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Companies have been working tirelessly to enhance and improve the fluid working experience as a way to attract and retain employees in the highly competitive labor market. Coworking spaces are considered productivity destinations for employees.
There is an interesting paradox happening within the ongoing return-to-office discussion. No one wants to go back to the old ways, and yet everyone is longing for the way things used to be. Fortunately, there is a middle ground worth exploring.
Prior to the pandemic, access to daylight, greenspaces, and the natural environment was paramount to the evolution of the workspace. Now as more people are returning to the office, biophilic designs – the notion that humans are intrinsically drawn and attracted to nature – are becoming more and more central to office environments.
While the pandemic uprooted nearly every industry, the one most changed is arguably the workplace. Workers traded in their cubicles and water cooler chats for their couches and furry friends. And while companies are enticing their employees to come back to the office with hybrid work schedules and the return of happy hours, the physical workplace experience must be changed in order to create an environment that feels comfortable, enhances creativity, improves well-being and supports an overall positive outlook at a time when stress levels among U.S. adults are at an all-time high.
Following two years of varied Covid-related restrictions, offices have slowly been re-opening their doors to staff as calls to work from home relaxed. However, for many employers , the expected rush of people back to the physical office didn’t happen, at least not on the scale that businesses were expecting. We’ve seen employers introduce hybrid working set ups to embrace the evolution of the workforce imposed during the pandemic, yet there is still some reluctance to return to the office. But why, and how can the physical workspace itself help address this issue?
Over the past two years, we’ve all become either digital nomads or (forced) remote workers. Some loved it, some hated it; but even among the office addicts, employees are demanding a more flexible return to the office.
The metaverse is one of those topics that people in all industries are talking about. It is a fusion of technologies that spawn an enduring virtual reality (VR) infrastructure that anyone will be able to access from anywhere on earth to interact, play, work, and shop. Even though it is only in its infancy, the metaverse is already impacting the coworking space industry by creating new hybrid physiverse/metaverse business models that allow coworking space providers to take advantage of this emerging trend. As it becomes what it is meant to be, the metaverse will offer even more opportunities for those businesses that are ready and that invested in the proper technology early on.
How we work has changed and the idea that a workplace must be contained in an office building has yielded to the notion that work is a mindset, not tied to any one location. The latest research tells us that people’s priorities for living and working are different, and flexible working is more important than being in a centralized location.
From Parks and Recreation to Mad Men and of course, The Office, it’s no coincidence that some of the most iconic pieces of pop culture are presented in workplaces. Offices are central to not just our jobs but also to our relationships and aspirations. However, there’s no doubt the pandemic has transformed companies’ and their employees’ relationship to offices for the years and decades to come.
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Hungerhub’s business more than tripled in 202l and expanded into Vancouver and Calgary as its work force has grown to 30, most of them hired during the pandemic. SUPPLIED
Even before the pandemic, Hungerhub.com never required its employees to come to the office. In fact, one employee works full-time from Brazil, and another is currently working virtually from Barcelona.
“The policy is, you can work from anywhere; it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re being productive,” says Sari Abdo, Hungerhub’s chief executive officer. The corporate catering company’s business more than tripled in 2021 and expanded into Vancouver and Calgary as its work force has grown to 30, most of them hired during the pandemic.
