Undeniably, our way of working has gone through drastic changes.

Today’s technology created a digital environment that allowed us to work in almost anywhere we want – spurring a question that a growing majority of us is asking; if work have become digital why do we still come to offices?

British economist Frances Cairncross – along with a number of other social and media theorists – predicted that distance will die during the year 1990s following the spread of the internet. They argued that space itself would become irrelevant when every place is connected instantaneously to every other location on the planet. It only makes sense that some of us would start asking if there’s really any need for offices – why go to work when it can actually go to you?

U.S. professor Melvin Webber’s well-known prediction is seemingly becoming imminent today. He said during the year 1973: “For the first time in history, it might be possible to locate on a mountain top and to maintain intimate, real-time, and realistic contact with business or other associates”. Traditional workspaces will soon be rendered obsolete as instantaneous communication to almost everyone is established.

But quite frankly, history has veered off a bit too far from what they expected. There’s no denying that we can now easily talk to anyone from around the globe yet ironically, we still go to work every day. Despite of its popularity, not everyone has picked up the trend of Telecommuting. On the other hand, corporations continuously invest in new or renovated office spaces located at the heart of urban areas so as to attract more talent.

Little do the early commentators know that though we now have the option of working anywhere in the digital world, it doesn’t necessarily mean we want to. Even if we already have the power to access a large quantity of information right at our fingertips, we still strive for places that allows us to share knowledge face to face, to generate ideas, and to create pools of talents and perspectives.

No matter how far humanity has gone in terms of modern technology, human aggregation, friction and interaction of minds remain to be vital aspects of work – most especially in the creative industries. The ability of a workplace to curate the aforementioned factors is becoming a vital requirement – stringing along with the other needs brought upon by watershed changes.

The past few years gave us front row seats to the transitioning of labyrinths of cubicles into free-flowing flexible workspaces. And due to its dynamic and sociable vibe, coworking has gained a large following amongst today’s labor force – serving as living proof that humans value shared spaces that allows them to take part in a community of like-minded individuals. Open to diverse disciplines, it promotes colorful interaction and ideation amongst its members.

Mixing the long-established advantages of traditional offices – fitting tools and a reputable business address – and a new breed of intangible yet indispensable benefits, coworking spaces changed the ominous “death of distance” into what many perceive to be the “birth of a new proximity”

Striving to create a place that engineers creativity, pioneers took the much needed procedures to thoroughly understand how the workforce connects with one another through a flexible environment.  With the help of new digital tools that can measure human connections and how they correlate with productivity and creativity, they are creating workspaces that adapts to human needs, instead of the other way around.

Veering far away from what theorists of the 1990s have predicted, rather than rending offices obsolete, today’s technology will transform and revitalize our work spaces.

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The physical and psychological health of today’s workforce is endangered as workplace stress creates an even higher toll on employees overall well-being. Affecting productivity and driving up voluntary turnover, the phenomenon has cost US employers nearly $200 billion yearly in healthcare coverage. And as a response, several companies come up with their own solution to alleviate the pressing predicament. From encouraging sleep and meditation through nap pods down to healthy snack bars, quirky perks can be found in almost every modern workplace today.

Yet amidst all of the clout and other activity going on, we have easily overlooked the fundamental factor that contributes to workplace stress: work environment – starting with the work itself. For years, researchers have advertised the benefits of better work practices for performance and productivity, enumerating two critical contributors to employee engagement: job control and social support. Moreover, it helps further enhance health – potentially reducing healthcare costs.

Companies from almost any industry can make use of the aforementioned elements to promote physical and mental well-being without breaking the bank.

Research dating back decades have revealed that the autonomy employees have over what they do and how they do it plays a significant role on their physical health. Recent studies have also indicated that having limited job control creates ill effects that extend beyond physiological well-being, it actually imposes burden on a person’s mental health. Organizations can prevent these workforce dangers by creating positions or roles that have more fluidity and autonomy or by eradicating micromanagement.

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot and his team lead one of the most notable studies in the area popularly known as the Whitehall Studies. Together, they discovered that the higher an employee’s rank is, the lower their morality is to cardiovascular diseases. As it turns out, differences in job control correlating to job ranks is most accountable for the said phenomenon. Higher-ranked employees who enjoyed more autonomy over their jobs and had more discretion over what they do despite having greater demands.

Additional data connected work stress to the presence of metabolic syndromes – clusters of risk factors that predict the likelihood of getting heart diseases and type 2 diabetes. Employees who go through chronic stress at work are more likely to experience metabolic syndromes compared to those who don’t undergo work stress.

A separate study have also discovered a correlation between measures of job control and healthy. People who had a higher level of power over task control in reorganization processes had less illness symptoms for 11 out of 12 health indicators, less absences and less experiences of depression.

Control over work is just one part of the broad – and growing – culture of autonomy. Architectural and design firm Gensler said in its 2013 Workplace Survey that another form of liberation that creates not just an increased happiness, but as well as elevated employee motivation and performance, is the power of choice over their surroundings. One example of this is Facebook’s headquarters; their employees can tailor the layout, height, and configuration of their desks based on their respective preferences. Teams can also create whatever plan best supports their project by moving their desks.

Admittedly this element isn’t easy to achieve but there are ways for companies to offer their employees a wider range of options like providing them with passes to coworking spaces. These unorthodox offices offer its member different work environments depending on their needs or personal preferences. It’s a cost-efficient way of giving your team more choices on how they work. They can share desks with other professionals or get a private office of their own.

With so much light being put on the health of one’s workforce, we’re easily distracted by what we think is important – forgetting that there are certain essentials needed to be covered first.

Talk to us today and we can help you elevate your teams overall well-being through autonomy.

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!