Is working at home all it’s cracked up to be?
While it is a dream existence for many, there are just as many who struggle with it.
A lot of those people are currently having a better time of it at our coworking spaces! They enjoy working remotely but found that doing it at home was an isolating and unproductive experience.
A recent survey strongly suggests they’re far from alone.
The survey’s respondents were 600 professional office employees across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The study was done in two parts: just before the COVID lockdowns began when employees were still in their office, and during the lockdowns when they were working at home. The survey was quite specific in its intent: it was set up to study how working at home affected collaboration in three key areas:
- The ability to meet and brainstorm
- The ability to maintain social relationships
- The ability to have unplanned interactions.
With this in mind, the findings from the survey were revealing and backed up what a lot of our clients say about the downsides of working at home. The findings were:
- The ability to meet and brainstorm dropped an average of 11 % for all respondents since they began working from home during the lockdowns. For employees whose roles rely on collaboration, the drop was even larger and went up to as much as 15 %.
- The ability to maintain social relationships declined 17 % percent for all respondents since working from home. For employees who have friendly ties to their colleagues the drop was more substantial, ranging from 20 to 26 %.
- The ability for unplanned interactions dropped by a whopping 25 % on average. Employees who were used to collaborating in close-knit team environments stated that the decline was even larger, as high as 40 %.
In our coworking spaces, we welcome people who want to work remotely but not in isolation.
They want collaboration, a social setting and to be surrounded by people rather than family pets. As those survey findings show, they’re far from alone in wanting those things and that is why spaces like ours give them the best of both worlds; the ability to work remotely without feeling too remote about it all.
