The boundaries between office and home office will become even more blurred in the future. The desk will continue to evolve and acquire more features. It will adapt to the changing work situations and be digitally networked. INNOVATIONS NEED FERTILE GROUND One might assume that global demand would go through the roof after the product launch of the first height-adjustable desks. Far from it. Only in the Scan- dinavian countries did the trend of alternating between standing and sitting in a back-friendly and health-pro- moting way catch on. Here, the share of electrically height-adjustable workplaces was already more than 90 % in 2005. In Germany and other European countries, investing in height-adjustable desks to offer office employees an er- gonomic and thus healthy workplace was still very dif- ficult. It took a lot of convincing to get the advantages of working at alternating heights into the minds of the decision-makers. Acceptance, and thereby demand, only increased slowly. As demand increased, the price also fell, which also contributed to the triumph of the electrically height-adjustable workstation. According to the IBA Study on the development of office Work (2019/2020), as many as 28% of all office workers in Germany worked at a sit-stand workstation in 2019. The Publication from IBA (in German only) can be down- loaded here. Over the years, the technology for the height-adjustable desk has steadily evolved. In the beginning, actuator sys- tem technology only enabled up and down movements. From an early stage, LINAK equipped the controls with more intelligence, allowing for optimal implementation of important features such as absolute parallel drive, collision protection or energy saving. Intelligent systems allow even more innovative steps to be made. Key ele- ments here are the integration of intelligent booking systems and the area of individualisation. LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Even more flexibility: The desk will continue to evolve and acquire more features. It will adapt to the changing work organisations. Flexibility is key here. The past few months of the pandemic have accelerated this develop- ment. Do we need a separate desk for each employee? 3
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