The Nomad Millennial and the Different Working Environments
Since the beginning of time, working has been the natural way of trading mental and/or physical efforts for money, land, food, etc. Ancient Egypt had its bakers, doctors, and merchants, the Roman empire their political administrators, the Ottomans their craft-workers, lawyers, and teachers, and the 21st century has us. “Us” is a generation that lived the fastest transitional shift from traditional to modern; from humans walking the Earth for thousands of years to Elon Musk planning on colonizing Mars beginning 2024, from cars using combustion engines for 135 years to electric cars, and finally, from hiding files in a drawer to being able to store them on an imaginary cloud.
My aim here is to highlight the “millennial” part of the title because, in order to think about its different working environments, one needs to have an understanding of how the rapid technology adoption influenced their working behavior and shaped their expectations.
1. Evolution of the working space
One of technology's main evolutionary characteristics is to make things smaller and more convenient to use, which greatly contributes to labor mobility. Let me give you a few examples:
About roughly forty years ago, magazine and newspaper companies needed their typewriters to be physically present at their offices in order to use the heavy and big-sized typewriting machines.
Nowadays owning a laptop grants you the possibility to sit next to the Victoria falls in Zimbabwe and work for a company in Japan.
Ten to twenty years forward (1990–2000), employees still had to be physically available at their work desks so they can make and receive calls on a landline telephone (cellphones mass adoption began post-2002).
The global use of cellphones made it possible to answer our boss’s work related questions just before sky-diving.
And finally, the scarcity of internet use at the time (0.05% of the world population in 1990 compared to 59% in 2020) made it difficult for white-collar workers to live too far away from their employers’ facilities.
Thanks to the internet, we can now join an important executive meeting with only a shirt, a blazer and some sexy underwear.
Yes, the aforementioned examples are common knowledge for the most part, but it is still important information to set forth because it gives credence to the nomadic behavior of millennials.
2. “Nomad” millennial
In the traditional sense of the term, a nomad moves from place to place in search of food. A nomad millennial will move from place to place in search of an experience.
And so, businesses targeting the nomad millennial need to consider the intangible value first and then come up with a specific product or service, instead of doing it the other way around.
How is it different? Because if you prioritize the product or service first, you narrow your range of possibilities to what the product or service can or cannot provide — WeWork (Newman era) prioritized the real estate aspect of the business since its inception, which drove the company away from a more adequate and personalized business plan, contributing to its IPO demise.
Whereas if you focus on the experience you want to convey first, you allow your creativity to come up with better alternatives and maybe better solutions — Impact hub prioritized the sense of community, which got them to develop a healthy and attractive collaborative ecosystem.
3. Co-working spaces
The nomadic behavior of millennials contributed to the success of co-working spaces. In numbers, millennials account for over 65% of global coworkers! which would explain the exponential growth of the number of co-working places from 3 in 2005 to 26,300 in 2020 (a pretty 876,567% growth).
Co-working spaces were a viable option — pre-Covid — because they gave their tenants the proper networking environment, collaboration opportunities, flexibility, and of course, great cost-efficiency. But The Covid situation sped up the digitalization of the work environment which made it hard for co-working companies to sustain as they are.
If companies want to remain in the game in the following years, they would need to prioritize the aspirational needs of their clients first and then adapt their spaces in accordance(as mentioned earlier). Second Home did just that; setting biophilia (human connection to nature) and evolutionary psychology as a ground rule for their designs.
Yet I believe that the co-working concept is but a natural transition phase from the Baby boomers’ static workplace to a fully remote working environment.
4. Remote working
Ahh, remote working… the method with the highest productivity potential in the long term. Skeptical? Let me enrich my point.
Remote working solves “I work too much, I’m not spending enough time with my loved ones”. Work-life Balance is a big factor that contributes to a more positive state of mind which boosts your productivity level. (No surprises when a 2020 workforce happiness index report states that remote workers are shown to be happier than in-office employees, with 75% and 71% respectively. Or when companies such as Best Buy, British Telecom, and American express stipulate that their remote employees are 35% to 40% more productive than their counterparts).
From the employers’ side, turning remote will help save around $600 billion a year in workplace distraction, and this is without mentioning relocation costs, real-estate costs.
Long story short, remote working has been the best hypothetical solution for some time now because it was thought to help companies reduce fixed and variable costs, give more family time for remote workers, raise their motivation, enhance the ease of traveling, and finally grant them the freedom to work at a personalized pace.
But, what was once hypothetical, is now actionable!
The pandemic’s impact on technology adoption sped up the shift from a deeply engrained traditional working system to a more innovative and modern way of conducting business.
What better examples than Twitter, Spotify, and Dropbox making the totality of their employees work from home indefinitely; Facebook deciding to allow up to 50% of its employees to go fully remote, and finally for companies such as Salesforce deciding to abolish the 9 to 5 working schedule for a more remote oriented and flexible system.
Remote working still has a long way to go before becoming massively adopted and so, has great room for improvement.
5. Ideating phase
Now that you have an overview of the coworking and remote space industry, let's ideate a bit and see if we can come up with interesting ideas.
For clarity’s sake, I will categorize nomad millennials into 3 separate archetypes and then work my way up from there:
The home person: Introvert by nature, the home person loves his/her mental comfort and can sustain alone for an extended period. He/she is more emotional than his/her peers, bothered by long-distance trips, and usually prefers silence or calming music when working.
- Analysis: By default, the home person will be reluctant to opt for co-working places or workplace cafes because of a high level of distraction. To target them, businesses need to replicate the home experience. The challenge is more about making the space as imperfect as reality than focusing on making things visually appealing (the “imperfect” is relatable and so will contribute to the individual’s mental comfort).
- Actionable Ideas: that would naturally pop in mind would be the possibility of renting actual homes/houses, which gives companies such as Airbnb an edge over traditional hotels. Airbnb could, for example, add a preferences feature — similar to the one used by Pinterest, Spotify… — to their website, proposing places that answer to the user’s subjective likings. Another idea would be for Airbnb to partner up with businesses from diverse industries to offer personalized remote bundles for their employees.
The social: Extrovert, the social welcomes public interactions with open arms. Impatience is one of his/her characteristics, but that doesn't stop him/her to concentrate on work in a crowded place. Distance is not an issue, as long as the place is lively.
- Analysis: Working cafes are places of choice for the social, conferring with him/her the mental activity needed for the day. Co-working spaces can also be attractive, as long as the focus is on community building pushing for repetitive social interchanges. Having this in mind, businesses interested in the social millennial should prioritize social activity over comfort (not that you shouldn't make things comfortable at all… but you get my point)
- Actionable ideas: Thinking out loud, co-working spaces can look like cafes, bars, and restaurants, to bridge the gap from a conventional working atmosphere to a more socially appealing professional environment (contributing to more genuine discussions). Laboratorio Permanente did just that; designing a Milan-based studio into a lookalike modern diner to foster spontaneous and unexpected interactions.
The traveler: As the embodiment of the typical nomad millennial, the traveler is an explorer at heart. He/she finds it wasteful not to explore all of what the world offers. Curiosity is part of his/her DNA, which means a constant change in scenery is always preferred.
- Analysis: Change is paramount for the traveler because every new place/country has the chance to create a “WOW effect”. In that case, the whole world is his/her playground as long as the Internet is provided. In case co-working spaces want to get involved, they should focus on a design/atmosphere that can disconnect the traveler from his actual habitat.
- Actionable ideas: Designing spaces to look like you’re in another country isn't really new, but customizing this approach to target the remote millennial market is interesting. Not all nomad millennials can change countries, or have the financial means to travel constantly, which will make an out-of-country experience highly praised. Finally, another idea would be to involve travel agencies or travel platforms to put in place special remote-working travel itineraries.
Endnote: This article’s aim is less about educating and more about reflecting openly about a change that is happening as we speak. A change that needs entrepreneurial minds to gather and refine the workspace 2.0. I believe that going fully remote is an undeniable future because it gives people the power to balance their life more adequately.
As a final word; if I got you to acknowledge any kind of opportunity in the remote/co-working space market… I succeeded in my endeavor. If not, well, I hope you still enjoyed the read!
