4 things to learn from Co-working workspaces

The regular office grind has evolved to working from home since long and now, to a co-operative mechanism by which several individuals, each working independently as a freelancer mostly, and entrepreneurs, set up shop and work together. This is what co-working space is all about. Here the individual members often belong to different lines of work and are not in direct competition with one other. Various studies have already indicated that those utilising a co-working workspace often tend to be more productive than regular office goers by as much as one percentage basis point. Here is a closer look at what makes co-working workspaces stand out for all the right reasons.

Co-operative: The co-working space often allows individual members to share resources, and even set aside funds for maintenance and essential utilities including shared transport facilities. By co-opting and pooling their resources, they are able to work in an atmosphere that enables them to relax while ensuring that they remain comfortable, and this often results in higher productivity, more so than the regular B&M workspace. In fact, given the recent success of co-working workspaces, more such enterprises are coming up fast, with the latest one getting established in Bangalore.

Collaboration: Coworking workspace pushes individuals to collaborate on several fronts, and apart from contributing towards the overhead, it enables them to come together and work as a team for the benefit of the whole co-operative. And while that may seem idealistic and not realistic, the truth is that most of these co-working workspaces outperform the traditional office on several fronts.

The right to choose: One of the most cited reasons for people to quit their regular jobs and become freelancers is the freedom to decide what to work on and the co-working workspace provides them with just that. The remote workers, freelancers, enterprise workers who regularly work in such environments, often cite the freedom to choose which projects to work on as one of the main reasons for preferring co-working workspaces over any other variant. One such freelancer said that one of the main reasons, he quit his photography shop for a digital vendor, was that he was not that comfortable working on a particular type of project, and the co-working workspace provides him with the freedom and the creative space needed; and today, he can decide what to work on and who to work with.

Structured model: A recent study indicated that the co-working workspace even outperforms the “work from home” segment. And this is on account of the fact that most freelancers, working from their home, often tend to find the process disruptive on many fronts. On the one hand, the traditional office is often seen as restrictive and forces one to conform. On the contrary, the co-working workspace provides the workers with a bit of the overlay of a regular office, with some structured control and this enables them to focus and perform better. This is why co-working workspaces tend to outperform all other segments on all fronts.

These are some of the things that we can learn from co-working workspaces and key reasons for why they are much more productive than all the other segments. More to the point, the co-working workspace is here to stay, and one can expect a rising trend in the number of similar co-working workspaces being set up, all over the world.