Towards Business Potential of Workplace Services in Finland

People no longer work as they worked 15 years ago. One of the major changes, as Laing (2013) stated, is that the employee no longer has to go to work, but information technology brings the work to the employee. Due to the independency of work from time and place, employees are working in a new way in multiple locations. For service providers, this offers a new business field. Thus, the paper focuses on this new business opportunity. The aim of the paper is to identify the business potential to build up and elaborate the workplace service business. Interviews with national workplace service providers and international workplace experts were conducted in order to get practical insight on the topic. Based on the interviews, two development steps are required to utilise the new business opportunity: (1) the transaction-oriented way to provide workplace services should be substituted by new business models, and (2) the workplace service should be re-thought and re-designed as a service that is not solely dependent on physical space. Based on the new business model and service, a new business opportunity could be harnessed.