Creative Class

The creative, knowledge economy thrives when cross-fertilization of ideas happens. Sharing a water cooler or coffee pot with people who have different backgrounds, jobs, and ways of thinking may spark new ideas and original solutions to problems.

This is precisely what happens when groups of self-employed individuals and micro-sized businesses comprised of only a handful of people share office space or “co-work.”

As reported by Graham Lanktree in the Globe and Mail last week,

[O]ffice spaces where small businesses share a common Internet connection, printer, kitchen and boardroom are common in London, where rents are much higher. However, the trend has been catching on in North America, where it’s called co-working.

This typically happens in one of two ways. The first is one small company decides to lease extra office space anticipating growth. To help cover the extra costs while awaiting this growth, they rent desks and offices to other individuals – usually providing use of reception, a board room, kitchen, photocopier, as well as internet and telephone connectivity. The second way enterprising individuals come to share workspace is through leasing from a third party company dedicated to providing such services.

The Lanktree article again:

Margaret Zeidler, president of Urbanspace Property Group, runs the historic Robertson building at 215 Spadina Ave. in downtown Toronto.Starting in 2004, the company converted 5,000 square feet in the 100,000-square-foot building to common workspace where single entrepreneurs and small businesses in the social innovation field could rent an office or even a desk.

The space has since grown to 20,000 square feet and prospective tenants are on a waiting list to get in. Dubbed the Centre for Social Innovation, or CSI, part of its popularity stems from the extra value it offers lessees, Ms. Zeidler says.

The advantages of cross fertilization are myriad. One is that office-mates provide clients. An architecture firm I know leases empty desks and offices to complementary individuals and micro-sized businesses.  These include: a real estate development company (which has hired them to do most of the architectural drawings and consulting work), a web company (that in turn gets business from the development company), and an interior design firm.

Another advantage is networking. If the web designer in the above-mentioned office does great work for their office mates, the clients, competitors, and friends of these businesses will notice and could look to hire him for their own work. He might otherwise never have thought of marketing himself to real estate-related firms.

Since the recession hit, at least 37,000 Canadians have joined the ranks of the self-employed (with Canada’s population being approximately 1/10 that of the USA, this is like 370,000 new one-person businesses emerging in the U.S. – which hasn’t happened, but could going forward).

Although some will relish the opportunity to work from home, many entrepreneurs find that too lonely and isolating.

Look for shared office space arrangements to grow in the coming years.

Ironically, the most effective telecommuters and home-based workers are those who are naturally great at connecting with people and intuitive, good communicators. This is one of the messages in Kate Lister and Tom Harnish’s new book, Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). Introverts tend to be less successful working from home.  Another key message is that slackers need not apply — successful home-based workers tend to be self-starters, highly motivated, and dedicated.

With technology now making it possible to work from virtually anywhere, this book offers some advice on whether you should try to do so, and how.

This book covers all variety of work that can be done away from the conventional office. Besides the option of shifting one’s regular corporate or government job to home, the authors cover other possibilities such as becoming a virtual assistant, medical transcriptionist, writer, or virtual nurse or doctor – and detail what’s involved in doing this as an employee or as a freelancer (your own business), including contracts, taxes, self-marketing, and pricing your time.

Although the authors personally have thrived operating their own businesses from home, they are quick to point out the pitfalls, drawing on others’ experiences as well. Among the challenges presented:

• The tendency feel like you should always be working, especially when working flex hours around children’s schedules. Over half of freelancers work more than 48 hours per week, for example.
• The difficulty in convincing family members and friends that you are really working, and therefore cannot be disturbed at certain times.
• How difficult it is for freelancers to maintain a steady stream of work and keep up with administrative requirements: most put in one to four hours of non-paid efforts for every billable hour, the authors claim.
• Self-control if you have tendencies toward over-eating or alcoholism.

The audience for this material appears mainly to be baby boomers, the authors’ generation. Most of the suggested work-from-home options require a number of years of professional experience as well as specific education. The book also devotes considerable time to explain how Google, Facebook, MySpace, Monster.com and Craigslist works, which may be helpful for baby boomers ready to try something different, but probably information that the average gen x’er or millennial person already knows.

Indeed, the authors have been away from the office for so long – and clearly had negative personal experiences with it – that they begin their book with two chapters and a foreword basically saying how ridiculous it is that anyone would want to work in one. They assume that offices are simply places where people waste time at the water cooler and no social interaction that takes place there is productive – which is far from the case in many office environments today where engineers collaborate, researcher-writers get new ideas, video game strategy is debated, and business direction is discussed. The authors miss that workplaces today are increasingly being designed as a resource to support this productive activity, rather than being a generic destination for spending time in exchange for a paycheck.

Most of their examples of office-building-based work sound like the office of the 1970s where strict hierarchies, rote work, and a micro-management approach reigned along with a different dress code. Indeed, Ms. Lister states several times that she left office work because she hated wearing pantyhose – it’s been at least a decade since women routinely felt they needed to wear those (pant suits anyone? or just more casual attire?).

For those readers seriously interested in how to work from home, and whether they possess the aptitudes and skills to do so, this book is a valuable resource – especially if you are over the age of approximately 40 and therefore have the experience to fit yourself into their examples and options. I do suggest you start your reading at chapter three however, where the writing becomes stronger and the inaccurate assumptions about today’s office as well as the forced cliches around working in your underwear are dropped.

Would you want to work from home 100 percent of the time? If you do, what are the pitfalls and benefits?