Corpoworking Workplace

With coworking at the spearhead of the unprecedented revolution in the real estate industry, influencing the work conventions and environment of the corporate offices, ‘CorpoWorking’ is the future of a new corporate culture. The motion that helped in shifting the traditional outlook for offices to a co-working environment has made it’s way into the organisational setting.

Coined by LBMG Labs, “Corpoworking” is the corporate world’s take on coworking, aimed at providing employees a respite from a traditional office setup and engaging them in a coworking-like environment, redefining the meaning of a modern corporate phenomenon. The corpoworking concept isn’t needed to permanently enter the traditional work setup but can co-exist for an alternative, collaborative and pliable environment. 

The distinctive features of corpoworking are :

• Their creation is an experiment; not all arrangements are permanent and they develop organically over-time;
• Their layout and mode of operation are characterised by more lavish facilities than in coworking spaces, ranging from various employee benefits, contemporary office setup and other aspects of operations;
• Corpoworking spaces remain subject to the company’s pre-existing work norms, i.e. the company’s directives apply for everyone at the working space;
• The contact with external employees provides exposure and a chance to share complementary skill sets among individuals.
• There are times when companies open up a space in their offices to new people to come and work, to maintain and further enrich the diversity in their spaces. The diversified environment helps in expanding networks and encourages individuals to adapt to their new environment.

In their day-to-day operations, corpoworking spaces must compromise with the company’s regular processes (procurement, accounting, reporting, etc.), which may represent handicaps for carrying out their specific mission. For spaces open to outsiders, questions particularly relating to information security are raised. But that’s among the few hurdles that corpoworking still needs to overcome.

For instance, Google, with it’s immense employee benefits, ensures an employee-friendly corporate culture with initiatives like TGIF (Thank God it’s Friday), along with the style and design of their office very close to a coworking space, giving its employees the much-needed opportunity to truly connect, create and collaborate with one another. It offers perks like access to fully equipped gyms across offices in India with trainers and customised health programs, table tennis, pool, football, air hockey and other games in the recreation area, several sleep pods for a quick nap to its employees.

Similarly, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple have also embraced this trend to incorporate the Corpoworking culture in their office spaces. At Facebook, there’s graffiti art on the office walls, snacks and drinks are everywhere, cubicles don’t exist and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s office looks just like everyone else’s. Adopting less traditional workplace norms have been a key to success for companies like Apple, Google and Netflix.

While the corpoworking revolution is still at a premature stage of development, the concept remains full of promise in terms of innovation, corporate transformation, efficiency and the quality of people’s life at work.