Here’s How Coworking Spaces Improve Your Work-Life Balance!
“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – Dolly Parton
If you live in a busy metro like Mumbai, you know how ruthless the rat-race can be! We are always on the move, giving the better part of the day to work, or travelling for work. What suffers in the bargain is ‘life’.
While technology has surely made things easier, with remote working now accepted by most companies, it does have its own challenges. For one, working at home may put a dent in an employee’s productivity owing to distractions.
And, being connected all the time via smartphones, laptops, and social media, leads to the line between an employee’s personal and professional lives thinner than it normally is!
The question is – how does one find a balance between work and life?
Finding Work-Life Balance Through Coworking Spaces
Work-life balance is not merely a buzzword. It is pivotal to employee wellness and hence, efficiency. Nothing impacts work as adversely as persistent stress.
It is why companies need to branch out from simple fitness initiatives and ergonomic measures into avenues that create an equilibrium between office and personal life.
There is no catch-all solution, but the benefits coworking spaces provide, especially in a hectic metropolis like Mumbai, come quite close.
1. Flexibility: The Foundation
While 9-5 routines are still around, the millennial workforce are increasingly veering towards a more flexible work schedule. They want a more balanced life, with enough time for friends, family, socialising, travel, and hobbies.
Unfortunately, conventional offices do not give you the flexibility to fulfil most of them during a workday. The result is a heavy tilt towards the professional end of the scale while personal life takes a backseat. At some point, it backfires, and productivity at work takes a hit.
Working at home, while flexible, has its own cons. The inevitable distractions of working in a homely environment may cause work to suffer.
Coworking spaces offer both, flexibility and a space that feels like a workplace. Since they are open all the time, employees can easily balance work with their other responsibilities. The flexibility to make your own work schedule is the foundation of a healthy work and life equilibrium.
2. Community: The Enabler
When the people you interact with day in and day out are either directly connected to your work or peripherally, the topic of conversation invariably leads to, you guessed it, work. A shared working space is a community. It has a mix of people that are most often outside the realm of your profession. It means you connect and mingle with individuals socially too.
The community a coworking space offers has always been considered the biggest business advantage. It is more than that. It enables a happier work-life balance. When you feel at home in the place you work, you thrive mentally and productively.
It is the foundation (flexibility) and the enabler (community) of coworking spaces that give rise to the many ways of improving work-life footing.
3. You Learn, Not Compete
One reason why the work-life balance goes for a toss is the contest among colleagues to be better. You are continually competing with other professionals and to stay ahead, you sacrifice personal life.
Coworking spaces are supportive communities. They are diverse, with freelancers and entrepreneurs rubbing shoulders with small enterprise and corporate employees. These differences, combined with the inherent ‘openness’ of the coworking spaces, encourages members to communicate freely, and develop brand new perspectives.
Instead of a competitive environment of an office, you get a symbiotic relationship. As a result, you learn from your peers, which makes for a wholesome work milieu.
4. You Do What You Love
For employees who love their work, stress generates from extraneous chores. It is the administrative problems of a conventional office that makes the work-life symmetry wonky. Coworking spaces take that headache away. They sort out the little details like office equipment and maintenance, while you get to do what you love.
5. You Can Get Some Downtime
Sometimes the only way to stabilise the balance of work and life is some R&R. What form it comes in is your choice. For a few, it is a quick lunch with friends in the middle of a hectic day, and for others, it is a social learning event on a Friday evening.
Coworking spaces are the mecca of decompressing. Because of the camaraderie they evoke between co-workers and the many learning and social events they host, there is always a chance to take time off and give ‘life’ some attention.
6. You Participate In Life
The sombre adults will tell you that life is about work at the office, work at home, and repeat. But it is the more woke adults who have the right end of it. It is participating in activities that make you more content. The activity could be a dance class or a meditation session or a theatre lesson. It is occupying the mind in things other than work and quotidian tasks that relax and soothe.
Coworking spaces open the chance to partake in such activities. For instance, we recently hosted a Zumba session at our Lower Parel office, and got members across the floor to participate in it. While it was meant to be a wellness initiative, members really enjoyed the short break from their routine, and had fun!
Similarly, the Independence Day celebrations in our Lower Parel and Andheri centres helped members bond over shared sentiments of patriotism and country love.
What Makes You Happier At Work, Makes You Happier In General
A coworking space is not merely a place to work. If you consider it so, you’re missing out on a massive chunk of its value. How so? Loving what you do is not enough, where you do it matters — a lot. Finding the right coworking atmosphere recovers work-life symmetry.
At WorkWise, we also acknowledge the reverse. Experiences at work affect the quality of life, exponentially. It is one of the reasons our coworking spaces in Mumbai are designed to deliver an ideal work environment.
With the ideal mix of open and private workspaces, ergonomic furniture, thriving diversity, and a flourishing community, WorkWise’s centres at Andheri, Lower Parel, and Vashi can help you strike the right balance between work and life!
