Workspaces That Helps People to Maximize Their Potential

In Silicon Valley the tight correlation between personal interactions, performance, and innovation is an article of faith, and innovators are building cathedrals reflecting this. Google’s new campus is designed to maximize chance encounters.Facebook will soon put several thousand of its employees into a single mile-long room. Yahoo notoriously revoked mobile work privileges because, as the chief of human resources explained, “some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions.” And Samsung recently unveiled plans for a new U.S. headquarters, designed in stark contrast to its traditionally hierarchical culture. Vast outdoor areas sandwiched between floors will lure workers into public spaces, where Samsung’s executives hope that engineers and salespeople will actually mingle. “The most creative ideas aren’t going to come while sitting in front of your monitor,” says Scott Birnbaum, a vice president of Samsung Semiconductor. The new building “is really designed to spark not just collaboration but that innovation you see when people collide."

Cutting Edge Workplace Design

Samsung’s U.S. headquarters, in San Jose, features a central atrium.

Outdoor and large public spaces are sandwiched between floors.

Photography courtesy of Samsung

Public areas can become semi public meeting places.

Silo-busting requires spaces that drawpeople out of their offices.

Photography courtesy of Telenor

Coworking spaces are a response to the oppressiveness of the cubicle and the loneliness of the telecommuter. Young digital workers believe that these spaces improve their performance.

Photography courtesy of Wework

Workspace in the Downtown Container Park, part of the Las Vegas Downtown Project.

The park mixes spaces for work, living, and play, encouraging serendipitous meetups.

Faith is nice, but do executives have proof that this works? Social space like Samsung’s could be just another in a long line of fads and broken promises in workspace design: The “action office” becomes the cubicle. Cubicles are torn down for open plans, which leave introverts pining for private space. Quads. Hotel space. Couches. Rotating desk assignments. Standing desks. Treadmill desks. No desks. With apologies to Mark Twain, there’s no such thing as a new office design. We just take old ideas, put them into a kind of kaleidoscope, and turn.How do we know whether any of these approaches is effective? The key metric companies use to measure space—cost per square foot—is focused on efficiency. Few companies measure whether a space’s design helps or hurts performance, but they should. They have the means. The same sensors, activity trackers, smartphones, and social networks that they eagerly foist on customers to reveal their habits and behavior can be turned inward, on employees in their work environments, to learn whether it’s true that getting engineers and salespeople talking actually works.Emerging EvidenceWe’ve already begun to collect this kind of performance data using a variety of tools, from simple network analytics to sociometric badges that capture interaction, communication, and location information. After deploying thousands of badges in workplaces ranging from pharmaceuticals, finance, and software companies to hospitals, we’ve begun to unlock the secrets of good office design in terms of

Faith is nice, but do executives have proof that this works? Social space like Samsung’s could be just another in a long line of fads and broken promises in workspace design: The “action office” becomes the cubicle. Cubicles are torn down for open plans, which leave introverts pining for private space. Quads. Hotel space. Couches. Rotating desk assignments. Standing desks. Treadmill desks. No desks. With apologies to Mark Twain, there’s no such thing as a new office design. We just take old ideas, put them into a kind of kaleidoscope, and turn.

How do we know whether any of these approaches is effective? The key metric companies use to measure space—cost per square foot—is focused on efficiency. Few companies measure whether a space’s design helps or hurts performance, but they should. They have the means. The same sensors, activity trackers, smartphones, and social networks that they eagerly foist on customers to reveal their habits and behavior can be turned inward, on employees in their work environments, to learn whether it’s true that getting engineers and salespeople talking actually works.

Emerging Evidence

We’ve already begun to collect this kind of performance data using a variety of tools, from simple network analytics to sociometric badges that capture interaction, communication, and location information. After deploying thousands of badges in workplaces ranging from pharmaceuticals, finance, and software companies to hospitals, we’ve begun to unlock the secrets of good office design in terms of

Chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance.

We’ve also learned that spaces can even be designed to produce specific performance outcomes—productivity in one space, say, and increased innovation in another, or both in the same space but at different times. By combining the emerging data with organizational metrics such as total sales or number of new-product launches, we can demonstrate a workspace’s effect on the bottom line and then engineer the space to improve it. This will lead to profound changes in how we build our future workspaces. Here are a few:

Recognize office space as not just an amortized asset but a strategic tool for growth.

The consulting and design firm Strategy Plus estimates that office utilization peaks at 42% on any given day. By that logic, the best way to manage cost per square foot is to remove “wasted” square feet. But the data we’re generating reveal that investments in reengineering space for interactions over efficiency can increase sales or new-product launches.

Design offices to reflect how 21st-century digital work actually happens.

The buildings we go to every day haven’t changed as much as have the tools we use to get work done. Merging digital communication patterns with physical space can increase the probability of interactions that lead to innovation and productivity.

Re-engineer offices to weave a building, a collection of buildings, or a variety of workspaces into the urban fabric.

The office of the future will most likely include highly networked, shared, multipurpose spaces that redefine boundaries between companies and improve everyone’s performance.

Getting there won’t be easy. It will require collecting much more data to inform new design and management principles while engaging urban planners and municipal governments. It will also transform HR, IT, and facilities management from support functions to facilitators. But if companies can change their spaces to reflect how people work, performance improvement will follow. Don’t take that on faith. There are data to prove it.

Strategic Coffee Machines

Jon Fredrik Baksaas, the CEO of the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor, credits the design of the company’s Oslo headquarters with helping it shift from a state-run monopoly to a competitive multinational carrier with 150 million subscribers. That design, he says, improved communication, accelerated decision making, and even created what he calls “an attacking mindset.” It was ahead of its time in 2003, when it incorporated “hot desking” (no assigned seats) and spaces that could easily be reconfigured for different tasks and evolving teams.

Telenor’s CEO thinks of its headquarters not as real estate but as a communication tool.

The design features that make the space effective resulted from a profound shift in mind-set: Baksaas thinks of the offices not as real estate but as a communication tool. Thus strategy, features, and value become more important than cost and efficiency. You’d choose the e-mail provider with the best collaboration and file-transfer features; you can think of space investments the same way.

The improved communication Telenor achieved in its new space can be explained by Alex “Sandy” Pentland’s April 2012 HBR article, “The New Science of Building Great Teams.” Pentland deployed badges (the same kind now used by Ben Waber’s firm) that track how people talk to one another, who talks with whom, how people move around the office, and where they spend time. (Devices were worn on an opt-in basis, and individual data were anonymous and unavailable to employers.) Pentland identified three key elements of successful communication: exploration (interacting with people in many other social groups), engagement (interacting with people within your social group, in reasonably equal doses), and energy (interacting with more people overall).

Spaces designed to promote these activities increase the likelihood of collisions—and the data repeatedly demonstrate that more collisions create positive outcomes. We don’t measure the content of interactions, but that doesn’t matter. When collisions occur, regardless of their content, improvement typically follows.

Spaces can be designed to favor exploration or engagement or energy to achieve certain outcomes. For example, if a call center wants improved productivity, the space should favor engagement— getting the team to interact more. Higher engagement is typically accomplished not with open social space but with tight, walled-off workstations and adjacent spaces for small-group collaboration and interaction. The team’s break area becomes a crucial collision space. At one call center, the company expanded the break room and gave reps more time to hang out there with colleagues. Paradoxically, productivity shot up after the change. Away from their phones, the reps could circulate knowledge within the group.

FURTHER READING

Then again, for a company that—like Telenor—is trying to innovate or change, increasing engagement can be detrimental, because it takes time away from crucial exploration with other groups and outsiders. Telenor’s open, public, and flexible space values exploration much more than engagement—it begs employees to meet in the open, where they may bump into unexpected people, and allows them to claim spaces and shape them for brainstorming sessions.

Once a company has identified the pattern it’s trying to achieve and how the pattern affects outcomes, it can begin to calculate the value of workspaces, not just their costs. For example, we deployed sociometric badges with about 50 executives at a pharmaceuticals company who were responsible for nearly $1 billion in annual sales. They wanted to increase sales but didn’t know what behaviors would help. Even if sales went up, they couldn’t necessarily say why.

The data collected over some weeks showed that when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams—that is, increased exploration—by 10%, his or her sales also grew by 10%. An elegant correlation.

So the executives asked, How can we change our space to get the sales staff running into colleagues from other departments? In this case, the answer lay with coffee. At the time, the company had roughly one coffee machine for every six employees, and the same people used the same machines every day. The sales force commiserated with itself. Marketing people talked to marketing people.

The company invested several hundred thousand dollars to rip out the coffee stations and build fewer, bigger ones—just one for every 120 employees. It also created a large cafeteria for all employees in place of a much smaller one that few employees had used. In the quarter after the coffee-and-cafeteria switch, sales rose by 20%, or $200 million, quickly justifying the capital investment in the redesign.

Managers might be tempted to simply build big social spaces and expect great results, but it’s not that simple. Companies must have an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve (higher productivity? more creativity?) before changing a space. For example, what worked at the pharma company didn’t work at a large furniture manufacturer that transformed its headquarters from classic cubicles to an open-plan office in which approximately 60% of the workforce had unassigned seating. To test the plan, we deployed badges with 65 sales and marketing team members on a single floor before and after the reconfiguration.

The call center’s goal was to get the members of one team talking to improve productivity. Telenor and the pharma company needed space that encouraged people to collide with other groups. The furniture company’s success required something in between: tight integration across the sales cycle, which meant some exploration and then high engagement among specific groups that needed to communicate more.

The company had hypothesized that fewer desks and a smaller footprint would move people closer together, increasing the likelihood of interaction. Unassigned seating would make interaction between people in different groups more likely. Such interaction did increase, by 17%—but energy levels (the number of individuals’ encounters during the day) dropped by an average of 14%. This suggests that the space simply reshuffled stationary workers rather than creating movement. Someone from marketing might bump into new people because their temporary desks happened to be close by, but none of them were leaving their workstations once they got there. As a result, team communication dropped by 45%. The company saved money on space by reducing the number of fixed workstations, but both revenue and productivity plummeted.

A Beginner’s Guide to Space Design

If you want to reconfigure your office space to improve performance, this simple grid will help you get started. It uses two important factors in office design— relative openness and seating flexibility— to suggest what configuration will lead to one of four distinct outcomes.

The type of interaction that’s most valuable changes according to goals; what doesn’t change is that interaction in itself is far more valuable than we realize. Sometimes circulating, exploring, engaging, and increasing the number of people’s collisions is more important than individual productivity or creativity. Imagine, for example, that a worker finds a better way to do her job but never tells anyone else doing the same job what she discovered. She has improved her performance but no one else’s. If she takes time out of her day to tell others about what she’s learned, her productivity drops—but she has increased theirs. We’ve shown that in some cases even a 5% drop in personal productivity can have a positive outcome on group performance.

Think of the implications: First, most employee performance reviews are based on individual productivity and don’t take into consideration how group productivity can grow through more interaction. Second, untold amounts of money are invested in tools to increase individual productivity, but the money might be better used to design a workplace that promotes collisions that will make the organization—not individuals—more successful.

Lobbies as Offices

One factor complicates all this: Office buildings are no longer the sole locations for knowledge work. In fact, research from the consulting group Emergent Research suggests that two-thirds of it now happens outside the office. Consequently, no matter how precisely we design office space to create collisions, the design is incomplete if it doesn’t take into account digital work and collaboration that are independent of space and time and for which immediacy is more important.

In some ways the digital workspace enhances in-person collisions with file-sharing and communication tools such as chat, e-mail, and archiving.

It can gather more ideas from more places: Research indicates that interactions and engagement decrease as the physical distance between work groups gets bigger, whereas online engagement increases with the number of users. However, data show that digital communication can’t replace face-to-face interaction and may actually be enhanced by it (see the sidebar “The Allen Curve Holds”). Studies with sociometric badges confirm that remote teams don’t perform as well as those in physical proximity.

The Allen Curve Holds

In his seminal 1977 book, Managing the Flow of Technology, Thomas J. Allen was the first to measure the strong negative correlation between physical distance and frequency of communication. The “Allen curve” estimates that we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as with someone 60 feet away, and that we almost never communicate with colleagues on separate floors or in separate buildings.

But the office is no longer just a physical place; we can enter it by logging on, attend meetings from anywhere, and collaborate on documents without ever seeing one another. It would seem that distance-shrinking technologies break the Allen curve, and that communication no longer correlates to distance.

Wrong. The Allen curve holds. In fact, as distance-shrinking technology accelerates, proximity is apparently becoming more important. Studies by Ben Waber show that both face-to-face and digital communications follow the Allen curve. In one study, engineers who shared a physical office were 20% more likely to stay in touch digitally than those who worked elsewhere. When they needed to collaborate closely, co-located coworkers e-mailed four times as frequently as colleagues in different locations, which led to 32% faster project completion times.

Furthermore, the upgrade cycles of buildings and technology don’t mesh. Telenor’s state-of-the-art campus, which smartly integrated digital features such as a wireless file-sharing system—was built four years before the iPhone was introduced and before Wi-Fi became ubiquitous. Just a few years later, Telenor’s then-novel proprietary wireless network would have been designed radically differently—if its features weren’t obviated by cloud storage and other developments. All of which is to say that understanding how digital and physical spaces work together is crucial to improving workspace but also an incredibly complicated design challenge.

Workers themselves have been the first to take on this challenge. Just as IT has been consumerized over the past decade, digital-savvy employees are beginning to demand that their spaces adapt to how they work, rather than vice versa. This shift began in earnest in 2005, in San Francisco, London, and Berlin. Technologists, programmers, and creative professionals wanted to work outside confining office environments but also to avoid the isolation of home offices. They chose to work side by side, in what are known as coworking office space.

Early examples were organic, built by users rather than by design professionals. They were accessible to anyone and sometimes free. People who chose to work in those spaces intentionally sought members from different organizations, thus reproducing the community, social interaction, learning, and energy typical of their online work, while adding the benefit of physical proximity to others. Unwittingly, they were engineering spaces to create the exploration that we know enhances creativity. And it worked. Studying 45 coworking spaces around the world, one of us, Jennifer Magnolfi, discovered that people had chosen them because they believed that their performance would improve more rapidly in such spaces than in an office building or at home. A 2011 Deskmag survey of more than 1,500 coworkers in 52 countries supported her findings:

1. 75% reported an increase in productivity since joining their space
2. 80% reported an increase in the size of their business network
3. 92% reported an increase in the size of their social circle
4. 86% reported a decrease in their sense of isolation
5. 83% reported that they trusted others in their coworking space

By 2014, 72% of those who used coworking spaces were forecasting an increase in their income.

The growth of coworking and surveys of coworkers demonstrate that given the choice, people will choose workspaces that support their digital style while giving them access to new knowledge, exposing them to different kinds of expertise, and accelerating their learning. Coworking’s success has helped some teams “graduate” out of their coworking spaces. Although the model clearly provides the exploration that independent workers and very small groups need, when teams reach a critical size, usually around 10 members, they need to up their engagement with one another. Private office space and conference rooms become necessary parts of their workday.

This has led to the scaling of coworking space. What started as small spaces for a few independent workers grew into start-up accelerators—groups of start-ups sharing some of the private collaboration space available to them. Eventually large corporations mimicked the idea by creating shared space where their employees could work with partners, researchers, and customers. The first floor of Amazon’s new campus in Seattle is mostly coworking space. Ace Hotel actively markets the lobby of its New York flagship as a workspace. AT&T has created Foundry, a network of research centers in which its engineers work side by side with handpicked start-ups, corporate partners, and third-party developers to bring new products to market faster. Even bankers are doing it: ING Direct built seven cafés (now called Capital One 360 Cafés) where its workers could set up shop and interact with customers who could also use the space for work. Perhaps less surprisingly, and true to form, Airbnb has made one of the conference rooms at its new headquarters bookable (through Airbnb, of course) by anyone in San Francisco, free.

What’s Happening in Vegas

Coworking is succeeding because it successfully integrates good workspace design that enhances exploration with the digital work habits of individuals and small teams. In some cases it’s possible to scale the benefits of coworking—such as high collision rates and accelerated learning—to build an entire neighborhood.

The Downtown Project, in Las Vegas, is an early example of the concept. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, is investing $350 million in the area around the company’s new headquarters, which is the former city hall. Hsieh’s goal is to grow the local start-up and entrepreneurial community in a way that will organically attract talent to the area, benefiting both Zappos employees and the neighborhood.

Jennifer Magnolfi participated in the development and analysis of coworking space inside Zappos headquarters and led a local coworking experiment that launched in early 2012 and eventually grew to include nearly 200 stakeholders, among them Zappos employees, area residents, start-ups, independent workers, and others. The spaces were improvised from a network of existing ones: a coffee shop, the courtyard of a Thai restaurant, an old church hall, the lobby of a casino, and an empty corporate apartment.

Early results show that the small, shared nature of the neighborhood fostered mobility that created collisions on a greater scale. Exploration and energy were very high. After six months, data revealed a 42% increase in face-to-face encounters, a 78% increase in participant-generated proposals to solve specific problems, and an 84% increase in the number of new leaders—participants who initiated work and collaboration and developed project scope and objectives. Ten new civic and local community projects were launched—including the Sunday Reset Project, a monthly event to promote healthful living.

Zappos and the Downtown Project have continued experimenting with the area and are using a new metric: “collisionable hours,” or the number of probable interactions per hour per acre. Hsieh’s goal is to reach 100,000 collisionable hours per acre in the neighborhood—about 2.3 per square foot per year.

Zappos uses a new metric—“collisionable
hours”—to measure a space’s effectiveness.

The Downtown Project is still a controlled experiment. It doesn’t capture the complexity of getting companies and civic entities to cooperate, routinely and continually, while also adapting to inevitable technological change. Nor does it address the complexity of getting a multinational to integrate coworking space when it’s already managing a global office portfolio. (See the sidebar “What About the Global Company?”) But it points to a new model for the corporate campus of the future that weaves together public and private spaces, employees and partners, living and working.

Hsieh and others believe that companies designed on this model will be more productive and innovative—as businesses and as communities—and in the long term will gain a strategic advantage over companies that cut off their employees from the exploration that improves performance.

What About the Global Company?

What happens when proximity isn’t feasible? When our colleagues are not only in different buildings but in different countries?

One consumer packaged goods company we know of is trying to address these questions. It has a global real estate portfolio of more than 200 million square feet supporting 300,000 employees in 26 countries. Managing for collisions at this scale requires a two-pronged approach. First, like Telenor, the company must treat the buildings as communication tools, using more open environments and denser workspaces to promote interactions.

Second, it must link those optimized buildings in a virtual space that makes communication between them as easy and effective as possible. To achieve that, it has created a “community manager” role for workspace operations, bridging facilities management, technology, and corporate communications. The role is modeled on those found in online communities such as Yelp and Airbnb for office space and in coworking spaces.

More than a century ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor brought his stopwatch and principles of scientific management to the office, instilling efficiency as the highest calling in what was then a factory for processing paperwork. Today we have the means to measure the performance of modern idea factories. Even these early insights suggest a future in which we must aggressively change the definition of what workspace is, from where work is done to how it’s done, and then design spaces—physical and digital—around that. The office of the past was a literal box of cubicles and desks, meeting rooms and common spaces. In the office of the future, we’ll be thinking and working outside it.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.

At the Black Swan Group, we use tactical empathy to deal with the Bad, the Mad, and the Sad (and sometimes even the Glad!) that we encounter every day at our jobs, in our social interactions, and even in our family gatherings.

How? With a simple three-step process:

1. Tone of voice
2. No denials or disagreements
3. Make them feel heard

I borrowed the phrase “the Bad, the Mad, and the Sad” from Tom Strentz (with his permission) for my TEDx talk. Tom is the godfather of the FBI’s hostage negotiation program, and he’s still very active in the profession as a mentor.

Tom is truly one of the good guys. The title of one of his great books is Hostage/Crisis Negotiations: Lessons Learned from the Bad, the Mad, and the Sad. You should check it out.

Now, here’s more on the three-step process to get you started if you are tactical-empathy curious.

How to Get Started with Tactical-Empathy

1. Tone of voice
In all cases, the late-night FM DJ voice (soothing), combined with upward (inquiring) or downward (understanding) inflections, is the critical touch.

In this video, Derek Gaunt not only discusses this, but he also embodies it with his own tonality. Derek is a complete natural at the late-night FM DJ voice, which is why he was such a great hostage negotiator and is currently one of our best negotiation coaches.

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2. No denials or disagreements
The key to any sort of empathy, no matter who is defining it, is no denials or disagreements. This doesn’t mean ignoring the stuff you don’t like, either. You need to make them feel heard.

3. Make them feel heard

There’s a fine line here, and it’s where the real power of tactical empathy comes from (and empathy, more broadly, for that matter). You don’t agree, but you don’t disagree, either.

Here’s an example: If you know they feel like you’re ignoring what they want, instead of denying it, call it out with a label. Don’t say, I don’t want you to think we’re ignoring what you want. Say, I’m sure it seems like we’re ignoring what you want.

That’s just an observation. You’re not agreeing, and you’re not disagreeing. And that’s tactical empathy, You’re making the tactical choice to defuse a negative by labeling it.

No one feels heard when you ignore what you’re inclined to disagree with, but these topics are precisely what you need to make them feel heard on. Anyone can make someone feel heard on the stuff you mutually agree on. That approach takes no talent or courage.

The talent and courage come into play when you make someone feel heard on the issues that are exactly where the disagreement or the anger might be.

Remember, tactical empathy isn’t an agreement. You aren’t putting your integrity on the line by calling things as they are. This frees you to use tactical empathy as a way to influence anyone in the world!

What We’re Avoiding

With this approach, we’re also avoiding the two worst practices.
1. “I understand”
Don’t say this. Ever.

Instead, take the time to articulate all that you understand. Don’t take a shortcut here.

2. “Yes, but …” or “I understand, but …”
No one wants you to put your “but” in their face. (That should be enough to get the point across.)

There are many occasions where people say “I understand” as a well-intentioned gesture. Intention, while a good starting point, is insufficient alone. You wipe it out with the word “but,” which means you just squashed your own good intention.

Just take the extra time to articulate what you understand. And then go silent so it sinks in and has the effect that empathy was conceived for.

Where tactical empathy evolved from was never meant to be synonymous with compassion. Yet it is a very compassionate thing to do. (It’s also effective as heck in preparing the conversation so you can make your point.)

Try this out in your low-stakes conversations to get a feel for it. Try it with your Starbucks barista: You guys really help the world get started every day! I’m sure I seem like just another customer who takes you for granted.

Say to the hotel front desk clerk, I’m getting ready to make your day horrible. Wait for them to ask what you want, then say, I need a late checkout. Or say, I’m another one of those demanding, selfish customers who wants something for nothing.

Again, wait for them to prompt you for your “ask.” At this point, would it be ridiculous to inquire about free room upgrades?

Think of your own versions of these scenarios to catch people off guard and end up brightening up their day. You’ll both feel better and wind up with some free stuff!

You’ll also get your low-stakes practice in so you can use it when you’ve really got skin in the game. Make it rain!

Go to our Eventbrite page for Tickets

Can Coworking Alter the Traditional Office Occupancy Practices?

The press has been all over the sale of New York’s mothership store of Lord and Taylor to a new CoWork flexible workspace startup. On the surface the transaction does seem to perfectly reflect the changing times. Retail space is in duress because of competition from the internet, and everyone loves technology enabled “disruptive” ideas – which flexible workspace seems to represent.

The CoWorking Potential:

The basic business proposition of CoWorking is that companies want to forsake their larger permanent office complexes, and instead pay for their workers to move into flexible smaller spaces, at a variety of locations, with flexible hourly use. The first premise of CoWorking is that it can provide this type of space to companies at an overall lower occupancy cost to traditional 24-7 longer term leasing.

The CoWorking model effectively creates a “service provider” who operates as an intermediary between the landlord and the ultimate tenant. Potential cost savings exist as long as corporate tenants currently do not need office space full time at a constant location. Take the case where workers in one corporation (A) need space every morning, but then are on the road after lunch. In in another corporation (B) space needs are exactly orthogonal – occupancy every afternoon. Currently both companies lease space full time say for $1. Enter a “service provider” who can pair these two and “hotel” them in the same space. Doing so allows them to keep this space occupied 100% of the time. In this case they could pay the landlord the same $1 as he was originally getting from either company with a full time lease, then charge each of the part-time tenants only 75% of what they were paying for that full time space, pocket a huge 50% profit, and still save both company A and B 25% on their year around occupancy costs per worker.

This same hoteling advantage can also operate across locations. Suppose company A needs its workers on the West side of the city 3 days a week and on the East side 2 days. If CoWorking can identify a company B that needs the opposite, it again can provide “hotel offices” at lower cost to the companies, make a profit and leave the landlord equally happy. The trick of course is in both situations CoWorking keeps the space continually used while space with the traditional model has lots of empty down time.

A little economic introspection reveals that for CoWorking to be successful and replace traditional company occupancy practices, 3 equilibrium conditions must hold in the office market.

1. CoWorking service providers must be able pay at least as much for space as traditional company occupancy in order to acquire it from landlords.

2. Then CoWorking providers have to rent that space at a part time or hourly rate to (relocating) corporate tenants that is higher than the full time rent they pay landlords for it – in order to operate a viable business. This rent differential can be less only to the extent they are successful at keeping space continuously occupied through hoteling.

3). The higher rent they charge for part time occupancy must be less than the corporations were originally paying for full time space. Hence lower occupancy costs per worker.

These conditions can be true only if the CoWorking service provider can keep offices occupied at significantly higher rates than traditional corporations can.

In addition to higher effective occupancy, two additional issues have to be considered in order for CoWorking to dominate traditional office occupancy. First, the workers have to be happy enough in their new part time space so that they do not ask for higher wages. Recent experiments at the University of Chicago actually show that while workers most often prefer workplace flexibility – they are not willing to accept lower wages for it (i). Second, it should be the case that having workers operate more independently (both spatially and temporally) will not lower (and possibly boost) overall labor productivity. Here there is very mixed empirical evidence. Breaking up a unified corporate workforce into a set of smaller remote teams, runs afoul of Nobel Prize winning arguments about the limits of contracting and the boundaries of a “firm” (ii).

It’s tempting to think that Technology may have altered these traditional economic arguments for why working “together” is superior, but the recent and now rapidly fading corporate interest in working-at-home suggests perhaps otherwise (iii).

The CoWorking Business Model:

While Co Working has the potential to raise property income through greater effective occupancy, it also has the potential to impact the risk associated with that rental income. Traditional leases tend to be longer term, are quite secure, and generally can be broken only in the advent of firm closure or bankruptcy. So, the first question is whether the income from a CoWorking intermediary is more or less risky than that from a traditional lease. Landlords will want higher rent from a CoWorking lease if it’s perceived as having more risk and vice-versa. Currently I see two risk issues with CoWorking income in terms of its risk.

If the economic shocks received by companies A and B (above) tend to occur at different times then space that hotels both of them may well involve lower rent risk from “economic diversification” – than that from a single full time tenant. With high correlation between the business fortunes of tenants, then this diversification has less value.

The second risk issue concerns “term-mismatching” between the CoWorking–landlord lease and that between the end user and the CoWorking service provider. CoWorking companies are not just hoteling space to different end-users, but they are leasing this part time space on much shorter terms than they are leasing the space from the landlord. This strikes me as a potential problem and takes me back to S&L lending during the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, largely independent banks were lending out money at long term fixed rates (mostly mortgages) and raising that money with short term rates on deposits. With economic cyclicality, these banks continually experienced trouble: their revenue was largely fixed from mortgage lending, while their costs fluctuated considerably with short term rates. Not good.

CoWorking today seems to be playing a similar game: leasing large blocks of space under long term contract, and then re-leasing it out in much smaller parcels – with short term contracts. That means that it has a largely fixed long term liability backed by revenue which is far less certain. If any of a host of things go wrong with the office market they could be a host of trouble.

So the jury is a long way from coming in on this disruptive idea. If CoWorking service providers can successfully hotel space (obtain near to full time effective occupancy), do so with diverse tenants, and better match those lease terms with what they pay for space, then they may in fact have found a better mousetrap. On the other hand, if they fail to boost effective occupancy, rent to tenants who share mainly common risks, and using short term flexible leases I suspect they could turn into a passing fashion.

The coworking movement developed to provide community and a collaborative working environment for independent and remote workers. It’s a trend some established companies are learning from.‍

Advances in technology have made it possible for many white-collar knowledge workers to do their jobs from virtually anywhere. But anywhere still means somewhere, and finding the right place is not always easy.

Some people try working out of a home office but end up feeling too lonely. Others experiment with coffee shops or hotel lobbies but find too many distractions. Now many people are turning toward coworking spaces — shared open office facilities where they hope to find the right balance of community and autonomy.

To understand the reasons for the popularity of this new way of working, our research team visited and interviewed community leaders or founders of two dozen coworking spaces around the United States. One team member also spent six months as a member of a space. We also garnered a broader and more representative perspective on coworking by analyzing the descriptions of a sample of more than 200 coworking spaces in the United States and Europe that were listed in an online directory of coworking facilities. In addition, we interviewed more than 30 people who belong to coworking spaces. These encounters gave us an insiders’ perspective on the experience of coworking and the challenges and opportunities of running coworking spaces.

Besides gaining insights into how people are using these new spaces to work and create new kinds of professional communities, we learned that some large, traditional companies are adopting certain aspects of coworking as part of their overall workplace strategies. Three trends in particular stood out.

Companies see sharing space as a way to tap into new ideas.

One of the key benefits cited by people using coworking space for rent is the opportunity for serendipitous encounters with people from outside their own team or organization. This is part of the reason the officfurniture manufacturer Steelcase participates in a coworking hub in Grand Rapids, Michigan called GRid70 that brings Steelcase’s workers togethewith employees from other large companies in the area — including Amway, Meijer, and Wolverine Worldwide. Each company has a dedicated space aGRid70, but all share the reception area, open workspaces, conference rooms, and kitchen facilities. “Our belief is that mixing creative teamfrom different industries will spawn ‘happy accidents’ that inspire innovation, new products, and different ways of thinking,” one Steelcasexecutive explained.

Managers once discouraged, even forbade, casual interactions among employees. To many bosses, chitchat at the watercooler was just a noisy distraction from work. Today we know that chance encounters and conversations on the job promote cooperation and innovation, and companies craft their floor plans and cultures with this in mind. The results have been surprising—and often disappointing.

Consider the experience of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS). In 1987 the company redesigned its headquarters around a central “street” that linked a café, shopping, and medical, sports, and other facilities, including several “multirooms” containing comfortable furniture, coffeemakers, fax and photocopying machines, and office supplies. The new design was explicitly intended to promote informal interactions, and management broadcast the message that employees should find opportunities in the new space for “impromptu meetings” and “creative encounters.”

What happened as a result? Very little. A study of employee interactions revealed that just 9% were occurring in the street and the café, and just 27% in all the other public spaces combined. In spite of the thoughtfulness and good intentions informing the new design, two-thirds of interactions were still confined to private offices. What went wrong?

Common sense, it turns out, is a poor guide when it comes to designing for interaction. Take the growing enthusiasm for replacing private offices with open floor plans in order to encourage community and collaboration. More than a dozen studies have examined the behavioral effects of such redesigns. There’s some evidence that removing physical barriers and bringing people closer to one another does promote casual interactions. But there’s a roughly equal amount of evidence that because open spaces reduce privacy, they don’t foster informal exchanges and may actually inhibit them. Some studies show that employees in open-plan spaces, knowing that they may be overheard or interrupted, have shorter and more-superficial discussions than they otherwise would.

Some studies show that employees in openplan
spaces, aware that they may be overheard,
have more-superficial discussions than they
otherwise would.

Both sets of findings are correct. Open floor plans, or indeed any type of design, can either encourage or discourage informal interactions, depending on a complex interplay of physical and social cues. Over the past 12 years we have conducted nine studies of the effects of design on interaction, looking at organizations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We surveyed the extensive literature on the subject and interviewed dozens of managers about their office redesigns. The sum of our research reveals that a space may or may not encourage interaction depending on how it balances three dimensions, or “affordances,” that have both physical and social aspects: proximity, privacy, and permission. (For more on affordances, see the sidebar “The Signals Design Can Send.”)

The Signals Design Can Send

The concept of “affordances,” developed by the psychologist James Gibson, explains how an object or an environment communicates its purpose and offers possibilities for action. Handles afford grasping; doors afford entry and exit; paths afford locomotion. Gibson argues that when we look at an object or an environment, we perceive its affordances for action even before we notice qualities such as shape and color—although we might ignore or misinterpret the affordances or, when they are especially subtle, fail to see them at all until a change to the environment alters or eliminates them. In the context of our research, workspaces afford—or don’t afford—proximity, privacy, and permission.

Affordance theory helps us understand how the design of an object might affect the ways people use it. An object generally gets its intended use only when the design exposes its purpose. There are myriad examples of bad designs that obscure affordances, from door handles whose shape gives no indication whether they should be pushed or pulled to aesthetically impressive control panels consisting of identical knobs symmetrically arrayed, without any visual clues as to what the various knobs do. In such cases conscious thought, and sometimes even training, is needed before people can understand and make use of an object’s functions.

Studies show that the affordances of objects and workspaces, as perceived by the people actually using them, may at first go unrecognized by designers or managers. The cognitive scientists Ed Hutchins and Don Norman, for example, examined the effects of replacing the interconnected control wheels used by aircraft pilots and copilots with individual joysticks. The joysticks were designed to have all the functionality of the old control wheels and then some. Hutchins and Norman discovered, however, that the designers had failed to recognize an important affordance of the old system: When the pilot turned the control wheel, the copilot’s wheel turned as well. This was not an intended functionality, but it signaled the pilot’s moves to the copilot without the need for conversation or extra instrumentation, and the pilots had come to rely on it. Unintended consequences can result from designs or redesigns that fail to account for significant affordances —whether in aircraft, workspaces, or elsewhere.

The most effective spaces bring people together and remove barriers while also providing sufficient privacy that people don’t fear being overheard or interrupted. In addition, they reinforce permission to convene and speak freely. These requirements, we’ve found, apply just as readily to virtual spaces as to physical ones, although their virtual manifestations may be quite different. In either setting, getting the balance wrong can turn a well-meant effort to foster creative collaboration into a frustrating lesson in unintended consequences. Although no formal studies of the reasons for the design failure at SAS were done, it has all the earmarks of such an imbalance—and should serve as a cautionary tale for any company contemplating a redesign.

The Properties of Proximity

People often assume that proximity is purely a function of physical factors: how far employees are from one another or how close they are to a break room. And distance is important. The MIT organizational psychology professor Thomas Allen famously discovered that the frequency of workers’ interactions in an R&D complex he studied declined exponentially with the distance between their offices—an effect popularly known as the Allen curve. Even when they were in the same building, researchers on different floors almost never interacted informally, he found.

But it’s not just the physical attributes of a space that influence informal interactions; “proximity,” as we use the term, depends on traffic patterns that are shaped just as much by social and psychological aspects. In fact, physical centrality is often less important than “functional centrality”—proximity to such things as entrances, restrooms, stairwells, elevators, photocopiers, coffee machines, and, of course, the watercooler. Allen argued that to improve the dissemination and sharing of ideas, lab directors should create spaces containing several shared resources. The social geography of a space is a crucial component of its physical layout.

The Importance of Privacy

One of our studies involved a media agency whose central shared space, which held coffee and vending machines, a printer, and a copier, sat between the company’s entrance and private offices. Everyone had to pass through it—but nobody lingered there. The reason, many employees confided, was that there was so much traffic that private conversations were impossible. In particular, the agency’s director came in frequently for coffee, and people didn’t want her to overhear them.

The physical requirements of privacy are the most obvious ones. At a minimum, people need to be confident that they can converse without being overheard. To ensure such confidence, spaces must be designed with visibility and acoustics in mind; privacy is enhanced when others can’t see whom you are talking to and when you can see others approaching or within earshot. There’s a subtle implication here: True privacy allows you to control others’ access to you so that you can choose whether or not to interact. Though it may seem counterintuitive, research shows that informal interactions won’t flourish if people can’t avoid interacting when they wish to.

The architect Christopher Alexander, who has written extensively about patterns of use in buildings and cities, describes the alcove as the ideal space for informal interactions: It’s sufficiently public for casual encounters but provides enough privacy for confidential conversations. Alcoves also make it easy for people to move a conversation that began in the open (for instance, in the hallway) to a more private space without having to seek out a room with a door—a disruption that can end the conversation.

Let’s look at how a lack of privacy undermined interactions at Xerox’s Wilson Center for Research and Technology. Managers created the “LX Common” to encourage informal encounters among employees in separate groups. The Common afforded great proximity: It was centrally located and was traversed by people walking from the main entrance to their labs, from one lab to another, and to the conference room. It contained the kitchen, the photocopier and printers, and key reference materials, and this functional centrality also drove traffic.

But as teams started having conversations and meetings there, people began taking long detours around it. The problem? The Common created so much proximity and so little privacy that engineers couldn’t pass through without risking being sucked into a meeting, informal or otherwise. So they avoided the space altogether.

The lab manager found a solution by setting three rules that gave employees control over when and with whom they would interact in the new space: Traffic through the Common was acceptable at any time; anyone was free to join any conversation there; and anyone was free to leave any conversation at any time. Once the rules were in place, informal interactions flourished.

The Power of Permission

The social dimension of permission is more obvious than the physical one, but both are critical. Culture and convention shape our view of what constitutes appropriate behavior in a particular environment. In an office, people generally deem a space to be a comfortable, natural place to interact only if company culture, reinforced by management, designates it as such. This was evident in a consulting firm we studied, where “real work” was done only at one’s desk or in meeting rooms. The luxurious coffee lounge was usually empty: Employees would come in, grab a cup of coffee, and leave. Company culture did not give them permission to stay and talk. In contrast, at a shared office space for rent we observed, where designers, advertising people, and architects shared an office space, sitting on sofas and chatting in the centrally located café was seen as part and parcel of the creative process.

Sometimes the artifacts in a space powerfully affect its social designation. In a study of interactions in photocopier rooms at three French companies, we found that the mindless, stationary task of making copies, combined with the need for others to stand around while waiting their turn, created permission for informal interactions. The sense of permission was strengthened by the fact that copying is perceived as work. Management might frown on employees’ “gossiping” over coffee but have no problem with the same sorts of conversations around the photocopier.

How Photocopiers Promote Interaction

Although photocopiers are ostensibly made for easy use by anyone, their complicated features and interfaces can make them frustrating and baffling. They need periodic maintenance—tasks that require specialized knowledge (such as how to install a toner cartridge or extract jammed paper) that tends to be unevenly distributed among users. These characteristics are wonderful stimuli for informal interactions, because they give people natural reasons to launch into conversation. We’ve observed employees turning to one another for help, watching one another to learn more about the machine, and commenting (usually disparagingly) on its operation. These casual conversations can naturally lead to other subjects, some of them work related.

And what is being copied can be as important as that it is being copied. People gathered around might discover, in the documents coming off the machine, the write-up of a colleague’s project that’s relevant to their own work, or a new company policy that might affect them. Rich discussions often ensue. Indeed, had the photocopier been designed specifically to inspire social interaction, it could hardly have succeeded better.

Permission, then, reflects the interplay of physical space, artifacts, and company culture. We saw some best practices for combining these elements at IDEO and Zappos. In IDEO’s open-plan office, portable furniture lets employees move around to work near whomever they’re collaborating with. At Zappos, managers are encouraged to spend as much as 20% of their time socializing and team building. The CEO, Tony Hsieh, has a small cubicle in the middle of the company’s Las Vegas cube farm, signaling his availability and broadcasting permission to interact.

Putting Principles into Practice

Understanding the three P’s required for informal interaction is just the beginning. How do you actually design for them? Start by being attuned to the balance between them; having only one or two usually isn’t enough, and over- or underemphasizing any of the three can backfire. Build flexibility into your design so that you can test permutations, and measure the design’s effects. In our experience, companies rarely do either. Be aware that seemingly small changes can have an outsize effect and that unintended consequences are common.

Be aware that seemingly small changes to a space can have an outsize effect and that unintended consequences are common.

Along with Bojan Angelov, a research fellow at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, we provided consulting services to a company that sells coffee equipment and supplies to offices. During our work there, we found that coffee rooms were more often conversation-triggering spaces than true interaction spaces. Proximity wasn’t the issue; the rooms we observed were well located. They weren’t set up to afford privacy, though, nor did people feel they had permission to linger. Employees would often start conversations in coffee rooms but then move to a more private space to continue talking. However, many conversations were interrupted, and ended, before they got to this next stage. The moment of transition—the perceived need to find a more private place—made the interactions fragile.

Another of our studies highlighted the unpredictable impact of design changes and the importance of monitoring their effects.

Researchers in a university psychology lab had a communal coffeepot and took turns making coffee each afternoon. As the person so tasked passed by colleagues’ offices on the way to the kitchen, he or she would tell the others that the coffee would be ready soon. Everyone would convene in the kitchen 10 minutes later and discuss both personal events and research projects while they sipped their coffee.

The head of the lab realized how important these coffee breaks were to collaboration. He wanted to encourage and reward them, so he replaced the old coffeepot with a new single-serve machine that made a variety of high-quality hot drinks. This would give people all the more reason to visit the
kitchen, he thought. But because coffee was now freely available and was dispensed by the cup, people came by for it at different times and left once it was ready. The informal afternoon meetings disappeared. The lab director had provided plenty of permission and privacy (employees could retreat to an office if they chose), and he was correct in assuming that increasing proximity would stimulate communication. Unfortunately, he inadvertently decreased proximity, throwing the three P’s out of balance and causing casual interactions to plummet.

Although few managers would want their employees to loiter all afternoon in the coffee room, neither should they want them to cut casual conversations short. People need time to engage if alight conversation is to evolve into something more substantial. We often observed that conversations started next to the coffee machine continued in front of a cubicle or in an office doorway—“accidental alcoves” of the modern workplace. Too often proximity is the only design consideration for coffee rooms and other informal spaces. If you don’t also build in privacy (for
example, by creating real alcoves) and convey adequate permission, you will probably end up with a space that triggers ephemeral interactions bearing little fruit.

Finally, it’s important to remember that permission can take many forms. Managers’ reactions to employee behavior, along with their own role modeling, can have a bigger impact than mere expressions of permission. We’ve found that many managers say they value informal interactions
but in fact crush them by making negative comments when they witness them—in some cases conveying powerful disapproval through body language alone. To encourage the encounters that fuel collaboration, align what you say and do. (For guidance on how to balance the three P’s, see the
sidebar “Designs That Inspire Interaction.”)

Designs That Inspire Interaction

By providing proximity, privacy, and permission, both physical and virtual
public spaces can invite chance encounters that may evolve into more substantive connections.

Casual Encounters in Virtual Spaces

Promoting informal interactions in the physical world is challenging enough; nurturing them in virtual settings is harder still. We have decades of research on physical workspaces to draw on, but we’re just starting to understand the nature of informal interactions in virtual workspaces and
how to design for them. Our research suggests that the three affordances are just as relevant online as off, but their virtual permutations are distinct from their real-world ones and can be more difficult to define and control. What does proximity mean in a virtual environment? How do you provide privacy in a teleconference? What constitutes permission on a company blog?

Even as the volume of virtual work explodes, companies have been slow to recognize the value of casual back-and-forth in virtual settings. Many still prohibit the use of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, seeing them only as distractions. Yet numerous studies show that these tools can help create common ground and build trust—crucial ingredients of successful virtual teams.

Managers shouldn’t set out to create electronic water coolers or virtual hallways and photocopier rooms, however; we’ve found that such analogues don’t work. Employees see them for what they are: phony and stupid. Instead, managers need to think creatively about the reasons for proximity, privacy, and permission, and how each might be translated into virtual settings.

Promoting Virtual Proximity

In virtual environments, non work activities such as walking to the restroom or getting coffee separate people rather than bring them together. How can we replicate online the random encounters that are so vital to communication in the physical world? Our research suggests that two and sometimes three conditions are needed: high awareness of others in the virtual space; compelling reasons to voluntarily engage; and, on occasion, rules for participation.

In physical workspaces that stimulate interaction, employees have a peripheral awareness of one another, a sense that colleagues are present and available. Virtual spaces need to convey a similar sense. Applications such as instant messaging, Skype, and Twitter can do this, but only if they’re always open, whether on desktops or on smartphones and other mobile devices. Friction less accessibility is key. Our studies show that if connecting with a team member online requires more than one click, informal encounters won’t happen. It’s not unlike how people behave in the real world: You’re not going to casually drop in on a colleague who’s on another floor. Some team leaders ask their members to customize their IM status or Skype mood message to invite or discourage informal interactions at any given time. It’s the virtual approximation of pausing at the coffee
station or closing your office door.

Anyone who has tried to promote a knowledge management system knows that traffic trails off unless the system contains useful information and is frequented by interesting, helpful people. The same holds true for virtual team environments and discussion forums. In our studies of public online forums, we’ve found that successful communities have a core group of active participants who provide resources and reasons for others to join in. You don’t need a core group of copy makers to fuel informal interactions in the physical world, but you do need their equivalents—facilitators champions, and other lively regular visitors—to keep interactions going in virtual environments.

This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: It’s hard to promote an engaging online social environment without a core group, but a core group is unlikely to form without an engaging environment. It may be necessary to mandate participation until routines and a critical mass of activity develop. During
our teaching about distributed work, we created a course blog and invited students to discuss the class on a voluntary basis. The blog languished. We then required participation, making sure that our own posts modeled the behaviors and communication styles we wanted to see. At first students
engaged at the minimal level and stayed strictly on topic. Soon, however, they began to participate more spontaneously, responding to one another’s posts and venturing into more-casual terrain— suggesting a movie related to the course work, for instance, or asking about a bag left behind in
class.

Creating a sense of proximity is especially challenging when virtual-team members are widely dispersed. We taught a course at Instead in which two classrooms a world apart—one in Fountainhead, the other in Singapore—shared a media space. Video links, interactive whiteboards, and other technologies let students on the two campuses see, hear, and write to one another in real time. We found that it takes a lot of planning and experimentation to foster an informal virtual work environment. One key, we discovered, was to open the video connection before class and leave it on
during breaks and afterward. Inspired by the sense of proximity this created, students soon began to engage in casual interactions during non class time, even inviting others to stop by and say hi to friends on the other campus.

Protecting Virtual Privacy

When employees know that the company may be monitoring their electronic exchanges and that their conversations might never be deleted, they are reluctant to use virtual channels casually. Managers and IT directors need to balance their desire to screen communications with the need for the privacy essential to trust building and collaboration. Organizations can’t promise complete privacy. But clearly communicated policies governing who has access to electronic communications and under what circumstances can convey important reassurance.

Xerox creatively tackled the challenge of providing both proximity and privacy in a virtual work environment. It installed a number of video links connecting Euro PARC (its R&D center in Cambridge, England) with the original Palo Alto Research Center. At first the links were always on, but the system’s designers quickly realized that if they wanted the scientists to use the technology, they would have to provide virtual doors that people could close at will. They ultimately afforded three levels of privacy: A video link could be on, off, or set at an intermediate status—like a half-open door that allows people in an office to glance out and those outside to look in for permission to visit. The links gave close collaborators a peripheral awareness of one another and increased the opportunities for chance conversations. For example, each day at about 4:00, employees in the UK office would use the links to see who was in the café having tea so that they could decide whether to join the group there.

Providing Virtual Permission

When you run into someone at the coffee machine, it’s natural to comment on the weather. This strengthens social bonds by affirming shared suffering or good fortune and often leads to a more substantial conversation. But in a virtual work environment it would be odd to contact someone out of the blue just to talk about the weather. Opportunities for random encounters are fewer. How, then, can we create permission for such interactions, making them feel natural and comfortable?

One company we studied did this by capitalizing on a mistake. A London-based manager used the wrong e-mail distribution list to invite people to her farewell party at a nearby pub. She had meant to ask her local colleagues but instead invited everyone in more than 25 offices all over the world. This led to rounds of humorous e-mails from far-flung colleagues about flying to London for the event. The next day the firm’s leaders published some of the e-mail exchange in the company newsletter, praising it as an example of the informal, connected culture they desired. Their note signaled that such online exchanges weren’t just permitted—they were encouraged.

Keeping virtual “offices” open 24/7 conveys
permission to use them informally. Leaving a
video feed on during breaks and after a meeting
sends a similar message.

When virtual-team members come to know one another beyond the confines of their job, the team is strengthened. Understanding this, Nokia an effective company in terms of virtual teaming— provided social networking tools and other online resources specifically to encourage employees to share photos and personal information, and created virtual “offices” that were open 24/7. Keeping such offices open around the clock conveys permission to use them for non work exchanges. Turning a video feed on well before a virtual meeting and leaving it on during breaks and afterward can send a similar message, as we saw in our linked Fountainhead and Singapore classrooms. Open connections help foster the sense that geographically disparate groups share an informal space and that the casual interactions that might occur in a real-world common space are sanctioned there.

Addicted to their smartphones and planted in front of computers for much of the day, knowledge workers increasingly straddle physical and virtual space. At first blush, you’d think this hyper connectivity could only enhance the informal interactions that fuel creative collaboration. Our research shows, however, that what matters isn’t how much proximity, privacy, and permission real or virtual spaces afford, but how the affordances are balanced. A lopsided distribution is more likely to inhibit than promote beneficial interactions. Technology can help employees feel closer to
colleagues around the world, but relentless connection can erode their privacy and overwhelm. Networking applications such as LinkedIn, Lotus Notes, Idea Jam, and Twitter can tear down walls, but they can also create them: We’ve seen virtual-team members get so involved in their digital
world that they become disengaged from the people right next to them.

There’s no simple formula for balancing the three P’s, particularly as the boundary between physical and virtual worlds increasingly blurs. But managers who grasp the fundamentals and design with balance in mind will be better equipped to understand and predict the effects of spaces on
interactions and to learn from successes—and inevitable mistakes.

First, you have to understand what type of cognitive distortion is occurring. By

• Healthline, Here's to a stronger, healthier world

By Sarah Aswell

I’ve lived with general anxiety for as far back as my memory goes. As a writer and stand-up comedian, I have the most trouble fighting against social and performance anxiety on a day-to-day basis, as I conduct interviews and interact with editors during the day and then take the stage at night.

My anxiety most often shows itself in what I call “anxiety hangovers,” when I wake up on the day following a social event or meeting or comedy show feeling horrible about everything I did or said — no matter how fun or successful the event felt the night before.

Everyone thinks you’re egotistical and obnoxious, my inner voice spits at me when I wake up.

You said the exact wrong thing to your friend when she asked for your opinion, because you never think before you open your mouth.

You dominated the dinner conversation. No wonder no one likes you.

You were so embarrassing on stage, of course you aren’t a success.

The mean little voice goes on and on and on.

After big events, like a friend’s wedding or important comedy show, I’ve had panic attacks the following morning: a racing heart, trembling hands, and trouble breathing. On other days, I just can’t concentrate because of the worry and feel mentally paralyzed, and the confidence I need to do my work is sunk.

Where cognitive behavioral therapy comes in

The central idea behind cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is extremely simple: If you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel.

But if feeling better and escaping depression and anxiety were that easy, we wouldn’t live in a country where psychological distress is increasing.

While I’ve found that I can’t fully eliminate or “cure” my anxiety (and probably never will), I’ve found a simple five-minute CBT exercise that quiets it down each day. My racing thoughts stop, my foggy brain begins to clear, and my fatigue lifts.

Suddenly, I feel like I can start my day.

Called the triple column technique, which was developed and named by clinical psychiatrist Dr. David D. Burns, all it does is change my mindset. But sometimes, this shift is enough to completely shut my anxiety up for the day. A change in how we think about ourselves is all we really need to find a calmer, happier place.

Recognizing cognitive distortions

In 2014, a friend recommended Burns’ “Feeling Good,” a CBT classic that takes readers step-by-step through recognizing negative self-talk, analyzing it rationally, and replacing it with healthier and more accurate thinking.

(Burns also suggests, for many people living with anxiety and depression, to see their doctor and pair therapy and the appropriate medication if deemed necessary.)

The book made it crystal clear that I wasn’t a secretly bad person and incredible failure who can’t do anything right. I’m just a pretty regular person who has a brain that can distort reality and cause way too much anxiety, stress, and depression.

The first big lesson was to learn the specifics of cognitive distortions — those statements that the little voice makes about who I am and what’s going on in my life.

There are 10 big distortions that can occur:

1. All or nothing thinking. When you see things in black and white instead of in shades of gray. Example: I’m a bad person.
2. Overgeneralization. When you extend a negative thought so it reaches even further. Example: I never do anything right.
3. Mental filter. When you filter out all the good stuff to focus on the bad. Example: I didn’t accomplish anything today.
4. Disqualifying the positive. When you believe a good or positive thing “doesn’t count” toward your larger pattern of failure and negativity. Example: I guess I survived the talk — even broken clocks are right twice a day.
5. Jumping to conclusions. When you extrapolate an even bigger and broader negative thought from a small negative experience. Example: He said he didn’t want to go out with me. I must be an unlovable person.
6. Magnification or minimization. When you exaggerate your own mistakes (or other people’s accomplishments or happiness) while minimizing your own accomplishments and others’ flaws. Example: Everyone saw me mess up at the game, while Susan had a perfect night on the field.
7. Emotional reasoning. When you assume your negative feelings reflect the truth. Example: I felt embarrassed, therefore I must have been acting in an embarrassing manner.
8. Should statements. When you beat yourself up for not doing things differently. Example: I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
9. Labeling and mislabeling. When you use a small negative event or feeling to give yourself a huge, general label. Example: I forgot to do the report. I’m a total idiot.
10. Personalization. When you make things personal that aren’t. Example: The dinner party was bad because I was there.

How to use the 5-minute triple column techniqueOnce you understand the 10 most common cognitive distortions, you can start taking a few minutes a day to complete the triple column exercise.While you can do it in your head, it works amazingly better if you write it down and get that negative voice out of your head — believe me.Here’s how you do it:

1. Make three columns on a sheet of paper, or open an Excel document or Google Spreadsheet. You can do it anytime you’d like, or just when you’re noticing you’re beating yourself up. I like to write mine in the morning when I’m feeling most anxious, but many people I know write theirs before bed to clear their minds.
2. In the first column, write what Burns calls your “automatic thought.” That’s your negative self-talk, that crappy, mean little voice in your head. You can be as brief or detailed as you’d like. Yours might read, My workday was the worst. My presentation bombed, my boss hates me, and I’ll probably get fired.
3. Now read your statement (it always looks kind of shocking to see it in print) and look for the cognitive distortions to write in the second column. There may be just one or more than one. In the example we’re using, there are at least four: overgeneralization, all or nothing thinking, mental filter, and jumping to conclusions.
4. Finally, in the third column, write your “rational response.” This is when you think logically about what you’re feeling and rewrite your automatic thought. Using our example, you might write, My presentation could’ve gone better, but I’ve had lots of successful presentations in the past and I can learn from this one. My boss was confident enough to have me lead the presentation, and I can talk to her tomorrow about how it could’ve gone better. There’s no evidence at all that this one subpar day at work would get me fired.

You can write as many or as few automatic thoughts as you want. After a good day, you might not have any, and after a big event or conflict, you might have to work through a lot.

I’ve found that after years of doing this, I’m much better at catching my brain in the middle of a distortion and much more comfortable in recognizing that, at best, my negative talk isn’t rational at all. At worst, it’s exaggerated or overdramatic.

And is it proven to work?

A 2012 meta-analysis of 269 studies about CBT found that while this simple talk therapy is most helpful in combination with other treatments, it’s very successful when specifically treating anxiety, anger management, and stress management. Go forth and fill out your triple columns!

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Originally published on Healthline.

How Coworking Spaces Affect Employees’ Professional Identities

Since the first coworking space appeared in 2005, over 14,000 have opened around the world. While the earlier generation sought to provide independent workers with resources and support that couldn’t be found at home, coffee shops, or other nomadic locations, today’s spaces have evolved into businesses that also support the needs of large organizations. Some use it to house employees located in remote locations, relieving them from the expense of a long-term lease. Other small  businesses and early stage ventures that have uncertain headcount projections or business growth rates operate entirely from coworking spaces due to the spatial flexibility.

Over the past several years, we have studied how these environments impact individual workers, taking into account the amenities, branding, aesthetics, and unique cultures created from diverse people and companies working together under one roof. We have found that workers benefit from
coworking spaces more than traditional offices. They experience greater levels of flexibility and thriving (defined as vitality and learning at work), a greater ability to network, as well as a stronger sense of community. However, up until now, we have not known how this impacts the businesses
they work for.

In our latest study, we set out to answer this question: How do highly curated coworking culturesimpact the professional identities of members and their organizations?

We wanted to know to what extent members identify with the culture of their coworking space and whether or not this impacts the extent to which they identify with their company or employer. After all, organizations invest valuable resources nurturing connectivity among employees and
developing work cultures. But, in a coworking space that houses multiple organizations, there are several messages, norms, and values, competing for members’ attention.

About the Research

Since 2012, we have conducted multiple studies of people who work in coworking spaces. We have conducted survey research, an in-depth qualitative study of members at a single coworking space, and field visits to over a dozen co-working spaces around the United States.

Our current research with WeWork started in 2017. We identified a cohort of new members who started at WeWork locations in the United States in December 2017 and surveyed them in January, April, and July 2018. Across all three surveys, we captured data from 1,097 unique respondents.

A core set of questions was included in each survey round. Our survey consisted of six questions to assess organizational identification (i.e. I have a lot in common with others in my organization); six questions to assess WeWork identification (i.e. I have a lot in common with others at WeWork); and 11 questions (including reverse-coded questions) to assess thriving (i.e. I find myself learning often; I have energy and spirit). We also asked,
“approximately how many hours per week do you work at your primary WeWork location?” to understand work patterns. We asked, “How has working from WeWork benefited you?” and provided
respondents with a list of 20 possible benefits, allowing them to select as many options as applicable. Our third and final round of surveying included a question about productivity (Compared to other settings where I’ve worked, working at WeWork makes me…). We also asked members an open-ended question that invited reflection on their experience at WeWork with respect to their professional identity (In what ways does WeWork factor
into your professional identity?).

Between 2017 and 2018, we collaborated with WeWork to survey over 1,000 of their new individual members in the United States. Seventyone percent worked full-time for companies that are either located in a WeWork office or use WeWork for remote individuals and teams. The remaining 29% included business owners, contractors, sole proprietors, and part-time workers. Through a survey, we asked members to indicate their level of agreement with statements like “I have a lot in common with others at WeWork” and “I have a lot in common with others in my organization” to determine how much they identify with WeWork versus their organizations. Identity was defined as the extent to which one feels emotionally, psychologically, and subjectively bound to an employer (or any other platform they work for) and was measured on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest association and 5 being the highest.

We found that members strongly identify with their work organizations, with the majority scoring over 4 points, even after working in the WeWork office for a long period of time. In general, members identify less so with WeWork, with the majority scoring more than 1 point lower on the same 5-point scale. This difference in identity scores intrigued us and led us to explore why.

At the end of our study, we asked members to describe how WeWork affects their professional identity. Some respondents replied neutrally, “It’s just a space.” These members derive benefits from the more practical elements of membership, such as spatial amenities or convenience of location. Other members, however, said that WeWork plays an active role in shaping their professional and organizational identities. These members had higheridentity scores for both their work organizations and WeWork (though the gap between the two remained). They also experience higher levels of thriving and productivity at work.

Our findings indicate that the WeWork brand identity doesn’t dilute the identity of the organizations housed in their space. Rather, our research suggests that people experience positive outcomes when their work environment aligns with their company’s brand messaging and values. When we organized the comments that describe how WeWork positively shapes professional identity, we found three key themes. Each highlights how coworking spaces can strengthen the way workers relate to their organizations and how they believe others (customers, other employees, competitors,etc.) perceive them.

Coworking spaces give some members a sense of professionalism and credibility that traditional remote working does not. This echoes a finding from our ongoing studies: working from an actual workplace (as opposed to from a home office or coffee shop) can signal to others that you take your work seriously and that others see you as a serious worker. The workplace has become a symbol of “legitimacy.” Some respondents used this word to describe how WeWork factors into their professional identities. One small business owner from New York commented, “I identify with the other startups in the WeWork Labs.” He feels that working there makes his small company a legitimate one in the eyes of his colleagues and clients. Other respondents experience a sense ofpride and confidence from working at a WeWork office in a prestigious location. More than half ofour respondents indicated that the location of their WeWork office is a benefit.

Workers with company-subsidized memberships feel that their employers take their needs seriously — regardless of where they are located. As a result, these members feel that their employers value them as much as the non-remote workers at their companies. One New York-based respondent told us, “Our company headquarters in California contains 90% of our workforce. By putting us in a WeWork office instead of our own space, my team here in NYC is reminded that we’re a bit of an outpost. However, we also know that it means we are important and worth the cost they’re spending to keep us together in an office setting.” A Denver-based respondent said, “I feel like my company values me. The atmosphere and buzz gives my work a sense of importance.” We heard a number of similar comments touching on the impact coworking spaces have on employeeimage. This, in turn, affects how much members identify with their companies.

Coworking spaces help new businesses make a positive impression on potential clientele. A Bay Area lawyer, commented, “I [work] primarily with young tech entrepreneurs and startups. I also work with a lot of young highly-skilled workers.” The office design gives her business a professional,yet trendy, image that helps her relate to her clientele. A DC-area owner of a mature technologybusiness said, “I’m doing a 180 and moving my staff to WeWork is part of my strategy to make themthink differently. It’s part of a new identity.” This suggests that this owner thinks a new way of working proves — to both customers and employees — the company’s willingness and openness tochange, which could ultimately create more visibility and help grow the business. Some employeeswhose companies are based out of a WeWork said that the WeWork brand affected their personal brand image. One respondent commented, “Recently the organization has sought to redefine itselfand has adopted a start-up model. Being based at WeWork helps our organization to look energetic and future focused, instead of stodgy and stuck in the past.”

The results of this study reinforce a key theme from our years of research: the choice to work in a coworking space is based on both practical, financially-driven variables as well as experiential, and culturally-driven variables. At a basic level, coworking is a service that simplifies the transaction of accessing and occupying a workspace. However, it is also a social product that nurtures a sense of belongingness to its members. In addition to spaces that target a full range of member demographics, there are, for example, niché coworking spaces for women, people of color, social
ventures, lawyers, architects, and fashion businesses. Because switching costs among coworking spaces are relatively low due to the lack of long-term member leases and the availability of different service providers, members can choose a space that reflects their identity and the identity they want to cultivate for their business.

Our latest findings suggest that when organizations take the time to choose a coworking space that aligns with the image they want to project — about their employees and about their business — workers will experience higher levels of thriving, and the organizations will benefit as well,causing employees to identify even more strongly with their purpose and values.

WHAT LASTING GROWTH AND SUCCESS REALLY MEAN IN SPORTS AND BUSINESS

Posted by: Bethany Qualls

SERENA WILLIAMS’ ACCOMPLISHMENTS

“I love making history,” Serena Williams told Harper’s Bazaar UK. Even though she lost to Angelique Kerber at Wimbledon 2018, her tennis ranking has soared back to 11th in the world, up from 15th the previous season. But rankings aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone disagreeing that she’s one of tennis’s greatest of all time.

In fact, statistics are just part of Serena’s story.

“She lost Wimbledon, but she [actually] won,” her agent Jill Smoller said. “Because 10 months ago, she was almost dead. [Then] she gave birth, and now she’s playing in a Wimbledon final” about 6 months ago.

Serena looks to keep surpassing herself with her accomplishments. So how does her mindset of a champion translate from sports to business settings? Here are 6 ways you can be a business leader like Serena, even if you’re not the ?? (that’s the tennis GOAT or Greatest of All Time).

SERENA WILLIAMS’ ACCOMPLISHMENTS

“I love making history,” Serena Williams told Harper’s Bazaar UK. Even though she lost to Angelique Kerber at Wimbledon 2018, her tennis ranking has soared back to 11th in the world, up from 15th the previous season. But rankings aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone disagreeing that she’s one of tennis’s greatest of all time.

In fact, statistics are just part of Serena’s story.

“She lost Wimbledon, but she [actually] won,” her agent Jill Smoller said. “Because 10 months ago, she was almost dead. [Then] she gave birth, and now she’s playing in a Wimbledon final” about 6 months ago.

Serena looks to keep surpassing herself with her accomplishments. So how does her mindset of a champion translate from sports to business settings? Here are 6 ways you can be a business leader like Serena, even if you’re not the ?? (that’s the tennis GOAT or Greatest of All Time).

https://youtu.be/mdwYaCKZHTI

Contact Us

Using a virtual office service offers an ideal solution for many companies and professionals. It can give a business an exclusive vibe without disclosing its true physical location, and the services that come with these virtual office solutions are largely beneficial. Whether you choose a virtual office service within or outside of your country of residence, you aren’t likely to see huge tax consequences, but it’s important to note that there are some areas that are stricter on the use of virtual office services.

In this article, we’ll talk about the ins and outs of using a virtual office service as it pertains to taxes, and we’ll even offer a prime example of why knowing the tax codes of the area your virtual office is in is so important.

Virtual services offer operational convenience

First, let’s discuss what a virtual office service really is.

With a virtual office service, you get a host of business-oriented benefits and an address where your business mail can go to. Of course, your mail can be forwarded from there. Not only that, you can actually base the whole business operations on the virtual location (a.k.a. Virtual Headquarters,with a virtual office nyc) offering you much flexibilities, especially in term of operational convenience.

Indeed, virtual office services are used for numerous reasons, and they can streamline business operations by handling administrative duties with remote receptionists, answering services, and virtual assistants.

For those who use virtual office services, the main advantages are cost-effectiveness and efficiency. These services simply help people get more work done faster than if they had to handle it all on their own, and it prevents them from hiring people to handle these tasks for them.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why a business might use a virtual office service. For instance, the use of a virtual office service can help avoid potential zoning issues. In addition, such a service can prevent the rules of HOA and lease terms from being broken.

A virtual office for rent service is often a prime choice for any entrepreneur or professional who wants a more sleek and authoritative presence, and such an image can help build trust with audiences. This, of course, is a strategic way to brand a product or service. Many virtual office services even offer meeting spaces where entrepreneurs and professionals can meet with clients and customers.

Much of the time, using a virtual office service is cheaper than leasing a physical office and staffing it with employees. Even if you’ve never heard of such a service, you can probably see why they’re so popular. They’re a great way to nurture a business for growth by maintaining a professional appearance and spending money on other areas of businesses as opposed to paying staff to handle administrative needs.

Virtual office and taxation

Companies in all industries can leverage the benefits of virtual offices, including startups, small and medium sized businesses, solopreneurs, and corporations. Generally speaking, taxes aren’t a serious consideration when using virtual offices, but because they differ from traditional leases, there are exceptions to the use of a virtual office. This is especially true for corporations.

Corporations can be incorporated and operate from anywhere in the world; they can also employ people from anywhere in the world. This is where a gray line is happening with the use of virtual office services, and governments around the world are beginning to react in ways that are catching corporations off guard.

In the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that employers outsourcing teleworkers were subject to corporate tax, which is massively different from other forms of business taxation. For example, Telebright was incorporated in Delaware with an office in Maryland. They employed someone who resided and drove in from New Jersey. Generally, she worked from home. Telebright was filing taxes with New Jersey, but it was deemed that Telebright would also need to pay corporate taxes.

Speaking as a global economy, you wouldn’t normally pay taxes in a country where you don’t reside. Governments are challenging this when it comes to virtual offices, and so there are many things that you should consider.

If you use a virtual office space, will you be employing anyone there? If so, how does that change your tax situation? Do you have contract workers? If so, do those workers genuinely fit the description as such? Last but not least, are you a corporation? If so, are you subject to corporate taxation on the use of a virtual office service?

Takeaway

To stay out of trouble when it comes to taxes, you’ve got to ask those questions and then some. Always check the stipulations of leveraging a virtual office as it pertains to your situation. While it might seem like a cost-effective way to run your business, tax levies could quickly tip the scale.

Credit:

Post Author: Neil Duncan

Website: www.noobpreneur.com

Corporate wellness programs are episodic. Dedicating a day or money to Employee wellness is ineffective. WorkSocial solved this by integrating wellness into the fabric of our workspace. We have addressed  the physical, financial, social and emotional aspects of wellness.

We believe that It’s essential for employers and employees alike to understand how these different components of wellness influence one another.

For example, if an employee is having difficulties with their financial wellness, they are most likely feeling the emotional and physical impacts of that as well. When one aspect of wellness is lacking, it’s difficult for employees to feel and perform their best at work.

This is why we though it’s to be a good idea for to re-think their traditional approach to employee wellness with a holistic Approach. The following takes a deep dive into on we connect these elements, it’s crucial to fully understand each component of employee well-being and how we address each component at WorkSocial.

Physical Wellness

The physical component of wellness is what we typically think of first when we hear the words “health” or “wellness.” Physical wellness is what we can see and feel, so it usually seems to be one of the most important factors of wellness. This element of wellness refers to the general health of the body, including exercise, nutrition, health habits and preventative healthcare. Being physically well means being able to maintain a healthy quality of life. Helping employees achieve positive physical health means helping them lower their risk for chronic illness, maintain a healthy weight and prevent other issues like chronic fatigue or headaches. Supporting physical wellness in the workplace can even help increase the lifespan of employees.

WorkSocial’s Physical Wellness Activities Include:

1. Curated low sugar and high energy snacks
2. Weekly on premise massages
3. Abundance of fresh fruit to satisfy sugar cravings
4. Scheduled on site physicals and flu shots
5. Lunch and Learns that create awareness about physical wellness
6. Nutrition education
7. Lifestyle education through micro learning

Financial Wellness

The financial side of wellness is often overlooked; which is unfortunate because it can have a significant impact on other areas of wellness if left ignored. According to an article published by UC Davis, financial wellness refers to the process of learning how to successfully manage financial expenses. Research has found that financial concerns can lead to mental and physical distress.

According to one study by GreenPath Financial Wellness, 58% of employers reported that financial “illness” plays a role in employee absenteeism – while 71% of employees say their top source of stress is personal finances.

As a coworking provider WorkSocial addresses Financial Wellness by putting money directly into the pockets of its members. Here is how:

1. An average employee spends $20 a day on beverages and lunches at WorkSocial this number is approaching $0
2. Providing free financial resources to member employees – with access to relationships at banks, financial planners
3. Discounts at gyms
4. Sharing of memberships: AMC movie card can be borrowed at no addtional charge
5. Frequent gifts of hotel stays and miles to subsidize vacations

Emotional WellnessEmotional wellness is sometimes a bit trickier to discuss in a workplace setting, but it’s crucial for WorkSocal – it is why we call ourselves a happiness company. Emotional wellness refers to being aware and in touch with one’s emotions, thoughts and feelings. Positive emotional wellness helps support a healthy mental state and well-being.  This includes stress management, emotional intelligence and positive mental health habits (like meditation or mindfulness). Without positive emotional well-being, employees aren’t able to perform or feel their best at work. WorkSocial has incorporated the emotional component of wellness into their employee wellness program through:

1. Onsite meditation programs
2. Integration of binaural audio to subliminally improve Emotional Wellness
3. Stress management through massage
4. Lunch and Learns: Emotional/mental health education and resources
5. Creating deliberate wellness moments

Social WellnessSocial wellness is another commonly overlooked aspect of employee wellness. More and more employers are becoming increasingly aware of the negative consequences of loneliness in the workplace. Strong work relationships and opportunities for social connection in the workplace are essential for employee job satisfaction, happiness and overall well-being.In fact, lonely employees are much more likely to feel disconnected from their jobs, which can lead to lower work performance. WorkSocial has incorporated the social component of wellness into their employee wellness program through:

1. Weekly lunches
2. Monthly networking events
3. Quarterly Outdoor Events
4. Frequent opportunities to network for a cause

If you are interested in creating a Culture of Excellent – please call me and we can talk about how WorkSocial can totally help transform your organization at its coworking space. We currently are accepting clients for the Month of June. Once the space fills out applications will not be accepted.

With Love | Happiness & Generosity

For WorkSocial

Natasha Mohan, CEO

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