Coworking Space Gives Team Members the Best of Both Worlds

The commute to the former Spinutech office in Elmhurst was quite the trek for Chase Bougeon.

There are those who live in Chicago, and then there are those who live in Chicago. If you’re not a local, the former often translates to living in one of the surrounding suburbs and the latter means actually residing in the city of Chicago. Chase, a Paid Media Strategist at Spinutech, is a resident of the Lincoln Park area, and thus falls squarely in the living in Chicago category.

If Chase were to work out of the Elmhurst office, the commute would have involved taking the Brown Line downtown before hopping on a Metra train to the suburbs, accounting for at least an hour, if not more of his day. And that’s only in the morning. The return trip would be at least another hour, if not more, padding each end of his work day with travel time.

But Chase doesn’t have to work out of the Elmhurst office, which has since been closed in a decision that was made to serve the evolving needs of our team members. Thanks to the normalization of remote work embraced by Spinutech, Chase’s commute now consists of however many steps it takes to get from his bed to the desk in his apartment. He can sleep in later and start decompressing at the end of his work day earlier — and his productivity remains the same.

But as convenient as working from home has been for Chase, there are still social aspects of working in a shared office space that Zoom calls and Slack chats can’t quite replace.

A Modern Solution to a Modern Challenge

Spinutech has multiple team members who live in the city of Chicago and each of them is encouraged to decide their own working arrangements. While many of our Chicago team members are comfortable working from home, more than a few expressed a desire to get out of the house on occasion and spend more time working together in person on a regular basis.

When the prospect of utilizing a WeWork office was raised, Spinutech offered to cover the cost for any team members wishing to gather together weekly. With nearly a dozen locations in Chicago, WeWork provides these team members a coworking space closer to home than Elmhurst where they can fill their cup with the in-person social interaction they used to get on a daily basis working in an office.

As Chase attests, it has been exactly what he and other Chicago team members needed.

"Working from home is great, but coming into WeWork keeps me sane and the cabin fever at bay,” Chase says. “It has strengthened good work relationships into strong team bonds."

Since the start of the pandemic, many companies have struggled to figure out how to adapt to the workplace needs of today’s workforce. With no one-size-fits-all solution, Spinutech has embraced a mix-and-match approach, and team members like Chase are grateful for it.

“I certainly appreciate that Spinutech has never told us where we have to work, but they’ve also taken it a step further and allowed us to experiment with different working arrangements,” Chase says. “The WeWork space is a great example. I think the fact that they were willing to try something based on the needs of a handful of team members speaks volumes.”

If you are interested in learning more about Spinutech and how we support our team members, we invite you to dive into our culture and what makes us different from other agencies.