You’ve probably heard the term Coworking Space thrown around a lot in the modern day. For most overseas, these spaces are a growing phenomenon among businesses and freelancers alike, and for good reason. But here in Samoa, such spaces have never been officially utilised. At least, until now. With the recent opening of Onelook Studio’s own dedicated workspace, we decided to look into what makes them so interesting and how you can use them in your professional life. While this is more for our fellow Samoans who are new to the idea, anyone who wants to learn more about these spaces are free to take what they want from this little statement.
But first, a bit of preamble.
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Work Hard, Play Hard
As an adult, it can feel like you’re spending the majority of your time in two places. The first place is your home. It’s where you go to relax, where you feel the most secure and where you go to live out your private life. The second place is, depending on your age or education level, school, work or another area where the primary objective is to work or be productive.
You go out, spend a third of the day being productive. You spend another third of the day eating, taking care of yourself and doing whatever gives you joy in life. The rest of the third is spent sleeping. Unless you’re in the software field, in which case God be with you.
Two places to be, two places to go, two places to exist for the rest of your life.
Now if that sounds soul crushing, it’s because it sort of is. Human beings are social creatures. We’re also anxiety ridden and our resting state is either boredom or panic, and despite what some say, being alone can be a horror in itself. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is a punishment. People like being around other people. It’s an inbuilt need, with a handful of exceptions due to anti-social behaviour but the majority of humans function best with the knowledge there are other humans about.
That’s also why everyone needs a third or fourth place to be (Liddy, 2023; McGowan, 2024; Jeffres, Bracken, Jian and Casey, 2009; Butler and Diaz, 2016)
That’s where coworking can come in.
Coworking spaces are sort of a third place, leaning more towards the professional part of your life. They’re somewhere that’s not quite work but not quite home. Technically third places are where you’d go to relax and play, but that isn’t universal. For some people working away from the office is a kind of relaxing. These spaces are a middle ground, offering comfort and freedom but also professionalism and the resources to continue working.
Working Remotely or Remotely Working?
During the pandemic of 2020 many people were relegated to working from home, a necessity on account of the virus. For many, working remotely had been a relief, allowing them to relax while still be productive. This did however come with some downsides (Clair, Kroon, Gordon & Riley, 2021).
For one thing, if having two places to be was inadequate for your emotional wellbeing, staying in one place over a long period of time and doing everything there might’ve been worse. Remaining indoors, in the same room, in the same house, doing work and then relaxing in that same house, every day. Live, work, play, eat, sleep and relax all in one place. Every day.
Now if that sounds like an utterly miserable way to live, it’s because it very much can be. (How to Be Miserable, Randy J. Paterson, 2016; Tulane University, 2020; Hwang, Rhabheru, Peisah, Reichman & Ikeda, 2020)
That’s because, on top of being social, human beings also feel a need to be active. So while working from home can be a boon to some, it’s not the optimal solution and in a lot of cases can be detrimental. This is only accounting for those who live alone. Imagine attempting to remote work in a space you share with your family. Samoans in particular can relate to this because we often live in large communal dwellings where you’re expected to put the family above work, which can interfere with flexible working.
After the pandemic, workplaces opened up again, but that came with its own problems. (Levente, 2024; Boatman, 2024; Rifin & Danaee, 2022; National Library of Medicine, 2022)
Employee dissatisfaction, anti-social tendencies, burnout and of course, having a bad supervisor/boss. The litany of issues with working in a traditional workplace is well documented and has been for years. Fun Fact: It even used to be worse until the 1920s.
So, if working from home and working from work is not optimal, that’s where coworking inserts itself as a significant alternative (Hadley, Marks & Wright, 2023).
So What do Coworking Spaces do?
Coworking spaces are a lot like cafes, except without the expectation that you need to buy a consumable and with the express dedication to being a working space. True, you could just use a cafe to work. But cafes, despite their popularity among employers and employees, are an eatery first and foremost. They don’t have the resources you need to be optimal. They don’t have secure internet, printers, scanners, dedicated working areas and desks for work. They’re informal and oftentimes, limited.
Coworking spaces do have these resources as well as the space needed to conduct a variety of things such as video chatting, board meetings or a private area for focused labour. (Herity, 2024)
Another thing coworking is good at is fostering a community (Macaraeg, 2021).
That’s not to say that traditional workplaces can’t do that. But there’s a rising trend of employee loneliness, coupled with the abundance of reportedly toxic work environments (Farris, 2022; Vega, 2023), managers and coworkers that are going to affect an employee’s sense of belonging. Companies who try to artificially enforce a workplace culture can even have the opposite effect and foster resentment (Griffith, 2023).
Working with Others
Think about group projects in school and university. If you were lucky, you were placed in a group that did their assigned tasks and finished their assignment on time, or you and your friends formed a group and went to work. If you were very unlucky however, you might find yourself in a group who didn’t care to do the assignment and kept shirking their responsibilities or making excuses.
The first one, at worst was pragmatic (you did what you were supposed to do, and that was that) and at best, was a joy (you had fun and performed better as a result). The second one, at worst, was a complete nightmare that made you want to hug a cactus (no one did anything and no one communicated. Disaster. Stressful. Many variables.) and at best was just okay (everyone did the bare minimum and just scraped by). The same principle applies to a workplace culture. While it’s true you can’t blame everything on bad colleagues, it also shouldn’t be your job to ‘fix’ it.
A coworking space is like a traditional office in the sense that you’re working alongside people, but these people are from a variety of other industries. They are a place for anyone who needs it. In that, there’s an element of choice for some people. With more traditional workplaces, things can get complicated.
Why work with a coworker who makes you feel uncomfortable, or hampers your ability to focus? Why force yourself to work with a petty supervisor when you could find your own quiet space to work without distraction. You could avoid unnecessary interactions with people you don’t get along with, or who don’t get along with you (nobody’s perfect, you might even be the problem). You also get to interact with people outside your normal bubble, some of whom may be experts or just starting out.
And like anywhere else, the more a few people share the same space, the more they begin to interact and form a community. It might not seem like much but having connections and building networks in the modern day is invaluable both to job security and future prospects. Coworking spaces give you a way to meet people. However, that is of course a choice. These places can just exist as a personal haven without needing to interact with anyone. But it’s hard to deny that people like working around other people. Especially when those people don’t make you want to know what asphalt feels like at terminal velocity.
Without the pressures of work, the anxiety of dealing with bad colleagues and the more homely comfort of somewhere warm and welcoming, people can work better and more comfortably. Studies even show that more than half of people who have participated in a coworking space felt more fulfilled afterward.
This is also a boon for freelancers, or people who don’t have an office space as a given. This is a market that includes independent contractors, ministers, artists, writers, content creators and burgeoning business owners. For all the benefits of remote work, an office space can do a lot in putting a person into the right headspace to be energetic and productive. The right coworking space can be a tremendous help to the right people on top of being an area for easy socialising.
The obvious benefit from all the above is to one’s mental space. People are often stretched thin these days, having to juggle work, private and social lives. Coworking spaces can ease that burden and while they won’t suddenly make your life better, it’s another little boon in the effort to keep yourself happy in what must feel to most people as a scary time to be alive.
Samoa had no coworking spaces, at least until now. Before workers only had cafes, of which Samoa has a healthy selection of. Many of Samoa’s cafes however lack the dedicated resources needed to properly facilitate a work environment, with many of them lacking the space as well. Cafes are, again, dining areas first. The only other option is the library which, while built for quiet working, is nowhere near versatile enough to be a proper coworking space.
Many Samoans however have a variety of networks and clients (everyone seems to know everyone), and finding a space with which they can all collaborate and work in comfort has a lot of untapped potential. But coworking is not simply a void. Coworking spaces are owned and managed by people. They don’t need to be rigid in how they present themselves and can adapt with some help from the people who use them. For Samoans and our often chaotic personal lives, this can be a godsend.
In this way, Onelook Studio, like other similar spaces, isn’t just a collaboration between the people using it, but also with the people managing the space.
Conclusions
With all this in mind, it’s clear why Coworking is on the rise. Since the term was first coined in 2005, the number of people using coworking spaces has steadily risen to around 3 million. (Statista, 2024)
Coworking spaces offer a lot for someone who wants to work somewhere secure and someone who wants to build connections and break out of the monotony of their usual work routine. It’s healthy to want to seek out different places and interact with different people. They can offer both. And even if you just want to shut out the world and work in silence, you can do that too. Coworking, despite having been around for nearly two decades, is still developing and this industry has yet to be fully explored.
With traditional working being reviewed and remote working becoming more common, it might be nice to find a good midway point. Somewhere professional but not overbearing. Somewhere comfortable but not overly familiar. And in a country like Samoa, seeing how Coworking spaces evolve and accommodate its growing digital labor force will be interesting to see.