Careers going slash is not exactly news (Fast Company recently dubbed the same phenomenon ‘Generation Flux’ in a fascinating series of articles) but one corollary of this shift is just getting started — the slash space. The boundaries between our different identities are blurring in time as many more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects throughout the year, week or even day, and it seems the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark.

At least that’s what a spate of innovative new space ideas that blur personal and professional space begins to suggest. In Europe, for example, Regus and other flexible office space companies are tucking workspaces into transport hubs to cater to a more location independent, office hours agnostic work style. Reuters reports:

Regus… is opening 15 on-platform railway business lounges in the Netherlands, 60 to 100 in France, and more in Switzerland and Germany. Regus is looking to do the same in shopping malls in the U.S and Shell service stations globally. The firm’s first motorway-flanking office opened in January in France on the A10 Autoroute’s Limours-Janvry service station.

In Britain, The Office Group has signed a deal to open five drop-in offices at railway stations, starting with London Paddington in September.

But it’s not just the railway station/office that’s going slash. How about coworking/daycare? Forget leaving your personal commitments at the door as you head out to the office, Plug & Play, a new coworking space in Austin, Texas is offering freelancers, entrepreneurs and remote workers office space and childcare under one roof, allowing members to meet parental and professional obligations in one place.

Do you think we’ll see more hybrid spaces along these lines as the rigid boundaries of traditional office culture break down further? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user SashaW. 

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Luckily, we now have one. A whole week’s worth of celebrating remote work, in fact. It may not sell as many roses or chocolates as that better-known mid-month holiday, but Anywhere Working Week is now in full swing in the UK. Announced late last year with the support of MP Norman Baker, the seven-day event to highlight the personal, business and environmental benefits of flexible and remote working has a fistful of big-name founders, including Business in the Community, Microsoft, Nokia, Nuffield, Regus, Vodafone UK and Transport for London, and it is also supported by the UK Department for Transport, WWF and the Trades Union Congress.

“It’s no longer viable for businesses to stick to rigid, inefficient ways of working if they want to compete successfully in the market,” says Gordon Frazer, the managing director at Microsoft UK on the initiative’s home page, and the weeklong event is meant to promote these more flexible practices. To spur participation the sponsors are offering giveaways to those who sign up as supporters, as well as a handy calculator that British individuals can use to find out how much they would save by working remotely.

As the Digital Workplace Forum points out, the event is hardly making waves and compares it unfavorably to a similar but more cleverly promoted event in the Netherlands. The Forum blames the British government for its lackluster support, saying:

The lack of visible ‘oomph’ with Anywhere Working week is disappointing. . . . For all the positive benefits which flow from the Digital Workplace we believe the UK government should be championing remote working far more actively. It reduces pressure on transport, is good for the environment and produces a healthier, happier and more productive workforce.

To be fair to the British government though, the U.S. equivalent, Telework Week 2012, is next week and is hardly a pressing topic of discussion around American kitchen tables either. The truth is remote working doesn’t have tons of immediate sex appeal (that’s probably why the Dutch had to use pretty women in pink bathrobes to get their event some attention), despite the Digital Workplace Forum and the Anywhere Working Week sponsors’ being completely correct about its many benefits, which is both a shame and a marketing challenge.

How could the Anglophone countries take a leaf out of the Netherland’s book and find a way to make remote work a hot topic?

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Flexible office space company Regus asked 12,000 workers in 85 countries about their intentions to work during the end-of-year holidays and found a few of the year’s biggest occasions aren’t enough to keep Americans away from the office (or their smartphones). The company found:

• 64 percent of U.S. business people will work during the last week of the year.
• 56 percent of those working during this time will travel into the office to do so.
• Yet a hefty percentage of American respondents – 39 percent — believe workers will get very little done in this work time.

These numbers come on top of an another poll from RingCentral showing 70.4 percent of U.S. business owners, executives and independent pros surveyed expect to work more this holiday season than last year. Only 14 percent plan to take a real vacation, meaning a complete break from work, including work-related emails or phone calls. Filling in this dismal picture of vacation starvation is the annual doom and gloom from Mercer’s 2011 Worldwide Benefit & Employment Guidelines, which shocked exactly no one by showing workers in the U.S. have among the least generous statutory employee holiday entitlements (entitlements they don’t even take full advantage of).

What does this have to do with connectivity and the future of work? Simple: Constant connectivity and eroding work-life boundaries may be making it even more difficult for vacation-starved Americans (and even those in more vacation-friendly countries) to really get away. Just take the tiny percentage of workers RingCentral revealed will be taking a real vacation by severing their connection to work entirely as exhibit A. Add to these difficulties the seemingly endless pressure of a dire economic climate and the vacation complications caused by our increasingly international teams, which creates the need to decide which holidays, if any, remote employees are entitled to and you have a recipe for increasing levels of holiday deprivation-induced burnout.

Do you get the sense that our Americans vacation starvation is getting worse due to larger workforce trends?

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We’ve blogged about concerns that hyperconnected remote workers are more prone to workaholism and burnout before, discussing whether the tendency of plugged-in pros to struggle to define work-life boundaries is an artifact of the type of people who choose this lifestyle or an issue that’s actually caused by all of our gadgets. But whatever the cause of the problem, it’s apparently widespread.

A survey of 1,599 IT pros for the seventh edition of the Australian Computer Society’s Employment Survey found that techies from down under are working increasingly long hours.

• The number of IT pros working more than 40 hours a week rose from 65 percent in 2009 to nearly three-quarters this year (74.9 percent today).
• Of those surveyed, 21.3 percent reported working 50 or more hours per week compared with just over 10 percent in 2009.

Of course, some of this increase in working hours could be in response to fears about job insecurity brought on by the global financial crisis (though Australia has weathered the economic storm better than most). But speakers from the industry at Ne(x)twork, an Australian conference organized by Fuji Xerox to explore the future of work, blamed our increasing addiction to connectivity.

Scott Mason, the director of products, marketing and strategy for Optus Business, hoped for “a bit of a backlash. We are so ‘on’ all the time,” according to Beverley Head on ITWire. “Stressing this was a personal rather than Optus viewpoint Mr Mason said that in the future people might come to question some of the health impacts of expecting employees to be available for work around the clock,” she writes.

“There may be a time when we all have to have some specific downtime,” Head reports Mason remarking. And Beth Winchester, the executive general manager of human resources at Fuji Xerox, apparently agreed, saying, “I have more requests about how to help stop people working than to start working.”

And it’s not just Aussies who are apparently suffering from connectivity-induced workaholism. Together flexible-office company Regus and Mindmetre recently asked 12,000 businesspeople from around the world about their work hours and health, concluding in the process that stress from overwork is “the twenty-first century Black Death,” particularly for remote workers. And they have the numbers to back it up:

• Fifty-nine percent of remote workers take work home with them over three times a week, compared with only 26 percent of fixed-office workers.
• Forty-one percent of remote workers work a 50-hour week, compared with 41 percent of fixed-office workers.
• Fourteen percent of remote workers say their average working day is eleven hours or longer.

Do you think a similar survey focused on American workers would find plugged-in pros working equally long hours in this part of the world?

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Plenty, argues a recent piece by Rieva Lesonsky on MSN’s Business on Main site, which argues that the tepid pace of small business hiring, while obviously impacted by the dreadful economic situation as a whole, is partially down to rise of freelancers and platforms, like oDesk and Elance that enable small firms to find them. She cites a study from the Kaufman Foundation from earlier this year as evidence:

The Kauffman Foundation suggests the job deficit is actually not recession-related. In fact, Kauffman’s study, “Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation,” shows that new employer businesses have declined 27 percent since 2006. However, when newly self-employed workers are added to the mix, the level of startups hasn’t declined, but instead has “held steady or even edged up since the recession.”

To put this in perspective, in the 1990s, new businesses opened their doors with about eight employees; today, that’s down to five. The culprit? The traditional business model doesn’t apply anymore, due to a number of factors, including technology and a globalized market.

Essentially we’ve created a contingent, freelance economy. There’s still money to be made, innovations to be marketed and ideas to be harvested. The difference is that many businesses today are choosing to hire on an as-needed basis, relying on a freelance workforce.

Numbers from office space provider Regus earlier this month tell a similar story. A survey of 12,000 companies worldwide by the firm found “47 percent say they plan to hire freelance staff and 44 percent plan to hire remote workers over the next two years.”

But this decline in small business hiring might not be entirely a bad thing, according to a recent piece by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. In it, he notes that while small businesses are beloved by politicians, they are less productive than large firms and therefore do less to raise living standards. Countries with miserable recent growth like Greece and Portugal have some of the highest percentages of workers employed by small firms, he also points out.

Maybe the rise of the freelancer will make for a more dynamic economy even if it means less small business hiring. Does that sound plausible to you? 

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But like the dinosaurs, which scientists tell us live on as chickens, the office building of the past is unlikely to become completely extinct, but rather to evolve to meet the demands of new kinds of workers, driven by technological advances and a desire for a lighter, cheaper real estate footprint. So what will this new paradigm look like? To find out, we spoke with Bob Gaudreau, Executive VP of Regus and Philip Ross, CEO of Unwired, about the changing meaning of the office in a wired world.

Jessica Stillman: One of the models for the future you explore in the report is the idea that employees will be allowed to buy their own office space. Can you explain how you envision that working?

Philp Ross: One of the core corporate drivers in the move to agility is a reduction in the cost of real estate. It’s a move from providing a container for work that tends not to be used towards a future where it’s on-demand — that work places are aligned with how people actually want to work.

We found that only 45 percent of desks in offices are used at any one point in time today. So what we’re doing is aligning the idea of “buy/bring-your-own,” which is beginning to get traction in the IT world, with the idea of just provisioning work, so that companies give their employers a stipend, a budget, and the budget is for all aspects of the provisioning of work to suit them and the way they work.

Bob Gandreau: We’re seeing it happen already. Companies like Yell in the UK had 20 properties that were sitting vacant 70 percent of the time. So what they did is they gave everyone a membership to be able to use any of the Regus locations, and these people can go into the location where they want, when they want and work how they want. It’s not totally the worker buying his own, but it is companies giving them a sum of money and allowing the worker to pick the right work setting depending on what the worker needs. What that means for Yell is they’re saving, I think, £1.5 million or 40 percent of all their property costs by working in a much more agile way.

Jessica: If you go super lean and cut back severely on space at traditional offices, how do you plan usage so if everyone wants to use the space, they can?

Ross: It’s a very important point. We identified only 12.3 percent of people want to work from home, but you can also see in the research that people want a very short commute. So I think what we’re identifying really is that people want to work locally. We’re seeing this kind of new hybrid model where there’s a bit of working from home, a bit of working from the corporate office, but also this move towards third space — new spaces that are in the community — and that’s a very exciting trend.

In terms of load-balancing the corporate building, we’ve seen it done around the world. We profiled companies like Macquarie Bank in Sydney who built a kind of on-demand, real-time building. Companies are looking at this to provide places to work, not desks or cubes, so that there is always somewhere to work and also reallocating space based on the work that people actually do, which is moving more and more towards collaborative work, not just working solo in a cube. Again, we found that not only are 55 percent of the cubes empty at any one point in time, people report they can’t get meeting rooms. So I think what we’re seeing is a wholesale reallocation of space in the corporate center, and that also looks like a 20-25 percent of reduction of space at the same time.

Gandreau: In the old days you might see 10 percent of the space as meeting room, lounge and collaboration, now it’s 20-30 percent of the space, because it becomes a destination for people to come together and do that kind of work, which is where the good ideas come from.

Jessica: So-called “third space” seems to play a big role in the future you’re imagining, but are they up to the task today? Are there enough quality spaces available, and if not, do you predict a big boom in the industry?

Ross: There is a mixed range out there – there are some very good ones and some very mediocre ones that don’t quite meet the needs of the corporates. You can see them meeting the needs of the freelancers, the contingent workers, who go in with their Macbook Airs and have a coffee and they’re online, but they don’t meet the confidentiality needs and other services needs that they will have to respond to if Fortune companies adopt third space. I see them becoming, perhaps, more like an airport lounge with tiers of membership where platinum cardholders can get advanced services with teleconferencing, privacy and other facilities. I think it’s got some way to go from the kind of café society to a much more sophisticated offering of the future.

But if we see a huge change, a sea change, in the way that big corporates are working — if they do reduce their property footprint by 30 or 25 percent — we’ll see tens of thousands of new workers looking for someplace to work, especially in their communities, but no that hasn’t yet been provided for.

Gandreau: I see it happening before our eyes when you go out in the community. I was just back at my alma mater in Boston and I went to the library. In the old days, you couldn’t talk in the library, right? Now there are white boards and students collaborating, so I see more and more third spaces appearing in the places you’d least think they’d appear. Another place I’ve seen them, and Regus has looked at locating, is shopping malls. People are actually meeting in shopping malls. They’re naturally occurring in the places where large groups come together – sort of like the piazza in the old days. If you were in an Italian village people would go to the piazza and it was a beehive of activity. Third spaces are the piazzas of the modern century.

Jessica: Your report very much focuses on the cost savings of agile working and shies away from more holistic arguments, including commonly sited things like quality of life and environmental benefits. Why did you make that choice?

Ross: Over the years a lot of chat has been around about touchy-feely, nice-to-have issues around this, but corporates want to see the bottom line. They want to understand the impact on their business — how they can reduce costs, how they can improve efficiency. They are hard-nosed. We’re coming out of a climate of recession. Money is king. Doing more with less is top of the agenda.

Technology trends, the drivers from cloud to devices to connectivity, are enabling us to look at agility from a very different perspective, and in the report we’ve identified this idea of the agility dividend — how we can measure and monetize this, because I think what we found is companies are saying, we want to look at this but how do we present this to the board? The dividend looks at three key areas: reducing costs of real estate, a happiness dividend in work-life balance and improving the working lives of people, and the productivity dividend, making us more effective. If you sit back and look at this picture, it’s a no-brainer: there are lots of other spin-offs from environmental benefits through to the quality of life. We have to monetize it. We need a figure to produce a compelling business case to the CFO and the COO.

Gandreau: Our challenge has been for years to put a number to it. Once you can put a number to it, it becomes a really compelling argument. Once you have the bottom line, the flexibility you get by working in a more agile way just becomes the gravy. But it all starts with the numbers.

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Fortunately, there are now plenty of places where you can find a workspace outside the home office, ranging from coffees shops with Wi-Fi to dedicated coworking centers and office space sublets. However, it’s not always easy to know where to look for them, and having taken the long commute to the office out of the equation, you don’t want to find a workspace that’s miles from your home. In this post I’m going to round up a few of the most useful resources for finding local desk and meeting room space. All of the resources listed below are free to use unless otherwise indicated.

Coworking Wiki

Coworking centers are café-like collaboration spaces for independent professionals (if you’d like to find out more about coworking, Imran put together a good summary). The movement has grown in popularity over the past few years, fueled by the demand of a growing number of freelancers, and there are now coworking centers in cities (and even more rural locations) all over the world. Generally, coworking spaces will offer monthly memberships (either with your own desk, or as a “hotdesking” membership) and a daily “drop in” rate. While they tend to be populated primarily by freelancers and small business owners, remote employees can also enjoy the benefits of a well-equipped office space, camaraderie and the ability to bounce ideas off others.

The coworking wiki is the official repository for all things coworking, and includes a directory of coworking spaces around the world.  While its useful for finding out if there is a coworking center in your vicinity, the quality of the entries in the directory itself can be a bit of a mixed bag. As it’s a wiki, and the entries are generally entered by the coworking space owners, the amount of information presented varies — sometimes you’ll just get a list of prices, sometimes you’ll get a description of the space, its facilities and what it’s like to work there. Still, it’s a good resource to draw up a shortlist of potential spaces from.

Jelly Wiki

A Jelly is “a casual work event where everyone’s invited.” It’s an informal coworking-like gathering of professionals at a suitably equipped location — that could be someone’s house (which is how Jelly started), but more commonly at a coffee shop or in an office. A Jelly is a great way to get out of the home office, network and spark some great conversation — and they’re usually free (I wrote more about Jelly here).

Like coworking, Jelly has grown in popularity in the last few years and there are now hundreds of Jellies held regularly — often weekly or monthly — in many locations worldwide, as detailed in the Jelly wiki. There is likely a Jelly group near you (and if there isn’t, you can always start one). Again, as the information is held in an unstructured wiki, some groups have more detailed or up-to-date information about their meetings than others, but it should be enough to tell you about your nearby groups.

Loosecubes

Loosecubes is a useful web app that lets you search for both desk and meeting room space; you can look for space to lease for as short as one day. It’s currently in beta, but it’s a nicely designed site, allowing you to browse a map of your city to find suitable locations. Clicking on one of the spaces on the map brings up a thumbnail image of the space, together with its price — clicking on that takes you to a new page with more photos (if available) and a detailed description of the space, its amenities and the working environment. Loosecubes currently lists over 500 spaces in around 180 cities, primarily in the U.S. It lists space in coworking centers, office space to lease and businesses looking to share their office space with others. It’s free to use.

Deskwanted

Similar to Loosecubes, Deskwanted lists available office space from coworking centers and businesses looking to sublet their own space. You can search by location and lease term (daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly) and it’ll return a listing of results. You can also search on a map view. It has listings from over 600 spaces worldwide, although it has more of a focus on Europe  — it has plenty of listings in London, for example, whereas Loosecubes only has one). Deskwanted is also still in beta, which may explain why some features are a bit buggy (map search isn’t working on Firefox for me currently, for example). It’s free to use.

Share Your Office

Run by San Francisco-based coworking outfit pariSoma, Share Your Office is another site with listings advertising available office space. It’s primarily aimed at advertising shared office space (businesses looking to sublet their own space), but also has listings from coworking centers and commercial leases. As with Loosecubes and Deskwanted, you can search by location and budget and also search on a map. Share Your Office doesn’t seem to have quite as many listings as the other two, though.

WorkSnug

WorkSnug is a neat augmented reality mobile app. Go to a supported city (it works in many major cities in Europe and North America), fire up the app and get an augmented reality view of your surroundings that shows suitable work locations in the immediate vicinity, from coffee shops to meeting rooms to coworking centers. You can also view results on a more traditional map view. Each listing provides details of the space, including whether power, Wi-Fi and refreshments are available (together with ratings of their quality), noise level and if formal areas/meeting rooms are available. It’s available as a free app for iPhone and BlackBerry. You can also use WorkSnug via the website.

Laptopfriendlycafes

Similar to Worksnug, Laptopfriendlycafes lists coffee shops suitable for working, including details of whether Wi-Fi and power are available, ratings for the coffee and ambiance, and user reviews. As you might expect given the name, it concentrates on coffee shops, so isn’t the app to use to look for longer office space or meeting room rentals. It’s available via the website and through an iPhone app, which costs $0.99.

Local listings magazines, Craigslist, Gumtree

Although the options listed above are all great ways of finding office space, many potential office space advertisers may not know about them. Local listings magazines, Craigslist and Gumtree (in the U.K.) are all good places to look for shared office advertisements from companies looking to sublet some of their space.

Regus

If you’re just looking to rent a meeting room temporarily, virtual office space provider Regus has them available worldwide, often in convenient locations, such as nearby to transport hubs.

Social Networks

Finally, don’t ignore your networks. A great way to find temporary shared office space is to ask your contacts (and get them to ask their contacts) on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Many businesses may be nervous about subletting their space to complete strangers — a friend of a friend is always going to be a more attractive option.

Photo courtesy Flickr user hyku.

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