Supporting work–life balance with the use of coworking spaces

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the topic of parents who work on a flexible basis and use coworking facilities to find a work–life balance and overcome work–family conflicts. Design/methodology/approach The author uses a qualitative approach to explore the research questions. The first part of the empirical research undertakes an ethnographical approach in carrying out the unobstructed participant observation within five European coworking spaces targeted at improving comprehension of the spaces’ mediation mechanisms and development of supportive interactions. The second part traverses into conducting unstructured interviews with parents who work on a flexible basis and use a coworking space as their daily workplace. Findings This research paper reveals that flexible workers who found themselves juggling work tasks and family obligations tend to seek better conditions that assist them in tackling conflictual situations and, in addition, enhance their social lives to create further career opportunities. Coworking spaces are thus perceived as optimal workplaces by working parents in that they can find stability and scale their social networks within. Moreover, the continually evolving user interactions resulting from effective mediation mechanisms let these individuals find emotional support, increase productivity and exchange knowledge. Originality/value While the coworking industry is rapidly evolving and the academia is keener on investigating the field, the subcategory of work–life and family care within these collaborative environments is virtually unresearched. This paper provides valuable insight into the topic and serves as a knowledge base for the future exploration of this field.

Inclusion through use and membership of co-working spaces

“…Co-working provides the contact and the potential for inclusion via the acceptance and proactive support provided by the co-working community. This is where events, community managers (also known as coordinators or hosts) can play a critical role (Capdevila, 2019;Orel, 2019;Orel and Alonso Almeida, 2019;Roth et al, 2019;Walden, 2019). This also fits with Jansen et al's (2014, p. 370) argument that "in the process of inclusion, it is the group rather than the individual that has primary agency" This is also in line with Shore et al's (2011) argument that belongingness is characterised by acceptance by others and interpersonal relationships.…”

“…when the task is creative or collaborative; Haynes et al, 2019). In addition, work-life balance concerns also change the needs of many mobile workers (Orel, 2019). Co-working spaces are quickly developing in tandem with these trends in work environments and working models, making them important workspaces for employers and mobile employees alike.…”

“…The third step would be to reach out to community managers of selected places (Šviráková et al, 2015), and pre-vet spaces with respect to the resources that their mobile workers will need. This may even include identifying spaces where co-workers jointly create and take responsibility for self-organised daily childcare (Orel, 2019). Knowing the job and work requirements of their workers, employers may then be more readily able to identify those spaces that are suitable and arrange for memberships in the appropriate locations.…”

What Do We Know about Co-Working Spaces? Trends and Challenges Ahead

“…Continuing the analysis, the upper-right quadrant contains the "motor themes" that are being debated in the co-working literature. These conversations are framed around the rationale behind CWSs, including discussions about the phenomenon per se (i.e., how it emerged) [2,65], the serendipity of the interactions and opportunities for cooperation [46,66], as well as how CWSs should look like both in terms of the support services they might deliver to their co-workers [59,67] and from a business model perspective [43,68]. Clearly, all these keywords, to a greater or lesser extent, reflect the main essence of what CWSs are.…”

The perspective of a coworking space model in scholarly settings

“…Sankari et al (2018) report that universities are increasingly experimenting with activity-related and multipurpose workplace concepts to assist students and academic staff members and enable them to benefit from enhanced and ad hoc collaboration possibilities. Moreover, other benefits of coworking such as networking (Spinuzzi, 2012) and collaborating (Bilandzic and Foth, 2013;Merkel, 2015), increasing interactivity (Ross and Ressia, 2015) and receiving emotional support (Gerdenitsch et al, 2016), tackling alienation and isolation (De Peuter et al, 2017), finding a work-life balance (Green, 2014;Orel, 2019) and increasing productivity (Bueno et al, 2018) and innovation (Cabral and Van Winden, 2016) have been linked with the usage of coworking facilities. These are all needs that university students regularly struggle with and student counselling centres regularly must address.…”