By mid-April, more than two-thirds of knowledge workers were working remotely. Various surveys of people around the globe, conducted around the same time, found 90% of employees hope to work from home at least twice a week after the Pandemic. This move toward remote work could warrant major changes in many communities.
This trend indicates that the number and size of Coworking spaces will increase with the design catered more too digital nomads, that is, people who can work remotely digitally and are not bound by any specific location.
How many new remote workers will be in place post-pandemic remains to be seen, but refining the approaches to Coworking is moving forward. Especially having premium, fiber-backed Internet will become ever more important. Also, creating a designated place in homes where you could have your laptop, so work is not just sitting there on the kitchen or dining room table.”
As much as we are now talking about ways to isolate in your home, social connection is going to be important. So designing for wellness will continue to be more important. Simple experiences that can change the way people choose working/living spaces. But beyond indoor workspace options, digital nomads will look for shared outdoor spaces. These will rise in significance if people are without daily trips to an office and the social interaction that this experience brings spaces for outdoor yoga or cross-training may become even more common.
It seems very probable that in areas hard hit by the virus, consumers will start to evaluate new criteria for Coworking spaces that is cleanliness. There will be many options that will help make workers feel safe in a coworking environment. For starters, placing cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer, allowing the individual to address their work area. Also increasing the frequency of cleaning in their space. And very important, prevention, encouraging those that have traveled internationally or are showing any symptoms to stay home. No more kisses, hugs or handshakes. It’s a ‘shoe shake’ or Namaste, instead. It’s fun and not too dramatic.
But what is obvious is that the long-term answer will probably not be encouraging people to spend more time isolated at home, but rather to find a way to mitigate the risks and get back to a more normal state of daily life.
The Coworking product that currently seems to flow well during this crisis is the virtual office, of course. Companies are learning from the experience that people do not need to commute long hours to sit all day long next to one another in an HQ to be productive; nor that there is a need to keep them under a permanent watch to make sure they don’t procrastinate. Therefore, in the longer term, the main reason for hope for coworking is that a lot of companies will ultimately be forced to apply home working on a big scale.
Homeworking is often a step preceding the adoption of coworking, the best model for today’s distributed workforce. Things are uncertain at the moment and changing every day. We’ll see more people being sent home to work or quarantined. Short term this will hurt coworking until we better understand how coronavirus is spread. Long term it might be beneficial to the growth of shared coworking spaces. Companies and individuals will learn they can work from home.
The risk is that people will be sent home to work and the loneliness epidemic will become worse than it already is. People need options and access to a collaborative environment that is needed for success in life and work. Also, companies will have to rethink their distributed work models and this will also increase coworking space usage.
Coworking will fast-forward the remote work adoption process of many companies around the world. This crisis will stimulate cost reductions by embracing a distributed workplace model, where employees can work closer to their home, while not being isolated nor out of touch from colleagues living in the same area. It’s the opportunity to strengthen the message and change the mindsets that are hesitant to explore Coworking adoption.
Coworking grew out of the great recession. Sending everyone home to work sounds like a great idea at first, but then people are isolated and alone. This is like adding fuel to the fire that is the loneliness epidemic. People want flexibility and choice in how and where and when they work. Companies will figure out post Coronavirus that their employees can, in fact, work from home, and after the glow of something new wears off they will seek out communities and Coworking.
This crisis is an opportunity to show how the Coworking models can also offer new solutions and make our economy more resilient in such circumstances. So, maybe, thanks to the Pandemic, we could end up having more people and more coworking operators find new opportunities arising. And in the paradisiacal COSTA RICA, there is a clear alternative for this new tendency that will strengthen after the COVID-19 crisis, its name: RESONANCE.
“Resonance“, the brainchild of Eco-entrepreneur Daniel Yepez ([email protected]), is a sustainable ecosystem for living and coworking and a hub for innovation. A model for the new future, encouraging enterprise, investment, and ingenuity. A sustainable place of opportunity for inventors and innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs. A place to call home for the digital nomad to work and integrate with the community for a positive work/wellness balance.
Do you feel inspired? Then you’re not alone. Many others are accepting the vision of investing in Resonance and have taken a step forward to grow while securing a profitable co-working enterprise.
Come & engage with us: https://www.facebook.com/ResonanceCR/
