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Next G E N E R A T I O N F L U X

Renowned trend analyst Dion Chang says the concept of a career for life spent working nine-to-five is a relic of the 20th century. In his Flux Trends report titled “Is the Future of Work, the Death of the Career?”, he says technology coupled with the protracted global economic crisis has rendered traditional ideas of work and workspaces obsolete.

A YO U N G E R W O R K F O R C E I S U P E N D I N G T H E T R A D I T I O N A L V I E W S O F W H E R E , W H E N A N D H O W P E O P L E WA N T TO W O R K

By Glenda Nevill

The brave new world of workspaces

Smooth operations: Cape Town Garage is

home to a number of startups and

online businesses. Clients tend to (mostly)

get on pretty well, and collaborate too,

says general manager Sam Meyer

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“New jobs are being invented as new technologies are adopted. How we want to work and where and when we work is becoming more flexible and fluid. Even the timelines and boundaries of when you learn and when you retire have blurred,” he says.

A young workforce, weaned on technology, is challenging the status quo—and a new breed of entrepreneur has risen out of the ashes of the recession. “The traditional template of ‘learn, work, retire’ is being challenged,” says Chang, “and is already proving unsuitable for a new world order.”

These factors have impacted not just on how people work but where people work, too, as the ‘death of the cubical nation’ hastens ever closer.

George Gabriel is a director of Daddy.O, a shared workspace in Cape Town’s famous Old Biscuit Mill in what is one of the city’s creative hubs, Woodstock. Daddy.O offers tenants the flexibility of renting a desk hourly, daily or monthly. Of course, excellent technology is a given, with 200 megabytes free data a day, and there’s a boardroom big enough for 12 people, which is also rented out on an ad hoc basis.

“We pride Daddy.O on being open to all types of professions, and we currently have people working in fields such as alternative health, social-media consulting, management and fund-raising consulting to non-profits, wine distributors, freelance writers, public-relations consulting, information-technology strategy—and the list goes on and on,” Gabriel says.

“In addition, we have a healthy mixture of seasoned professionals and startups, as well as independent professionals, business travellers and longer term visitors blending work and play [workacation] and people who work from home—but who recognise the need to connect with other people in a relaxed yet professional atmosphere.”

Gabriel first learnt of shared and collaborative workspaces in Oslo, Norway four years ago. “As someone who had always been fascinated by the idea of intentional communities, the idea of a work environment that allowed freelancers to share resources and knowledge seemed to be such a logical way to nurture synergy. Which, at the end of the day, is what most people today crave: being part of successful work projects that develop through meaningful collaborations,” he says.

Gabriel presented the concept to Daddy’s World, the brains behind the Old Biscuit Mill,

the Daddy Long Legs, Daddy Long Legs Art-Hotel, Grand Daddy and Old-Mac Daddy hotels. “The reason I chose to work with them was because they understood the concept of the boutique hotel, which is based on the idea of merging the talents of the creative and hospitality industries. I saw—and still see—co-working spaces as a new type of merger, this time between the serviced-office industry and the hospitality industry,” says Gabriel.

Another interesting ‘merger’ is one of storage amenities with flexible office space. Entrepreneur Abri Schneider, who founded XtraSpace, recently launched a high-end co-work offering in Melrose Arch in

Johannesburg, called FlexiOffice. But the idea was driven from his

XtraSpace developments across South Africa. Schneider’s clinically clean, streamlined storage units proved enormously popular— not just with individuals but also businesses, many of them entrepreneurial.

“They would ask if they could fax something or make a print; or if they could send an invoice, call a courier. So we started adding business centres with a few hot desks and a TV on the wall to XtraSpace facilities. Then we got requests for the use of an office, so we added a few small offices. It grew from there. Now offices and services are a feature

Next Generation Flux

of XtraSpace,” Schneider explains. FlexiOffice in Melrose Arch is their first

standalone development. “It’s a five-star space,” says Schneider. “It’s special.” The attraction of Melrose Arch as a destination is a big drawcard, situated as it is close to restaurants, hotels, post offices, banks, shops and a gym—all within the same precinct. Its clients tend to be along the lines of international businesspeople perhaps setting up offices in South Africa, or lawyers, and even a global film company.

“It’s a different clientele. Our XtraSpace business in areas like Booysens in Johannesburg and [Khuzimphi] Shezi Road in Durban attract micro-entrepreneurs; I’d say 80% of our clientele are young and black,” he adds.

The Woodstock Exchange, another Daddy’s World development, houses Cape Town Garage, among other co-work offerings including The Bandwidth Barn and The Bureau.

Sam Meyer is general manager of Cape Town Garage, which was formerly Google’s Cape Town hangout. Now it’s home to a number of startups and online businesses. She says clients tend to (mostly) get on pretty well and collaborate, too. Of course, there have to be rules to ensure smooth operations, such as pre-booking the boardroom or other facilities. The space is also used for events and tech meetups.

One of the ‘tenants’, Julien Perreard, works for an online travel agency. He originally worked from home, but the birth of twin daughters sent him scurrying for an out-of-home office solution. “I looked at three or four different spaces before settling on Cape

Town Garage, as the environment appealed to me,” he says. The yoga studio, the various restaurants, the tech culture, the art in the building… “For me, it’s the vibe and the people. We’re all online. There’s no loud social screaming!”

Another tenant, Blyde Wright, works for a Dutch website company. He says the parent company is “very structured”, but it is handling his decision to take space in a co-work office. “The pros outweigh the cons,” he says. And the cons are? The technology can be tricky on occasion and Google takes the space three times a year as part of the agreement with Cape Town Garage, utilising the office.

Wright says he has a “dynamic workforce”. “They’re free-spirited, they want to work flexi-hours; this is the way the world is going. It keeps things interesting,” he adds.

An inspiring concept is activity-based working. Pete Townshend is the managing director of Know More, a division of workspace designer, Giant Leap, which offers “workplace intelligence”. One of the concepts it offers clients is activity-based working: think hot-desking, but much bigger. Activity-based offices are ownerless environments. Workers “don’t own a desk—or any space, for that matter—and choose what type of workspace to work at on a daily, or even hourly basis”. Staff come and go as they wish and work wherever they wish.

Townshend says the benefits go way beyond the cost savings achieved from the reduction in space. He talks numbers gleaned from research done by global company, Gensler. Desks are occupied around 52% of the time and a single desk can cost a company around R150 000 a year to run. Adoption of activity-based working reduces office sizes up to 45%; 71% of staff reported an increase in performance; 55% of staff said they were more productive; staff have better access to managers and work colleagues; and sick leave decreased from 9% to 2.5%. Then there’s the sustainability aspect: 50% power saving, 50% water saving, and 36% paper saving.

Townshend says 40% of new businesses in Europe have adopted activity-based working. “Moving to an activity-based work environment is a big shift in thinking. It is radical, and South Africa’s largely conservative corporate environment resists change. It also calls for a managerial style that expects more employee freedom, which can be a challenge

THE ‘DEATH OF THE CUBICAL NATION’ HASTENS EVER CLOSER

Logical: George Gabriel says this work environment allows freelancers to share resources and knowledge

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for managers,” says Townshend. Managers have to trust employees to

deliver even if they can’t keep an eagle eye on them. “I think this is slowly starting to change and managers are basing performance on output more than time in the office. But, yes, there are still managers who feel it is more important for an employee to be in the office and unproductive, than out of the office and productive,” he says. “Freedom and trust are essential. But it also requires a manager to dispense with the notion of hierarchy and the ego that goes with it. Managers integrate with their teams far more than they would otherwise.”

Styli Charalambous is the publisher and CEO of Daily Maverick, “the best online news read in South Africa”. The publication doesn’t have an office but, instead, editor Branko Brkic runs a network of contributors, sub-editors and production editors around the country—and even abroad.

“A virtual office environment is only possible for a newsroom that is quite experienced. One of the reasons Daily Maverick has managed to garner such respect from the reading public is the fact our newsroom has journos in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. So apart from putting out great content, they also have the experience to manage themselves

and their time (although filing on time will ALWAYS be an issue),” Charalambous says.

“Technology has also played a role: online messaging and WhatsApp mean the team are always connected in a group, or individually in a convenient and effective manner. While the group channel is used for info sharing, it’s been instrumental in maintaining team morale, far better than when we had permanent office space. And you need a very hands-on editor who holds the whole thing together.”

Brkic says the “success of such organisation depends on an implicit trust between the members of the team. Otherwise it just would not work”.

Interestingly, even for those who work in traditional office spaces, the 24/7 working hours brought about by technology have impacted on the home front, too.

Jacques van Embden, managing director of Blok, working with a team from WAUW Architects, creates what they call the “third space” in residential developments. “We live in a time of a 24-hour work cycle,” says Van Embden. “We create third spaces, which are workspaces that don’t take over the home, which protect the magic of the home. We find nooks and crannies where we add lots of plugs, lights and shelves to give work a permanent home—at home.” This often

Next Generation Flux

involves extending a passage, for example, and building in a workspace that doesn’t impose on the rest of the house. Widening a passage also works, as well as creating a long, slim desk with space below to store work materials. The space under a flight of stairs could also be utilised.

It is indeed a brave new working world. But it’s also one that has its challenges, not least letting people know of the different working options out there, says Gabriel. But he truly believes co-work spaces are the future. “And not only as standalone spaces, but also as networks of spaces, providing both incubation and other new opportunities for active

members to engage with each other locally, regionally and even internationally,” he says. “Many corporates see the value of this way of working and are redesigning their own facilities to incorporate aspects of collaborative design as well as allowing their own employees to use these spaces.”

Extra space: FlexiOffice is a high-end co-work offering of storage amenities merged with flexible office space

Some useful links to co-work spacesdaddyo.co.zawww.capetowngarage.comwww.the-bureau.co.zawww.xtraspace.co.zawww.bandwidthbarn.org