As Director of Workspace Solutions EMEA Brett Hartle sees his clients and colleagues adopting hybrid workspace strategies, he sees the benefits of flexible workplace going beyond the bottom line to benefit things like collaboration and company culture.
This month, Upflex’s Director of Workspace Solutions in the EMEA region, Warsaw-based Brett Hartle, sat down with Remote Work Advocate to talk about the evolution of the workspace environment, the shift to hybrid, and the benefits to collaboration, creativity and company culture that spring from the flexible workspace. Here are a few of the trends and changes he has observed.
Because they allow for shorter leases and quicker move-in and move-out times, coworking spaces and serviced offices enable businesses to scale up or to downsize easily and quickly — and those are benefits companies new to hybrid work have become especially familiar with since spring of 2020. But there are benefits that go beyond the business side, Hartle says, to the personal side as well.
Coworking and flex space “offers a diversity of people and businesses, which in my mind, that’s one of the big benefits of coworking,” Hartle explains. “It provides a supportive ecosystem where companies are all in the same space, trying to achieve their goals. They’re trying to grow, they’re trying to expand to new markets, and you can sit and talk to someone who’s running a completely different business but may be facing similar challenges. You have this support group.”
Reading Stephen Johnson’ Where Do Good Ideas Come From? Hartle notes he saw a number of parallels between coworking and remote work when it comes to the personal, creative and collaborative advantages over traditional office models.
“One of the takeaways I had is if you want to improve processes for your company, you can meet with the same people every day in the same office in the same environment. You can figure out how to do that,” he said. “But it’s different if you want to truly innovate, to come up with a brand new go-to-market strategy, or to tackle a difficult challenge that you haven’t been able to solve.”
In that case, Hartle says, one needs exposure to people with different backgrounds, in different industries, with different ideas that may be approaching similar issues. “That’s where you really get these bursts of creativity to innovate and overcome challenges,” he says.
