The youngest demographic of today’s workforce – the Millennials – have brought a ton of change in the world of business. From the way we do business and even our work area. This generation’s penchant for autonomy pushed several corporations to reconsider the modern innovations occurring in terms of work.

And though these modifications have helped us become even more innovative and flexible, it also brought in a certain trend that alarmed companies as well as experts. More and more members of today’s workforce are becoming disengaged with their respective work with a number close to 70 percent. Some have traced it back to despite having available resources around them to familiarize themselves with the work models, there are certain employers that continue to fail in creating a fulfilling path and culture for their employees.

To make things even more alarming, a large number of these young professionals walking away from the corporate track are women. According to a Deloitte survey conducted among 7,700 millennials coming from 29 different countries, one out of four respondents plan on quitting their respective job within a year. Moreover, women are most likely than men to have left the company.

A recent global ICEDR study orchestrated during 2015 to 2016, leaders believe that the majority of women at the age of 30 leave because of the struggle they experience creating a balance between their work and their life. Yet contrary to what the study entailed, the women themselves said that there are other factors that influenced their decision to leave their respective organizations.

A few readers have argued that neither the work/life balance nor the compensation is their primary driving force for leaving, but rather the corporate environment itself have become taxing to them.

One of the most crucial factor is corporate politics – accompanied by incompatible values and toxic environment. Employees would often find themselves doing their best to dodge multiple stray bullets whenever they feel that their ethics and values is not in sync with those of the corporation. Women are frequently left burned out as they try to make a contribution to the business while making sure that their voices and opinions remain significant.

Another reason cited by the readers is impact. As most professionals would, they want to fulfill their purpose and make a difference. No matter the industry, most of us wish to give our own input into making the world a better place. We all want to leave an accomplishment of good, solid work as well as other recognizable achievements.

“Wonder Women” or ladies of the industry would often feel that their thoughts get easily drowned out by corporate noise. To them, they are helping a group of people build their dreams without being recognized for the contributions that they make in the process. Some women dream of their ideas coming to life right before their eyes. There are also certain young ladies who choose to continue their profession independently so that they have more control over their goals.

And the last most common reason is the overwhelming feeling of being undervalued or underutilized. The corporate world seldom fully recognize women’s ability to contribute, nor do they curate an environment that allows women to reach their potential and succeed at the highest levels. Whether it’s because of gender discrimination, family-unfriendly policies that take its toll on women with children or simply the overall unfair culture – when faced with these types of environment, females or workplace wonder women would make it their goal to ‘lean out’ of these corporations.

As a result, the number of female entrepreneurs expanded, globally. Over the past 15 years, women-owned firms have grown at a faster rate and would have provided an estimated of more than 5 million jobs by the year 2018.

These office wonder women are crashing the glass ceiling as they continuously disrupt the traditional corporate culture by building their own companies, taking over executive leadership roles and curating workspaces that cater to both the needs and interest of women.

The fast growth of flexible workspaces brought upon the unexpected appearance of several coworking offices globally. Though as expected, majority of them are built for co-ed occupation. But as the years progressed, the presence of niche shared offices have been observed. More and more female-friendly spaces are opening up to fill in the gaps of the available resources to women.

Providers from all around the world are now coming up with more ways to invite female entrepreneurs into joining them. Specific spaces in the US have started providing on-site child care services so that mothers of their community could fulfill both of their duties.

Whenever offices are reorganized, most workers view the process as nothing else but a nuisance interrupting their daily work and for what exactly? They’re not really sure. Design firms and experts have long discussed the benefits of changing up work environments, claiming that when people are able to circulate freely and had more opportunities to engage with different sets of coworkers, they become more communicative, collaborative, and creative.

Even world-famous managers believe so too; when Steve Jobs was designing the new headquarters for Pixar, he designated large central bathrooms in the building’s atrium, rendering employees to walk a couple of distances to use them creating unplanned “collisions” that would later on spark innovations. Several studies have backed it up but the financial return rate of such investment had been hard to prove – until recently.

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Sunkee Lee, came across a “natural experiment” within a large South Korean e-commerce company that was moving into a new office. In their old building, six Merchandising teams tasked with sourcing and marketing flash deals for various products were seated in one area while six other merchandising team sat in another, separated by a common entrance. And though the company wanted both groups to be in one location altogether, space constraints would render nine of them to be in one open area and three in another with a common entrance between them. Both areas are identical in terms of its decoration, lighting, equipment, distance between teams and their respective workstations, as well as proximity to management – there’s no denying that it was pretty similar with those of the old headquarters and employees had no choice where they would sit.

Lee looked at over 38, 435 deals done by 60 merchandisers over 200 days – 120 days before the big move and 80 days after – and found that those merchandisers in the area that contained more teams sourced over 25% more deals from new suppliers, on average, than all merchandisers had sourced before the reorganization. The thing was, the deals didn’t come from collaboration, they were a mark of change in the quality of the employees’ work. Lee identifies the change as a shift away from “exploitation” or the repetition of offers to “exploration” – the formulation of new ideas. More importantly, the daily deal revenue of each employee sitting with a previously unknown colleagues was 40% higher, on average, than that of their average prior to the move.

The aforementioned increase in creativity and the jump to exploratory ideas was statistically significant for those whose experience sourcing deals within the organization. They were above the median and had no social ties to most of the members of their new workspace. Lee explains that once a person learns enough about the area they specialize in, exposure to new peers would help them enhance their creativity. He adds that physical proximity promotes trust and the exchange of knowledge between new colleagues.

In addition to this, the change of surrounding seemed to boost the employees’ performance compared to the other switches the company has made. Moreover, the effect brought upon by the relocation was quick.

Sunkee Lee’s study is one of the first to use a before-and-after setup to examine how a change in a office seating arrangement affects individual innovation and sales performance. But it became part of a long line of research suggesting that where we seat can do significant effects on how they work together. Another prominent example of this is MIT professor Thomas Allen’s study on communication among engineer in the R&D facility of a multinational company during the 1970s. His finding, popularly known as the Allen curve, shows the dramatic drop in dialogues between employees who sit apart. Though most of the earlier research focused on businesses, the aforementioned phenomenon happens in other arenas too. A 2015 study said that members of the US Senate who will sit in close proximity with one another are likely to support each other’s legislation, regardless of their party affiliations.

And though majority of today’s organizations have left closed-door offices behind in exchange for open spaces for communal workspaces, few have gone as far as routinely changing office seating arrangements. Lee still suggests that such interventions is of big help to organizations who live by knowledge sharing and innovation.

And in any case you want some help in keeping things fresh, hit us up!

A large majority of us keep a list of things that needs to be accomplished during a work day. At certain days, our to-do lists grow longer and longer almost as if tasks won’t stop piling up. When other projects linger unfinished for quite some time, we can’t help but feel ashamed of the accumulating stockpile of work in our desk.

We often feel guilt and its close relative shame when we’ve done something wrong. Guilt is an internal feeling we have on something that we committed, while shame involves feeling like a bad guy, in the context of what the public views as bad behavior.

It’s a common scenario found in different industries but the main question is, are both feelings helpful?

It depends. For us to know how the aforementioned emotions affect an individual’s work behavior, it’s important that we truly understand its nature – its root causes as well as its differences.

Despite of its perceived similarity, guilt and shame arise from different attributions and elicits different responses. Shame arises when an individual regards the root cause of their failures to something unchangeable. All the while, guilt is what comes when an individual regards the reason for their failure as something changeable.

Both emotions relate to different aspects of agency and control. When we experience guilt, we resort to focusing on what we could’ve done differently or what we could do to be better in the future but when we feel shame, we direct our attention to how finer things would be if we were a different person. Say for example, a freelancer overlooked a deadline and fails to submit the collaterals he/she has been making for a client on time. If the freelancer correlates this misdeed to his/her behavior, she is likely to experience guilt but if the person attributes it to something core in themselves, he/she would feel shame – a much more devastating emotional experience than guilt for it promotes constructive responses to our mistakes.

Both emotions have its pros and cons. For example, guilt can be motivating. It has the power to increase one’s propensity to cooperate. In most cases, it will drive employees to work on tasks that have been stalled for quite a while. At its lowest, it doesn’t create much interference in completing projects but the guilt produced by the inability to work under conditions that are beyond one’s control can be painful.

Shame, on the other hand, relays a different story. It can be problematic in a sense that it prompts individuals to engross in habits that minimize contriteness and are unproductive to the organization. In fact, there are studies providing evidence that people will explicitly procrastinate to avoid shame. Realistically speaking, it’s almost never helpful.

Carrying the same amount of advantages and disadvantages, both can either be a liability or an asset.

So how do we avoid the negative effects of guilt and shame? We need to put a stop to rumination – the process of having repetitive thoughts about something anxiety-provoking – so that it would be less painful for us.

Being kind to oneself helps alleviate the negative effects of guilt and shame. We must be willing to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we’ve made. A large majority of us would tell our friends who are in the same situation to “give themselves a break”, so we must be able to give ourselves the same advice.

According Gabriele Oettingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, focusing on the space between what you have accomplished and what you want to achieve leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Admittedly, that same energy can motivate an individual to act but when they are unable to do so, focusing on what you have achieved can give you a sense of pride.

One of the many outcomes of mindfulness technique is acceptance of one’s situation. This perspective is also useful when we are trying to overcome feelings of guilt. During these moments, it’s important for us to remember that no matter how bad we feel, it won’t help get rid some of the work that needs to be done.

With the innate tradition of needing to look “busy” to be labeled as “productive”, feeling guilty is simply unavoidable.

This type of culture greatly contributed to our anxious tendencies and the longer it stays, the harder it is for us to diminish this toxic habit. Luckily, today’s young professionals are implementing progressive changes in the hope of relieving their peers by starting in the root of it all – the workplace.

With the help of shared offices like coworking spaces that encourages well deserved breaks and reflective downtimes, freelancers and budding entrepreneurs are welcomed to a fresh culture – one that doesn’t berate you for being ‘unproductive’. Its supportive community of like-minded individuals are constantly reminding us that it’s okay to have some slow Mondays, the greater audience agreeing in unison.

If you’ve been feeling down lately, hit us up and maybe we can cheer you up!