More and more big players want to change the way people work. Employees should be innovative, motivated, happy and, as a result, get more work done while achieving better results.
So, different companies come up with different strategies, but they mainly involve getting rid of the personal desktop. Instead, the employee gets a laptop and should choose where to work themselves. In order to give the employees a choice, companies set up coffee bars, lounges, quit-rooms, creative rooms (in which you can write all over walls/floors), power-napping areas, etc.
Since I will soon move into such an innovative area, I want to know what you guys think about it. Do you have any experience with such working conditions? What are the first things you would do? What would you feel is annoying? Do you think you could improve your work because of the environment?
I have an idea in which there is no central workplace. People are hired to work from home, after proper verification the company assign a rented work table, chair and a computer system setup with VPN over internet connection (if internet not already available, provides that too) at person's home. Meetings can be done over conference call. Some meeting can be scheduled in public places like hotels or restaurants where the room can be booked and not disturbed by anybody else. Saving the cost of commercial space to the company, saving people from traveling a lot and focus on work more without worrying about home related issues while work.
It has some problems like team collaboration, and home environment disturbance, but this can be carried out if these issues are not so important. Many freelancers work from home, and still are able to work effectively.
My current organization has not yet created a big name in the tech industry yet but they do have flexible working hours,table tennis,chess,basketball court,lawn tennis and gym facilities along with number of canteens and food trucks in the campus itself.
I usually work for 50mins at a stretch, take a break for 10mins and resume working. I play tennis in my spare time(or if my boss is on leave:D), go to gym everyday and play basketball/table tennis on fridays. We have an open office culture where employees are free to sit anywhere and get extra monitors to connect to their mac mini/laptops at their place of choice.
I usually switch my working place in few months just to escape boredom. All this perks do help to keep my motiavtion high and increase my productivity.
Most importantly I was lucky enough to enough to have a supportive team and mentors/boss to guide me properly. Because all this perks might seem nice in the beginning but it usually does not matter if you don't work with right people on interesting projects.
In a nutshell having all this office perks are good for sometime but in my opinion having supportive and understanding colleagues/mentors along with work that genuinely interests you is much more important.
I do freelance, contract, and consulting work - so sometimes clients will ask me to work from their offices, but the majority of the time I'm working with my own computer from my own environment. Working from different environments has pros and cons, but I think you'll be able to make the most of the new flexibility you'll have.
I find that creative work has a few caveats, for me at least:
When I was working 9-5 in an office I would usually have one good creative period in the morning, and sometimes another little creative burst near the end of the day, but there was a dead zone in the middle of the day where no matter how hard I tried, I was pretty useless for anything creative. I would try to schedule my day to take advantage of creative work during the creative times, and do routine boring tasks during my non-creative times, but I was still missing out. Normally I'd have another creative burst in the evening, and another one late at night - but by working all day I was just exhausted by 5pm and too tired to do anything creative at night.
When I left the office and began working in my current arrangement I also had the flexibility to work any time during the day that I wanted, so naturally I began to break apart my work day to take advantage of the 3-4 creative periods and do non-work life things like errands during my off times. This meant I could capture more of my creativity each day and still get the same stuff done.
I find that when I leave the house to work, I often set a goal and don't return until that goal is complete. This kind of goal-oriented sprinting by changing my environment keeps me focused and lets me get a lot of work done in a small amount of time.
Another bonus about being able to change environments is that if there's something negative or bad happening in one, you may not have the power to change it but you do have the power to leave and work somewhere else. It's great to have options!
If you are going to be moving into an office space where you have these different environments available to you, I'd suggest switching up your location 2-3 times during the work day, setting goals for each one. Don't linger or lounge—focus, get stuff done, and then get out of there! :)
You're fortunate to be joining a place with some variety, I'm sure different spaces will inspire you in different ways!
I am really not a fan of those cozy 'coffee bars, lounges, quit-rooms, creative rooms (in which you can write all over walls/floors), power-napping areas etc' you mentioned. I think giants like Google have all those to make sure their employees spend most of their time in their offices and hence end up working for the company and have absolutely no life out of work, which is wrong IMHO.
I am not saying for a second that I wouldn't want those cool facilities, just saying that there's a hidden reason as to why companies do it. I think people should work because they like to work and not be tempted to work because the environment is cozy.
Yes, it's 100 % true that environment makes you happier and productive. I was working in a organisation. Where I was working in a bad condition. Like if you late at your workplace, then salary deductions, no party's, no motivation everybody want to make happy to manager/management without productivity. And then I was moved to another organisation (current). Here is the very flexible time, they give us choice (Laptop/Desktop/Both), Work from home, Friday party's (obviously Beer/Chicken), Monday Motivation, Food, Laundry, Music room, Game Zone, Code War and many more. Here is no leave policy.You can take leaves and organisation pay you for that. I put my 100 % in my office time. Every organisation has pros and cons no one is perfect. Finally, I think you give respect and motivation to your employee organisation can touch the sky. That's it.
Ben Buchanan (200ok)
I make some bits of the web.
There's a big upside in variety, the main downside is the ergonomics of laptops are terrible.
My primary setup is an ergonomic keyboard and wacom tablet instead of a mouse. This avoids nasty RSI issues. Long periods laptop-only are not good.
So it's a balance.
Mostly - make sure you are looking after yourself physically and mentally, work on something you enjoy, and things will be good.