While traditional hierarchical jobs may have had their drawbacks, they were efficient. In a well-run corporation, people generally know when to do what, who to report to, what’s coming up next, and whether or not they’re doing a good job.
When you work for yourself, however, all of that goes out the window. Shedding the structure of a traditional job means losing a lot of the advantages it offers; it’s the baby with the bathwater.
Coworking communities give us a starting point for replacing the hierarchical structures with new, networked, opt-in equivalents. Instead of being compelled to go to an office, for example, we are free to choose where and when we work. The freedom is great! Inevitably, however, we struggle if we try to manage everything ourselves without any external feedback.
This is where our coworkers can come in!
But… I just gained my freedom from a boss! Why would I give it up now?
Okay, take a breath! We’re not talking about you giving up your hard-earned freedom. You’re still the boss.
What if we said that, in this new way of doing things, you have structures you can opt into (and out of) as you see fit?
In a traditional job, for instance, you might be compelled to work towards a quarterly goal that’s set by someone else and against which you are evaluated. As an independent, you don’t need to have this kind of bureaucracy managing your goals, but absent any structure at all you might find yourself adrift. Do you ever get the sense like you don’t know what your bigger picture goals are, or how what you’re doing now can support that future? Or perhaps you wonder what your next step should be, and you’re just not sure?
In these cases, perhaps you’d benefit from starting or joining a group of peers who want to collectively help each other tackle something similar.
Everyone is on equal footing, so you still retain your individual autonomy, but by participating in this group, you create an external structure for yourself to be accountable to in a positive and supportive way.
Over the past several years, we’ve been experimenting with programs that seek to tackle this. For our new project, we’ll be going further to integrate these practices into the flow of membership.
We can easily make friends at a coworking space over a cup of coffee in the kitchen or through a fortuitous connection through our online group, but ultimately we are still largely separate when it comes to the thing we spend most of our time doing: work!
That’s for good reason; few of us work on the same projects together. If, however, subsets of us can coordinate the kind of work we are doing with each other, we can find greater connection in our separate but aligned pursuits.
Say, for example, that you’re struggling to manage your inbox. Improving how you handle incoming correspondence is something you might likely put off in the face of more pressing matters, but if you allocated a consistent time to tackle it alongside others doing the same, you’d not only be more likely to get it done and stop putting it off, you might be more efficient, more effective, learn from your neighbors, and have peace of mind knowing you have a designated time you can count on.
Over time, these systems could mature into a consistent, coordinated calendar that independents can opt into and use as a default template for managing themselves with the help of their coworkers.
With this in place, people facing the tradeoffs of independent life can rest a little easier knowing that, if they want to, there’s a support system out there to help them with the things they might struggle to tackle on their own.
Building networked, peer-to-peer, opt-in support systems for the new workforce is what we are here to do.
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