Does anyone ever get paid what he really merits? It is an article of faith with professional managements that people doing the same work at the same level have a remuneration that is roughly the same. There are some concessions for age; having worked with the company for 20 years should fetch you a higher pay packet than a stripling who has been around for barely a year. If the younger man is better, he will probably be promoted and given a pay hike to boot. If that is not possible, he will be given monetary rewards in terms of bonuses that aren’t part of his regular remuneration.

This is all very fine in theory. But it never works out in practice. Promotions don’t happen overnight. And selective bonuses — no matter how deserved — can cause problems across the organisation. Every company tries to extract the maximum out of each employee, and no two employees have the same ability.

“You hear a lot about the office of the future, about how telecommuting and faster communications will create virtual offices,” says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. “You also hear about how geriatric bosses are insisting on more ‘facetime’ — meeting the employee face-to-face rather than over a videophone. These bosses aren’t stupid, nor are they as antediluvian as is being made out to be. They know they can get much more work out of the person if he is physically near at hand.”

The future of the office is meaningless unless you accompany it with the future of employment. Forget for a moment commuting time, and assume that that you stay within walking distance from office. If you reduce work to its basic level, one person may be capable of doing 10 units of work in 10 hours while another can do twice as much. In an office where both are present, you will surely load the second person with additional work, even some taken off the shoulders of the less competent. Take a look at a newsroom; A takes a minute to give a decent headline; B takes 10. All the headlines become A’s baby soon.

What would happen if both A and B were working out of home? Payment would be in terms of output. That’s good for the company. But the other side of the coin is that output would be in terms of payment. So you’d pay A to do his 10 units of work. He’d finish it in half-an-hour and have fun the rest of the day. You can’t even call it goofing off as you would have if he were in office for an eight-hour shift. The question of his helping B, now far removed in some other geography, does not arise. The boss doesn’t even have the chance of “bribing” super-workers to do more than their bit with the promise of a rapid rise up the ranks. The employee of tomorrow will live for his work-life balance — promotions be damned.

What would the office of tomorrow look like if it hadn’t been for this factor? According to a recent study by mobile and cloud technology leader Citrix, the workplace in 2020 will have just seven desks for every 10 employees. They will be able to link up with others on the corporate network with at least six different computing devices. The workspace will be everywhere, even in the cafeteria and the loo. Says Citrix: “The result is a stronger organisation, with high calibre people performing at their best.”

The danger is that not everybody is high calibre. Does an office where the comparatively mediocre have to obey 9-to-5 rules while the stars are free birds — putting in an occasional hour or two perhaps even from the beach — really work? Even more than today, you will have dummies doing facetime while the talent operates far below potential.