In his 1956 bestseller, The Organization Man, author William Whyte told us that employees of that era's corporation not only worked for an organization, but they sold their psyches to them as well. These "organization men," like Sloan Wilson's protagonist Tom Rath in the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, struggled with the subordination of their personal goals and desires in conforming to the demands of corporations and other organizations. Fifty years later, the traditional workplace has been fractured forever by technological innovation, societal change, workplace laws and the abandonment of historic corporate convenants that once promised loyalty and the prospect of lifetime employment to workers.

The Brave New World: What will it look like in 2010? In Northern Ireland, Central London and at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, three distinct groups are innovating new office concepts and examining issues that will affect the workplace in coming decades.

Workplace 2010 is a five-year program being developed in Belfast by Ireland's Department of Finance and Personnel and the Strategic Investment Board to modernize and rationalize the Northern Ireland civil service office. It involves the introduction of new accommodation standards, such as shifting away from "owned" to "shared" work space to create a more flexible environment promoting greater collaboration among teams, better communication and improved productivity. In essence, the Irish civil service will use less space more economically by consolidating government buildings and clustering workers from various groups in ultra-modern carrels with flat-screen technology, computer and phone access, and work files that can be stored and retrieved as migrating workers need them. We know this concept as hoteling, a practice that first originated in 1994 with the "non-territorial office," conceived by the California advertising agency, Chiat/Day.

In Central London, minutes from the Liverpool Street Station, workers requiring space now come to a location at 5 Wormwood Street to use "hot desks," meeting rooms and free wireless Internet access at The Hubworking Centre. No longer teethered to offices in their home or in a company, people can gather where they want with others and work on schedules that meet their needs. Hubworking is one of scores of like centers that are proliferating everywhere.

At Georgetown University, a campaign known as Workplace Flexibility 2010 is underway to support the development of a comprehensive national policy on workplace flexibility at the federal, state and local levels. Co-led by Professor Chai Feldblum, who authored and negotiated the 1992 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Workplace Flexibility 2010 is a collaborative effort with the Sloan Work & Family Research Network at Boston College and When Work Works of the Families and Work Institute in New York City. Its mission is to engage policymakers, political leaders, employers, advocacy groups and the public in a dialogue on existing and proposed laws that will affect the workplace.

How can we promote the flexibility employees may need to balance their work schedules while caring for a child or an aging relative if employment laws and employer practices don't permit us to do so? Will future office environments facilitate or prohibit access to employees with special needs who, through their differences, bring a rich diversity of attitudes, experiences and beliefs to the workplace? How will policies being decided today shape the profile of the workforce in decades to come? These issues and others are being examined by Workplace Flexibility 2010 in its efforts to help advance the health and well-being of American workers, their families and their communities.

The Organization Man is gone. The period Whyte examined in his writing had as its ethic the belief that groups are superior to the individual, and that individuals had little meaning or purpose outside their work group. The workplace of 2010 will be predicated more on the individual - how they work, how corporations support their individuality and needs, how new technologies and flexible work environments free people to be more productive 24-7-365, and how laws and policies advance and empower workers.

Effective employee communication will be a vital thread woven throughout the complex range of workplace issues that confront us. We see it today in new employee communications practices that promote the work of individuals as the "mentors and models" who contribute, through their achievements, behaviors and beliefs, to the work of the larger organization. Even more emphasis will be placed on facilitating face-to-face communications among front-line managers and their reports, using internal ads and communications channels to profile key individuals who represent the core values and attributes of the corporate brand, and technologies like IM and real-time messaging and videocasting capabilities on cellular devices to link individuals with their teams, geographies and time zones notwithstanding. Diversity will be profiled more as a business strategy rather than an attribute of the organization.

We cannot stand still; best practices quickly become legacies of the past. Workers who once needed the organization today are finding they need it less to define who they are, how they work and what they believe. It is our work as communicators to advance a new social and business ethic - promoting the individual for the purpose of advancing the goals of the larger organization.