CTV published a story a week or two ago about companies trying to ease commutes. It would have been great to see coworking mentioned in this mix. Coworking represents a great middle ground between full time commuting and working from home. Several of our full time members have jobs in other cities as far away as Toronto. For them, we’re their office away from the office.

Guelph is like any other city in that a decent chunk of our population commutes out of our city to work, specifically to Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. A company in Waterloo with even as little as 10 employees living here in Guelph could buy 3 or 4 full time desks at a coworking space and provide a place for their employees to ease their commute several days per week. If you have more than 10 employees living here then you may as well start your own coworking place. Or call us and we’ll start one for you?

Using coworking to ease the commute provides your people a productive office with proper facilities and coworkers. As well, putting them into a functioning coworking space allows them to meet and learn from people outside their company, getting them first hand exposure to new technologies and new influences.

You could take this a step further and take a 20% project approach with it. Assemble all of your Guelph based employees together here at ThreeFortyNine to work on a project for one of two days a week. Assign them a specific task or just give them some basic boundaries and let them self organize. Or let us organize the project with you and put some basic structure and format around it? It would be part hack day, part Guelph Seven, part retreat.

While trying to ‘ease’ commuting seems noble, it seems there are some options available today to stop commuting altogether, at least for a few days a week.