Spiralling up

Having worked for decades in large corporate businesses, the idea of not being in an office block with a few hundred other people is quite intimidating.

I’m a natural extrovert (to the extreme). For me, a lot of my energy comes from the emotional contagion of the people I’m surrounded by. I love the informal interactions, the chance catch-ups on the stairwells, bumping into colleagues waiting for coffee.

Since moving into a much smaller company, with a distributed workforce, I found myself working from home (along with the rest of the world). Once the CBD started to cautiously open up again we leapt at the chance to join a shared working office space here in Barangaroo in Sydney. There are a host of them springing up across the globe - Work Club, WeWork and multiple others - all catering to the emerging recognition that humans need to be with other humans.

We are social creatures, with social brains. Herd animals. Our brains are hyper attuned to any experience of social connection, we need to express our emotions and we need to achieve goals, we need to celebrate our successes. We have a deep need to feel connected to other humans, we need to access feedback that tells us we are ok and, through this, we create a sense of optimism for the future that we are all heading into. These needs have been the work of deep study across ancient tribal wisdom through to the latest social cognitive neuroscience (hit me up if you want a reading list!).

So what is it that shared workspaces provide? Today, I’m in the city at Work Club in Barangaroo to meet up with a few clients and a few friends. The office is a base of operations. I walk in and the team all greet me by name. I grab a coffee and sit down and strike up a conversation with a total stranger called Alice and we share stories of our English heritage and concern for our family members still living in the UK through the pandemic. There is music playing, a buzz of chatter as 50 or so small business teams plan their work, connect with their clients and run their businesses. There are some emerging and established businesses operating from here - CEO Magazine, Tex Ex Sydney, Singularity University Australia, Fair creative, PR and a couple of digital marketing/branding agencies + individual portfolio managers.

There is energy in the air. I haven’t spoken with another human face-to-face for the last three days. Here, I feel part of a community. People ask me what line of work I’m in with active interest - and every time I answer I’m getting crisper with our CAU value proposition. We are here to shape the future of change, we are here to help build the Future of Work, we are here to connect as humans and to humanise work. We are here.

The people we engage with can spiral us up or spiral us down. Each of us, as individuals, are on personal journeys of evolution, transformation and discovery. We all gravitate to the mean of the groups we interact with - hang out with chubby people you will get chubbier, hang out with fit people you will get fitter, hang out with drug users you are more likely to try drugs, hang out with recovering alcoholics you are more likely to recover. So what is the average point of a group of high energy, entrepreneurial, passionate people - working hard to build strong businesses, to change the way of thinking about the Future of Work, and shape the future of corporate Australia? I’m looking forward to finding out.