You’re working for yourself, an indie, after years of commuting to the office. At first, it’s wonderful working from home. It’s quiet – there are no major distractions, no water cooler gossip, no irritating colleagues blathering on. You can lounge about in a tracksuit, eat at your desk – or not, because you can work in the lounge, laptop literally on your lap, – make your own food and save money (and calories) on tempting takeaways. It’s great!
But at some point you miss bouncing ideas off colleagues. You’re becoming a slob, never getting out of your tracksuit. Actually, really, you’re a bit lonely, slightly starved of creative engagement… which is when you should investigate coworking and cowork spaces.
Cowork communities, says US entrepreneur Lawson Ursrey, writing in Forbes, are the future of how business will be done.“Coworking spaces have increased by 400 percent in the last two years because they offer what forward thinking entrepreneurs are looking for – community and collaboration,” he writes.
That’s just one reason why coworking is good for you and good for your career. Here are seven more, if you still need convincing!
1. Coworking eliminates that feeling of isolation. Sometimes it’s great being an island in your home office, but other times man/woman needs company. Isn’t having a flexible choice a liberating feeling?
2. Coworking can reduce time spent commuting, and so reduces stress levels. Why join rush hour traffic? Simply work from home until the wage slaves are in their cubicle and then head out to your cowork space.
3. When you work from home, you still have to deal with Telkom, outsourced IT guys, Internet service providers and all that tiresome stuff. Not at cowork spaces. That headache is someone else’s.
4. Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review, found people who chose to cowork were thriving, so they set out to discover why. Many said they saw their work as meaningful in that they could “bring their whole selves to work”, and didn’t have to wear a “work persona”. Liberating!
5. They also found that working with and around people with different skill sets provided amazing opportunities for collaboration and a culture in which coworkers helped each other out.
6. Let’s face it, having top-end high-speed Internet connection is a real boost for business. No desperate pleas to service providers trying to discover why your connection is fluctuating and dropping out.
7. A study by a software company revealed that by 2020, more than 40% of the US workforce (that’s 60 million people) would be freelancers, contractors or temporary workers. And the over-65s will still be working in one way or another. Coworking is trendsetting, and helping develop local economies.