Concepts of traditional and modern office?

Answer 1

Over a period of time, the difference between traditional office and modern office has been narrowed down to 'paper book office' and ' paperless office'. To simply state it, traditional office depends on records and files for documentation, manual operations in respect of banking, customer service and other commercial activities. The modern office on the other hand is entirely IT savvy and electronically driven appliances work hand in hand with office workers. Records are digitally driven and the communication is precisely and accurately handled with less human energy and errors as well.

Interestingly, yesterday's modern office too becomes today's traditional office. We may see the progress of modernising office management over a period of time, in various dimensions.

1. Work timings: Specific work timings, were modern for some time as compared to limitless work hours practiced in different situations. Now, specific work timing is a traditional practice as compared to modern 'flex' timings, throughout the 24 hours of the day and seven days of the week. Tomorrow, partly today even, home offices would be the modern scenario as compared to staff going to an office space and working today.

2. Records: Many of the records connected with commercial activities have been converted today to electronic documents. This space saving and accurate methodology being modern today, it might become obsolete, if not traditional one day, when unique identification methodologies are developed and the entire recording activities are arranged nation wide, if not done globally as a central recording system. Commercial organisations have already started following this practice. Every branch unit of an organisation goes through its information from the centrally maintained records of the organisation, held somewhere in the Globe.

3. Human resources: We can see this change in every dimension of the office human resource management. Stenographers or Private Secretaries are found in the traditional office organisation. Today's receptionist of a City Office in India, sits at New York, USA, to respond to customer queries, or vice verse. 90% of the interaction with the customer is done by the sweet recorded message customised for the situation. Most of the Office chores are mechanised.

4. Money transactions: Cash payments and receipts are typical activities of a traditional office. Credit cards came in between with manual transactions for debit and credit of payments at the merchant's office. Now, there is momentary account adjustments as the customer swipes his card in the electronically connected equipment, which encompasses the bank accounts of both the payer and receiver in every commercial transaction. If today's modern office believes in on-line transactions, tomorrow still some more methods would take their place as modern.

5. Office space: Commercial, serviced or home office, today's modern office has bays and cubicles for work stations, as against tables, chairs, telephones and dustbins of yesterday's traditional office. Even these types of today's modern office will become traditional, when offices are run only with a comprehensive equipment of a 'bulky' laptop or a smart PDA. Even today, the modern office is run by these electronic equipments with teleconferencing is held among office leaders, who have not met at all in their life.

6. Office equipments: Traditional Offices were earlier equipped with tables, chairs, typewriters, filing cabinets, steel cup boards, dust bins, punching machines and a blotting pad for the staff to comfortably sit and write. Later, comptometers, calculators, electronic typewriters, telephones and teleprinters, fax machines, photocopiers, shredding machines, staplers, vacuum cleaners, etc came in. Starting from Fans over the working staff, the climate conditioning was improved in terms of room air conditioners to central air conditioning. The offices today are realistic only with work stations with computer aided transaction equipments, whether it be a lap top or card readers and what not.

Precisely, tradition gains its name, when a new formula over rules the activity with advancement in civilization and science.