Promoting Job Satisfaction For Associates Who Work In Non-Company Shared-Office Locations

Maybe your company doesn’t care where your employees work, as long as they have access to a computer, but their job satisfaction matters a great deal to the company and to you as a manager.

In a recent article, the author suggests that job satisfaction may have more to do with whether the worker is able to interact with others, and that in turn has more to do with whether he or she is physically located near other people — regardless of the companies they work for or the kind of work they do.

And if they’re working in shared office locations like WeWork and Head Room, cheek-by-jowl with workers from other companies and different industries, you have less direct influence over their work environment. Even back in 2015, articles like this one from HBR were touting the potential benefits to the employee of this kind of work environment.

But you can’t afford to leave their job satisfaction to the chance that they’ll find a work space that supports the kind of attitudes you want them to have.

Here are a few things you can do starting today:

1. Describe the effect on the company scorecard. Emphasize company goals and objectives and show how individual work assignments affect them.
2. Show interconnectedness and interdependencies. Show how the work of one individual affects that of other company associates he may never have met.
3. Make them aware of the potential for future assignments. Describe how success in the position and assignment can lead to other opportunities for new roles with the company.
4. Counsel them on the risks of divulging company secrets. Workers should be made aware of the consequences to both the company and themselves in the event they inadvertently divulge trade secrets to others. Promising careers have been derailed because of inadvertent slips of the tongue, and the new relationships that arise in co-working spaces make it even more important to be mindful of the limits of sharing information. Make sure they understand the importance of keeping company information confidential in conversations and by scrupulous attention when using shared printers and copiers.

People feel better about working when they interact with other people. That doesn’t change just because they are working in non-traditional office arrangements. But it’s more the rule than the exception that the people with whom your workers will be in close physical proximity will be folks who don’t work for the company. That calls for a new kind of vigilance on the part of managers, and some new action steps to ensure workers’ job satisfaction and loyalty and affinity with the company.