Australia vs. World: Australia slow to introduce coworking
The coworking revolution has been at the forefront of business trends for quite some time. Looking back at the google trends in 2010 across the globe, the search term ‘Coworking’ overtook ‘Serviced Offices’. In Australia, it wasn’t until June of 2015 that the term overtook serviced offices.
World Trend: Coworking Hotdesking Serviced Office
Australia: Coworking hotdesking hot+desking,serviced office
The evolution of office spaces reflects the changing attitudes toward the work environment.
Let’s have a quick look at how the office space has evolved in the last century.
| 1900’s | Frederick Taylor designed a space which crowded all the workers together whilst the executives looked on from their private offices. |
| 1920’s | A clear, rigid hierarchy dictated work orders across a separated “workers” floor. |
| 1930’s | The streamlined office – A modern rich, warm space for workers was achieved. “Rank & File” sales workers were contained in a single room, as were managers, company executives, and loud machinery. |
| 1950’s | With the new technological developments of air-conditioning and fluorescent lighting, the 1950s saw the corporate office become completely autonomous from the outside world – as well as allowing for wider, more open-plan floors where workers could be placed virtually anywhere. |
| 1960’s | Bürolandschaft bought the socialist values of 1950’s Europe to the workplace with management no longer indulged in their own private office space. |
| 1968 | Herman Miller created a product which we all know today as the cubicle. |
| 1980’s | The cubicle concept reached extreme levels when the infamous “cubicle farm” was born. |
| 1990’s | Frank Gehry created the virtual office. Hotdesking was born. Through this new form of “completely open plan” office layout had positive intentions – saving costs, enabling better flexibility, and encouraging collaboration. |
| 2000’s | The Casual Office: designed to encourage highly-personalized workspaces suited to long hours spent programming, analysing data, building links or designing graphics. |
| The Future: | Agile working environments are the future. Allowing staff to work effectively in different environments within the same space is key to both productivity and workplace wellbeing. |
http://www.morganlovell.co.uk/articles/the-evolution-of-office-design
There has been an emerging shift towards coworking spaces in recent years. Allowing for the workforce to have the best of both worlds: collaboration and communication, and privacy for when they need it. There is a reason coworking is exploding in growth and that’s because it helps you grow your business. Being surrounded by other growing businesses and like-minded people gets you thinking about working on your business instead of only in your business.
The desire for collaborative yet adaptive workspaces has sparked the current growth. Coworking is not only for start-ups, it is open to freelancers, companies wanting to be around like-minded, innovative people or even corporates letting their employees work from their local area instead of spending 2hrs or more on commute each day.
When taking the time to digest the evolution of the office space within the past century, it is clear that although these architects and designers were thinking of the best way to reap productivity through collaboration from their employees, it was very much a “one-size-fits-all” mentality. With nearly 14% of the current workforce working from home (Morgan Lovell), the demand of adaptable, flexible spaces becomes more apparent. Coworking has become part of the evolutionary shift towards Business-to-Business collaboration.
Inspire Cowork understands this and is flexible in its operation. It is prevalent that many businesses still have the need and desire to work in a private. At Inspire Cowork we offer your own dedicated desk within the space as well as additional private spaces while keeping the business part of the community, ensuring they still receive the benefits of working within the space.
With coworking being that of people sharing a space, which focuses on community, in an environment where you have the flexibility of an open plan office, a private office, and the community engagement, it is clear that coworking is the evolution of work space.
If the rest of the world is an indicator, it is very exciting times for Australia with strong signs of big growth ahead.
