Moving Away From A Parental Relationship With Employees

Peter Kelly, the managing director of Virgin Media Business, spoke at Internet World 2014 about how mobile, agile working practices are cracking open the world of work, and how you can stay ahead.

Work isn't a place you go anymore – it's what you do. We need to move away from the parental relationship between us and our trusted employees. We need to be harnessing the power of millennials and using their innovation. The key to that is embracing mobile change and agile working practices.

You can get a 15 per cent productivity gain by embracing mobile and cloud. That's a whole other hour in the day. Imagine what you could do with that day.

In the UK we have 330,000 healthcare workers and carers. Imagine if every one of those got an extra hour in the day. That could be as much as 80 million extra visits – more than one for every person in the UK.

Or you could cut costs with that extra hour, or take the extra hour as free time that you can dedicate to your family.

We've moved from the traditional office layout to hotdesking, open plan offices where the environment is a lot more fluid. We've found that the average savings in property for an organisation adopting these practices can be from 15 to 20 per cent. The UK government spends as much as £25 billion on property – so if we all embraced these tactics, the benefit to UK PLC could be massive.

We're all in competitive markets, so the question is whether you embrace this as your market leads, or take a truly revolutionary approach to get yourself ahead of the trend. The only option we don't have is standing still.

The UK is one of the most technologically developed countries in the world, with as much as 12 per cent of our GDP. If we could embrace this across all sectors, that could be a crucial part of how the UK prospers. Those that stand still could well become extinct, but those that embrace it will come out on top.

At Internet World 2014, thousands of IT, technology and digital marketing professionals are discovering cutting-edge technology innovations and strategies to drive their organisation's success.