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Your e-mails: The future of workA four-day workweek could be the norm, if you still have a job
 Some of you suggested many more people will work from home in coming years, saving gas and saving time. SPECIAL REPORT(CNN) -- Last week we asked for your thoughts on the future of work. This week we are publishing a selection of your e-mails, which forecast a range of changes, from an explosion in telecommuting to nearly fully automated fast food joints. Here is a sampling of your responses, some of which have been edited. I think that my generation (I am 31 years old) understands that people have lives outside of the workplace. I feel that once my generation starts being the CEOs of big corporations and not-so big corporations, there will be more of a lax work life. We will follow more of a European way of life. More time off, four day work weeks and benefits, which include daycare and gym memberships. ... Speaking for myself, I would take less pay for a four day workweek any day. In the coming years, the early retirement age for Social Security will be age 70, full Social Security at age 75, and the four day workweek will replace the five day workweek. ... Employers will offer their employees one year paid sabbaticals after every five years of work to gain additional education to improve job performance. Of course, health care will be the field offering the most jobs, along with government service. The increasing price of gasoline and the continued availability of high-speed Internet access will lead to an increase in telecommuting. Service-sector jobs will increase working hours and decrease working days to reduce the travel element. Likewise, schools and public services will follow with longer days and fewer days of availability. Colleges will provide management training specializing in the virtual workforce. In my opinion, the workplace of the future will be heavily dependent on information technology based out of one's home. For example, I am a transportation planner --- 90 percent of what I do daily can be accomplished at home more efficiently. ... The remaining 10 percent involves community interaction. With so many positions like my own, I can see the home becoming a mainstream workplace for select professionals. I have seen the future. ... There are NO wires! After researching solutions to deploy a wireless network throughout our enterprise, I was asked to speculate on the impact it might have on the organization. I started using a laptop with a wireless connection to actually visit my internal customers face to face. I simply couldn't believe how much more sympathetic I became after seeing a problem as they experienced it, as opposed to reading an email from the IT help desk. I can ignore an email, but it is different to see a user struggle to do their work on a system that is not performing optimally. When talking about the workplace of the future one has to consider which job is being talked about. My example of a workplace that will undergo extreme changes from now until then is McDonald's. McDonald's will not need to employ 15 or 20 people. They will replace them with machines. Like on an assembly line for a car manufacturer, robots will mindlessly cook and then piece together every burger or chicken nugget. For now of course, there will always be need for a human face to be around for guests, and machines will always need maintenance. Sadly, I think most of us will be relegated to service type jobs. Off-shoring will take over much of the advanced engineering and research that was done here at one time. Those jobs that do not require face-to-face contact with a person, those that involve the direct transfer of goods, will likely be done as contractors working out of the home via high speed Internet connectivity. This may be a positive -- it alleviates a company from having to maintain a large and costly physical plant, and it alleviates the employee from having to commute. The downside to this is that the networking and social contacts that evolve in the workplace will be absent due to a lack of human contact. Still, many of us develop relationships via email and IM, so the impact may not be huge. I view the future of work to evolve where the line of work and personal time will become completely blurred. With the advent of cell phones and BlackBerries, a worker can no longer leave work at the office. Because of that, I also envision longer working hours without monetary compensation as workers are expected to do more. For example, lunch time has gone down from one hour to half an hour in most companies. I've had a friend reprimanded for going to lunch during a deadline (he was only going to bring the food back and he had worked 13 hours the night before). We will literally become a nation of cogs as no employee will be valued. The workplace will have fewer and fewer employees doing more work, benefits will be all but depleted, especially health benefits. Retirement will be a thing of the past. People will be working longer and to a much older age. For many years the workplace has been changing from a family type atmosphere where the company cared about its employees and looked upon them as assets. Rapidly most companies view employees as liabilities that cut into the profits and this will only get worse as the years go by. 
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