Future ways of Working

The way work is going to be performed in a near future will be very different. 40% of the workforce will be some kind of self-employed and the bigger corporations will be looking towards the coworking way of doing business for inspiration. Those who best understand the logic of great cowork will have a head start.

On the conference The Future of Offices held April 15th by Nohr-con did Philip Tidd, Gensler, came with some interesting perspectives on coworking seen from the point of view of an analyst and developer.

His points were in a nutshell the following: in 2020 40% of the work force will be self-employed of some kind. The infrastructure to do co-work will be improved and the willingness for corporations to act as co-workers will increase.

So huge numbers of working people will look for place to do their work, and for people to work with. It’s a fair assumption that when so many people are working in a flexible way, then the bigger corporations will start to adapt. If not only out of inspiration, but also because the workforce will be volatile and change workplace even faster than today – so pretty soon many employed will have tried to be self-employed and vice versa. The difference between different corporate cultures and the cultures of self-employed will converge.

My bet will be that there’s going be a great focus on effectiveness, satisfaction and wellbeing.

These tendencies are great incentives to start cultivate different modus operandi for coworking.

The modern assumption that corporation needs to focus on the how-many-hours-can-a-desk-be-occupied-by-employees is not longer what should be the the center of corporate attention.
Traditional work isn’t working anymore. People are sick and tired of being forced to sit at a desk in an open office environment (a thing that more and more people are experiencing). The analysis of Gensler shows an overall drop in effectiveness at about 6%. Extrapolate that to a global workforce and we’re talking trillions of kroner, dollars or whatever you’re counting in.

What Gensler and other have found to work, is to give the employees greater autonomy and to a greater extend embrace the principles of trust and sharing, e.g. coworking.
What the bigger corporations doesn’t know is exactly how to do it.

And here’s where it gets interesting for self-employed with co-work experiences.
1) as a consultant you can offer your know-how on practical coworking to bigger corporations.
2) Do what you do now, but team up with others in the same field and build a niche of coworking.