A New Type of Work-Life?

I was cruising the Internet the other day and ran into this unique company (see pics above) called Gate 3 WorkClub. Their vision is to create a new kind of work community that "blends the comforts of home with the professionalism of an office and the congeniality of a social club." Their focus is on creating a shared community for the "creative class" that is "worlds apart from traditional, centralized corporate environments." Interesting. How are they doing that? Practically, they've built a very nice shared space that provides all types of services for those who work from home, small businesses or are geographically separated from their business partners. This isn't a new concept. Kinkos has tried to create many similar services for small business. Chambers of Commerce have also established incubators for new businesses. I think what makes Gate 3 different is the totality of the concept. They're not just creating a launching pad for small or new businesses, they're advocating a whole new type of work-life for creative professionals.

Check out these questions from the WorkClub blog: "How do we put soul back into our work-lives? Is there room, in a fast paced, technologically sophisticated work environment for talk of 'love' and “transformation'?" O.k. now you've got my attention. Their questions are right on target.

I'm resisting the urge to come up with a boilerplate Bible verse or a standard Christian answer here. Sounds like something creatives who are Christians should explore. I think it may come down to connecting all our physically, emotionally and spiritually separate lives--work-life, home-life, church-life, social-life, spiritual-life etc.--into just one Life. If you noticed, one word never changed among those words…life. What if we just combined them all into life? The artificial and philosophical partitioning of work, home, church, society and spirit is a Greek concept. Neither the Scriptures nor Jewish culture supports such division. I think this is one of the reasons we have such a difficult time finding passion in our work or legitimacy in a home business. Everything has to be kept separate. When they are integrated and viewed as a seamless whole that makes up our lives, the concept challenges the legitimacy of established institutions (like corporations) and their authority over us.

For Gate 3, maybe this is what happened. They flew too close to the sacred fire of separation. Recently the Gate 3 CEO Neil Goldberg cited these reasons for shutting the company down:

- Change happens slowly. Especially when it involves changing people’s behavior.
- Systemic change of any kind is the hardest to broach, and takes the longest time.
- Corporations make decisions VERY slowly and embrace small changes with extreme resistance.

And noted these assumptions he feels hold true based on the Gate 3 experience:

- There is a huge need for alternate, flexible work arrangements for people and companies who would like to base their operations, and that of their employees, out of their homes.
- People would really love to have a place to work in regularly that is very close to home.
- People prefer to work around other people they aren’t affiliated with than working alone.
- People are significantly more productive working around other people they aren’t formally affiliated with.

Did you notice the strong connection between work-home-life that he discovered? Mainly, deep down, people need these areas to be free flowing and connected, not partitioned. Although I'm sad Gate 3 didn't make financially, I hope someone else will pick up the idea and run with it.