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Coworking spaces – the most prevalent form of collaborative workplaces – are said to offer the ideal solution for a new generation of creative knowledge workers, balancing flexibility and independence with structure and community. Recent studies, however, highlight deficiencies as they relate to the promise of ‘community’ made by most coworking spaces. This work reports 16 barriers that impede the process of human connectivity in coworking spaces that emerged from in-depth interviews with 26 coworkers. Suggestions are made for how these barriers might inform more effective workplace design.

Summary

Workers across the globe have evolved in their patterns of work, with increased flexibility emerging as a central theme. We highlight three forms of flexibility that workers have increasingly demanded: flexibility in location, schedule, and work design. We argue these capture the broad ways in which workers seek to structure and balance their work and nonwork lives, as well as their careers overall. We describe the evolution of each form of flexibility, review the benefits and challenges, and outline avenues for future research. Finally, we highlight a unique work arrangement, or setting, that infuses flexibility in unique ways – coworking spaces. We review what we know so far about coworking spaces, which have proliferated far faster than the scientific research that seeks to understand them. We conclude by outlining questions that may be good first priorities for emerging scholarly research in this area.

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BARRIERS TO HUMAN CONNECTIVITY AND THE DESIGN OF MORE COLLABORATIVE COWORKING SPACES

13 - Changes in Work Behavior Patterns

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BARRIERS TO HUMAN CONNECTIVITY AND THE DESIGN OF MORE COLLABORATIVE COWORKING SPACES

13 - Changes in Work Behavior Patterns

Summary