Co-working for the Social Freelancer
Man is a social animal. And a freelancer is not far removed from this adage. A freelancer working from home often ends up facing high degrees of isolation, almost the feeling of being in a vacuum. It is essential that all workers experience social engagement in course of work. Social engagements help dispel the feeling of being alone in the universe, and a go a long way to push people away from various edge problems, including depression.
A growing number of patients with counsellors and psychiatrists are those that tend to work alone, at home and away from people interaction. They don’t have people to share ideas with, bounce opinions off, indulge in a little bit of distraction away from their core tasks of delivery.
Co-working helps solve these problems.
Co-working is a brilliant concept that provides people who work off home a chance to engage with a community that is much like them. If not in skills, or professional domains, then at the least from the social standpoint. Co-working is the perfect balance between a lone wolf and a pack that demands rigid rules.
Co-working provides support from many perspectives, including those of getting an opportunity to engage with audiences with multiple talent points, the chance of sharing time over a coffee with someone totally unknown and the opportunity to work with no rigid regimen of an office and yet experience all social benefits that an office provides.
Co-working offers benefits that a coffee shop offering similar facilities doesn’t. The people in a co-working space aren’t what one deems “floating”, they are fairly fixed over a span of time. A co-working space also assumes accountability for facilities that may be required during a working day, including printers, secured dedicated broadband and the like.
No surprise then, that co-working is mushrooming as a concept not just across India, but globally.
Co-working helps create working communities that can engage with each other as and when desired, without rigid rules of signing in, usage or other points. Given the startup era boom across the world, where great products are born out of teams that are no more than three or four people in size, co-working is an idea whose time has come.
