Right now you can’t go anywhere without hearing about COVID-19. As businesses and schools are closing and many public events are being cancelled, we too are navigating the impacts of coronavirus and taking careful precautions to protect our coworking space members.
To keep our space open, operating, and healthy for our members, we have implemented the following:
The space is open to members and otherwise closed to the public. During this time, there are no drop-ins or tours accepted without prior notice.
We are diligently performing daily wipe down of surfaces, doorknobs, and light switches with disinfecting wipes.
Spaces are stocked with wipes, hand sanitizer, antibacterial hand soap, antibacterial dish soap, and tissues.
Paper towels are provided near all sinks.
Kitchens are stocked with disposable cups, silverware, and plates.
We have adequately spaced all desks and work stations at least 6 feet apart to abide by the NYS social distancing guidelines .
We are abiding by CDC recommendations to wash hands for at least 20 seconds (sing the Shout Song or the chorus to your favorite rock ballad).
We’ve ensured our cleaning company is using disinfecting processes and will clean more frequently.
Most importantly, we require coworking space members to stay home if anyone is not feeling well or showing any cold or flu symptoms.
Next Tuesday, 3/10 at 6:30pm meet Jimini Crowket — a real live crow!
UNOVA Coworking has partnered with non-profit Green Springville to present this year’s Speaker Series, and March’s presenters include several feathered friends!
Get up close and personal with Jimini, his crow friend Grover, a couple of owls, and a kestrel, while his owner, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, answers your questions about attracting, repelling, and maintaining a safe environment for all of the wild critters found in your backyard.
***Be sure to bring your camera – adults and *well-behaved* children can take photos!!!
Founded in 2010 as a way to help bring more customers to local shops, Small Business Saturday is now a well-known shopping tradition celebrating individual communities and supporting many kinds of small businesses. Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, shoppers come together to Shop Small and share the places they love with the people they love.
UNOVA Coworking is one of the many small businesses who will open its doors to shoppers on Small Business Saturday, November 30th for A Very Merry Springville, Springville’s version of Small Business Saturday! First, participants pick up a shopper card from the Springville Journal and Springville Area Chamber of Commerce. The card will highlight each participating business and the location of various vendors (UNOVA will have three inside!!!) Then, spend the day strolling down Main Street. Shoppers can get their cards stamped at participating businesses beginning on Saturday, November 23rd and enter to win prizes. Drawings will be held at 4 pm on Saturday, November 30th. You don’t want to miss it!
Eliminating the need for office space (and office small talk), remote teams are flexible, dynamic, and effective. You get the very best staff from anywhere in the world, and they get to work on their own terms. It’s a win-win situation, but many companies are still reluctant to take the leap. How do you know you are building a solid team? How do you trust your staff? Here are a few tips on how to overcome these questions and start building your remote team.
Use the Freelance Market
The easiest way to build a remote team is to use freelancers. You can find freelancers for almost anything nowadays, from web and software development, to IT and networking. Job boards like Upwork make it very easy to put together strong, reliable remote staffing firms. Using freelancers is also a good way to find employees you trust. Part-time jobs can be great for freelancers who want a stable gig, while full-time remote roles are increasingly common.
Before starting, you should inform yourself about the legal rights of freelancers. In particular, you will have to watch out for misclassification, which is when a business hires someone as a contractor when they should be an employee under the law.
Diversity Is Key
Diversity is important in any team, but it is downright foolish not to take advantage of the global pool of talent you have access to when you hire remotely. A 2017 study looked into how companies build successful, culturally diverse remote teams and attempted to build a framework for this. Elements of this framework include effective coordination across time zones and a focus on building trust and understanding across cultural gaps.
Get the Right Tools
If you want a cohesive remote team, you will need to invest in a few tools. Some of the best collaboration tools out there include Slack (the industry standard for team communication), Trello (great for project management), and Google Drive (free, convenient file management).
Don’t Neglect Mental Health
Freelancing and other forms of remote work can be extremely empowering, but they also have their downsides. Isolation, loneliness, and the stresses of self-employment can all take a toll, which is one of the reasons why one-quarter of freelancers have experienced depression. Commit to being supportive of your remote workers by creating a culture of openness around mental health, checking in regularly, and promoting a healthy work-life balance.
Give Regular Feedback
With remote working, there are few natural opportunities for feedback. This can lead to a team that feels disconnected, unmotivated, and inefficient. The best way to avoid this is to schedule regular feedback for all remote workers, whether its a bi-weekly email or a monthly Skype chat. Whatever format you use, follow the key strategies for effective feedback: make it concrete, talk one-on-one, and always end on a positive note.
In fact, make sure to show your appreciation for your team’s strengths and successes as often as possible. There are many small ways to do this, from remembering birthdays to offering training support and giving employees real opportunities to give you feedback.
Build Company Culture
Company culture is an intangible and elusive term, but it’s one that companies have been chasing for decades. A good company culture reinforces your company’s values and gives your workplace a distinct energy while bringing your employees together.
As you can imagine, company culture can be very hard to foster within a remote team. Zapier, a tech company with a mostly integrated team, has a great blog post on how they do this. Among others, they use tools like Slack to encourage fun interactions between employees, as well as perks programs to keep them motivated and occasional in-person team meetups when possible.
The internet has revolutionized workplaces in many ways. Without a doubt, one of the biggest is eliminating the need for a physical workplace at all. This can be a scary concept for employers, but it shouldn’t be. Remote working can benefit everyone involved. Just build a team and company culture that values employees, and they will return the favor by working hard.
Questions or comments? Have any additional tips or resources to share? Reply below or reach out to Tina Martin at ideaspired.com.
Here at UNOVA Coworking, membership comes with a variety of perks, one of which is FREE coffee. But don’t let the “free” fool you — at UNOVA, we take our coffee pretty seriously.
We regularly restock the air-tight storage container with locally roasted beans from Premium Coffee Roasters in Lackawanna. The official “House” beans are the Tuscan Blend — a perfectly blended amount of Arabica beans with low acidity and sweet aroma.
Everything you need for your cup of Joe is conveniently located on our kitchen counter. Every pot starts with freshly ground beans from our burr coffee grinder and ends with your own customization of creams, flavorings, and sweeteners. We also posted the instructions on top of the coffee maker in case you drink the last cup — don’t be THAT guy or gal!
Our coffee is just one of the many ways we ensure that UNOVA members have what they need to get work done!
Want to learn more? Click here and sign up for your membership today!
I know what you’re thinking — we at UNOVA Coworking have been very quiet on the communication front. Well, get ready, because that’s about to change. You see, we’ve been hard at work renovating the space for valuable community members like you to come in and start getting work done.
It all begins on Small Business Saturday, November 24th! Join Joe & Ashley and other potential members as we mark the official opening of UNOVA Coworking! Be the first to tour the space, enjoy some snacks, and learn more about what our space can offer you. Bring your friends and family, stay as long as you’d like, and be sure to ask for a free trial membership!
In the meantime, check back on our website and sign up as an online community member on our JOIN page — it’s easy to do and completely FREE! Just enter your email and pick a password, that’s it! From there you can create your profile and start connecting with others.
Here’s the pretty flyer we made for the Open House. Please help us spread the word and share with your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, mailman, accountant, favorite store cashier — really anyone who enjoys free stuff and good people.
We thank you for your patience, and hope to see you on November 24th!!!
Coworking as a movement, a business solution, and a supportive global community turns 13 years old today!
It was on August 9th, 2005 that Brad Neuberg opened the first collaborative workspace in San Francisco and dubbed it “coworking.” What started as a tiny community office space in a converted Victorian in San Francisco has grown to 1.74 million coworkers in 2017, with an expected 5.1 million members by 2022. To put that number in perspective, more people currently cowork than there are people living in all of Costa Rica! That not only means that memberships across the globe are making a statement in and of themselves, but that coworking will most definitely impact the future of work as we know it.
What Brad, a software developer at the time, wanted was “the freedom and independence of working for myself along with the structure and community of working with others.” Coworking allows members to experience the energy of being surrounded by like-minded individuals from different businesses, industries, and trades which benefits the professional worker in a way that a traditional office simply cannot.
Naturally then, on this day every year, coworkers and coworking spaces across the globe take a moment to celebrate their independence as well as their discovery of all the dreams that can come true when you’ve got a solid community in which to create and collaborate. Check out some of the Coworking Day events here!
Photo courtesy of coworking.com
Brad created this model by which people from all walks of life could work together. But this is not a one-size-fits-all model, of course. Brad invited those who liked the coworking concept to share and remix it, to make it their own. What differentiates coworking spaces from any other office space is a commitment to the five values of coworking: Collaboration, Community, Openness, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability. With these core principles as a foundation, coworking aims to create a happy, helpful community of workers whose success and knowledge rubs off on those around them.
Last week’s blog post discussed UNOVA’s definition of coworking and why we decided to open a coworking space in the Buffalo Southtowns. The coworking concept especially appeals to us because it provides independent professionals the flexibility and freedom of a “have it when you want it” workspace, plus a supportive business community, all in a polished work environment.
But don’t just take our word for it – check out any one of these news sources to learn more about coworking and its positive effects on the worker, the company, and the community:
to 1.74 million coworkers in 2017, with an expected 5.1 million members by 2022. To put that number in perspective, more people currently cowork than there are people living in all of Costa Rica! That not only means that memberships across the globe are making a statement in and of themselves, but that coworking will most definitely impact the future of work as we know it.
