How co-working bridges the gap

As workers, we’ve all learned a lot about ourselves over the past year.

When COVID-19 forced people into quarantine, businesses had to learn how to adapt to doing almost everything online. Employees found that they still could communicate with their teams, get things done and perform effectively while working from home.

And employers discovered that their workforce didn’t lose productivity, even when they aren’t all gathered under the same roof.

However, working from home isn’t perfect, either. Home is filled with distractions, and it can be tough to find that line that separates work life from personal life.

Personally, I know that I hated working from home before COVID-19, just because I felt like I never left home for work. I needed that gap. I know plenty of other people who feel the same way.

While they’ve enjoyed being at home for the past year, they miss having an “office” to go to.

This is why co-working spaces feel like the best of both worlds.

Having your own space in a co-working environment means that you still are in charge of your own environment. You aren’t tied to an office building, you don’t have a boss hovering over your desk and it feels like your own space.

At the same time, though, you aren’t in your house. You’ve created a place that is just for work, and when you are done working, you leave to go home.

Co-working offers a number of advantages over working from home. At Vault in Cedar Rapids, the space has office amenities like printers, a recording studio, conference rooms, and a kitchen with coffee and a cereal bar. The space allows you to invite clients to a meeting in a physical, brick-and-mortar establishment, which gives an added element of professionalism.

Co-working spaces can offer an ideal solution for business owners, as well. With fewer employees in the office, a company can downscale how much space it has to rent and maintain.

However, there are some teams that work together regularly who are better off if they’re in the same place. And that can be frustrating to do online, where “Zoom fatigue” has become a very real thing.

Co-working can allow for “pods” of employees from the same company to share space together, collaborating as a team even as they still maintain their independence.

Every co-working space is different in terms of how they can address this. At Vault, for example, we are flexible in working with a company on an individual basis about how many spaces they need.

For me, though, what’s always sold me on co-working — and continues to today — is the networking.

In my experience, co-working creates an environment where everyone encourages everyone. When I started as a graphic designer in a co-working space, if I had a financial question — about taxes, for example — there'd be somebody that I could talk to, just two pods away.

On the flip side, people would come to me saying, “Hey, I’ve got this graphic thing I can’t figure out.” I’d help them out, no charge, just as a favor, because I knew they’d do the same for me down the road.

In my experience, co-working environments create a really positive, encouraging community that you don’t really get when you work from home.

As the pandemic winds down, co-working might just be the perfect way for many employees and businesses to go forward.

John Foster is Vault community manager for the New Bohemian Innovation Collaborative in Cedar Rapids.