices that are more accessible to their personal or team-based activities. What’s more, they will have the ability to carry their personal workplaces with them using cloud communities, open applications and personal virtual assistants. In this kind of system — where people may not know one another — everyone will be rating each other on trust, competence and ethical behavior, much like people rate buyers and sellers on purchasing platforms.

Furthermore, it is expected that technology will assess when people have worked too much and when they need to recharge by monitoring their biorhythms, nutritional requirements and exercise needs.

This article has been updated from the original, published on December 15, 2017, to reflect new events, conditions or research.