If you’re in a leadership position either in an office or a small business, how you manage the staff can make or break the business. Happy and motivated staff will bring your business to success, while lazy and unmotivated ones will bring you down. In short, your staff are the ones making your goal a reality and your job as the space owner or manager is to make sure you effectively manage them.
It isn’t easy to manage different people with different motivations, views on work, and attitude. There is no right management style since it varies in a different environment. However, there are wrong ways to manage people that can be prevented. This article will help you on how to effectively manage your team in the coworking space.
But first, let’s discuss common challenges in managing the staff in the coworking space.
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Distractions
– Working in a coworking space involves collaboration, networking, and interactions which is different in an office setting. Because of this, there is a possibility that it might compromise the productivity of your staff.
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Social Interactions
– The ideal situation in a coworking space is that everyone would get along perfectly, so it is expected that staff is to socially interactive. However, this could cause to lose focus from other operational and administrative work inside the coworking space.
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Time Schedule
– Schedule may vary among your workers in the coworking space and also the factor that coworking presents a sense of working freely inside not time-bounded unlike in the office setting. This might cause compromises on the attendance of your staff, especially if it’s not monitored well.
Different Ways to Manage your Staff
Provide a Sense of Community
- It will be great to organize extra activities like happy hours, fun days, team lunches or dinners to develop stronger bonds outside the office. These social activities can boost collaboration and teamwork. Ask feedback from your staff about what activities they’d like to do, then assign someone to organize weekly and monthly activities away from the office. As a space owner, you might ask why you go to this extreme? Because this will make your staff inspired to work and also the staff who bonds after work is more likely to respect and trust each other.
- Team building allows your staff to improve and develop problem-solving skills, communication, creativity, time management, and productivity. Be sure to stick to your social activities plans to create trust among your staff.
Engage in business branding awareness
- Promote your brand within the workspace to constantly remind your staff about the brand identity you are standing for. Find ways to remind staff of your brand identity and its values. You can give your staff business cards with their names and your company logo to give them a sense of ownership and belongingness. Also, you may want your staff to wear uniforms on certain days like a branded t-shirt or cap from the company. If you plan to do this, including your staff in the decision-making process of the design of your uniforms to build team spirit.
- Your coworking space could be labeled with your logo, with signage, posters, and printed chair covers. Such branding efforts can go a long way in encouraging your staff to be proud of the coworking space. And once this communicated organically to your staff, they can communicate this easily to the members of your coworking space.
Data Sharing
- Data sharing in the coworking space will motivate your employees to share their progress and be on the same page with everyone. The goal here is to allow your staff to work together in achieving better decision making. Here are some ideas on how to initiate better sharing of ideas:
- Blogs – Encourages your staff to share ideas on the trending topic and what kind of content to include
- Deadlines and Project sharing – Manage your content like Slack allows your staff to view each others’ deadline sand completed projects, which results in encouraging them to complete their assignments and projects.
Manage privacy, noise, and interruptions
- Managing privacy can be a headache especially coworking spaces can be noisy and disorganized if it is not managed well. Be proactive in managing the noise and interruptions for your staff. Encourage them to use noise-canceling headphones if they are easily distracted by the noise while working. Also, as they use earphones, remind them to keep their noise down when communicating. They should be aware of each they can come in. Encourage your staff to send emails or messages to each other before approaching a coworker or fellow team members. A phone call can be made to ask permission first before entering a coworker’s personal space.
Counseling
- Offering counseling will help to minimize and resolve conflict. Investing in a counselor will keep your employees happy and healthy, especially when they have someone to talk to outside the organization.
Final Words
Coworking space can help your team thrive if you allow them too. Support your staff with digital tools to help them share, communicate, and collaborate without delay and friction. These different ways to manage your space is just a glimpse of other possibilities that you can do for your staff. Don’t forget to listen and ask questions to your staff, to initiate a dialogue that can foster a mutually beneficial environment. Hopefully that you can apply this to your coworking space.