5 questions for Michael Zgoll

1. Why is the partnership with ORGATEC relevant for your company?
The questions and demands on the office and the world of work are very complex, as are the specialist areas involved and the decision-makers in the companies that are part of these developments. No other trade fair brings together so many different decision-makers from the office world - a great opportunity for creative exchange and mutual inspiration

2. Why is the space a highlight of ORGATEC?
Firstly, because of its visionary character: #InspiredAugmentedOffice is a driving force for the industry and the office as a whole. Secondly, because it is staged as a real world of experience: no individual products from various sponsoring partners are exhibited. Instead, these individual components are used to create a holistic office landscape that can be experienced and tested.

3. What are the benefits for exhibitors and visitors?
The special area not only provides an overview of trends and visions, but also of the various highlights at ORGATEC as a whole. Exhibitors can present their products here in the best possible way as a target-oriented component of an overall solution and visitors can approach the exhibitors of the individual components after experiencing the special area.

4. How have office concepts and workplace design changed in recent years, and how is your company contributing to this?
The last few years have been characterized by one major driver: the hybrid way of working. Not all employees are permanently in the office anymore, but often take part in meetings from home or on the road via video conferencing. This leads to high demands on the workplaces (retreat rooms, acoustics, technology at the workplace), but of course also to a high focus on the meeting rooms, which are now almost 100% equipped with video conferencing technology and are also in permanent use.

If employees only spend part of their working day in the office, the working landscape will change: new options will be created to meet employees' requirements, but with significantly less space.

This trend brings with it a high degree of flexibility and new opportunities, but also a host of new challenges: Where can I work today? What equipment do I have there? Where can I find my colleagues? How can I hand over materials?

The evaluation using intelligent sensor technology is also extremely exciting here: Which areas and possibilities are really being used and how much? Do we need more workstations or room-in-room systems? We deal with such questions and are constantly developing new solutions for our customers.

5. What trends in office equipment and workplace design do you expect to see in the coming years?

In the short term, it will be about streamlining the office workflow. Many companies today use a colorful bouquet of tools, apps and technologies. They are usually looking for just one solution for a specific problem, which automatically leads to a large number of heterogeneous individual products.

By using these tools, employees are provided with a solution for what has become a very unpredictable working day. However, the sheer number of new tools increases the effort and demands involved in dealing with the various technologies. There is a great risk that people will feel stressed or even left behind by the use of the tools rather than that these tools will make the workflow easier.

In the coming years, the main focus will be on breaking down silos in companies and homogenizing the multitude of tools. The goal must be the sensible use of technology in order to harmoniously optimize the workflow in the changed office landscape.

In the medium term, spatial computing is a trend that will not only radically change the office landscape, but can also turn the office back into a center of work: I can use the entire space around me as a work surface for my PC applications and digital content, spread out and arrange and visualize my topics for myself in the way I need them.

However, the home office usually lacks something that the classic office today has more than enough of: Space! In future, spatial computing will provide a real reason why I like to travel to the office for certain things instead of working from home. It's up to companies to provide optimized conditions in good time and adapt their workspaces to this new medium.nik to harmoniously optimize the workflow in the changed office landscape.