The office of the future requires just one rule

Treat every individual like an adult-that's what it takes for all the generations in the workplace to work together effectively

- Nisha Ramchandani

The office is now a spectrum of ages your oldest colleague can be nearing retirement while the youngest could be a 19-year-old. You could argue that every generation goes through this cycle of learning to keep up with the freshers while balancing the needs of older colleagues and it keeps you on your toes, but the shift seems faster than ever. The adjustments can be hard for each generation, whether it is being on top of the latest culture tropes and Slack emojis, trying hard not to raise eyebrows when expletives are used, or understanding to speak the more formal language of senior colleagues. The question, however, is this: how much of this change is reflected in our workplace policies, many of which are just inherited?

In the industrial era, work was impersonal but output was almost equal to input. Today, however, the input includes our minds, hopes, ambitions, creativity-we bring ourselves to work and the output cannot always be measured or quantified. There are too many intangibles associated with work and going forward, when the human and the machine are enmeshed, work will take on a new meaning. We need a new way of working, one that is governed by a single rule that all humans who work are adults and have to be treated so.

The rest of the rules can and should be tweaked to suit the individual. Old workplace policies will no longer be enough.