The last fixed infrastructure in the office
We made desks, furniture and working hours mobile. Power stayed where the architect put it, and it still decides how we occupy a building.
Take a walk around a recent office. The furniture is on castors, the partitions move, desks are no longer assigned. The flex office has made everything mobile, or almost everything.
Now look at where people sit. Along the walls. Around the tables fitted with power hatches. Near the pillars where someone has fixed a power strip. The rest of the floor, however beautiful, empties as soon as batteries run low.
A layout decided ten years ago
An outlet is a layout decision set in concrete. It was placed at the time of construction or of the last refurbishment, for a use nobody imagined would be hybrid. It still dictates today where people work, where they meet, and where they stay only for the length of a coffee.
As long as the office was made up of fixed desks, this was not a problem. Everyone had their own outlet, under their desk. Hybrid working broke that model: people move from a meeting room to an informal space, from a shared table to the cafeteria. People move. Power does not.
What it really costs
The cost of a fixed outlet appears in no budget. It is spread across several departments, which makes it invisible:
- real estate pays for square metres nobody can use for work;
- every layout change starts with an electrician;
- employees waste time looking for a free outlet or a charger;
- IT keeps buying chargers that disappear into drawers.
Treating power as infrastructure
Wi-Fi solved exactly this problem for the network. Nobody misses the Ethernet cable that forced you to work next to a network port. Wi-Fi is not a gadget: it is infrastructure, deployed, secured and managed.
Power can follow the same path. A network of shared batteries, stations where you pick them up and return them, controlled access and usage data to know where to add more. This is what we call a shared battery network for the workplace.
The flexible office was a promise. Freeing power from the outlet finally makes it possible to keep it.
The question is no longer where to install new outlets. It is whether your building still needs power to stay on the wall.
