Walk into a cafe in any Australian city (or anywhere in the world) and you will notice that a large proportion of the clientele are workers, and amongst the sound of coffee grinders and steam you will hear the low rumble of mingled conversation. People are becoming increasingly mobile with their work and you wouldn’t be surprised to find a couple of guys in T-shirts & shorts slapping away at a laptop or pouring over their tablets/smart phones as they sip their coffee.

Cafes are quickly becoming ground zero for Australian businesses, there is  no better place to get an early start on your working day. A lot can happen over coffee, and there is a culture developing in the business world where meeting in Cafes is the norm. While  these casual business rituals let us enjoy good food and coffee while we work, they also do much to ‘level the playing field’ so to speak… The very structure of business is changing; where there used to be a prevalence of hierarchical structures that were plagued by inefficiency when it came to communication, there is now a culture wherein business owners & managers no longer play as strict a role as they did. The idea of adopting a flattened structure is receiving a better reception than ever before and this casual attitude to work is surprisingly fuelling productivity and innovation.

The cafe culture has helped us realise that we are clinging to systems that have floated into obsolescence as the technology we use has changed. Employees are becoming as much creative partners as they are workers and as a result, innovation is thriving. New ideas are being thrown around and in this open environment the most successful ideas can come from the most surprising places.

The role of the cafe in this cultural evolution goes much deeper than just food & coffee, they play an underlying part that influences the way we work. Cafes provide the neutral ground that is often necessary when trying to work with other people, a social space that gets us out of the office and in amongst the people of our work communities. This neutral ground  has the ability to disintegrate the kind of distance that can develop in an office environment, and sometimes it’s enough that simply being around other people can bring you back to earth and realise what you set out to do in the first place. And the act of sharing coffee acts as a catalyst to share ideas and build trust.

Once upon a time it was almost impossible to work from home, an unimaginable dream-world where only the most optimistic lived, but the way we work is evolving. We are more mobile than ever, and while there are buzz words like ‘telecommuting’ & ‘distributed workforce’ they don’t do justice to an emerging trend that is truly great. To say that this is an emerging trend may be a bit of an untruth however, because in some places it is a firmly established practice to have people who work remotely, yet this flexible lifestyle still eludes the vast majority of people who need it.

While it isn’t common practice to provide workers with these freedoms, the opportunity to be flexible in our work schedules has grown significantly in the past decade, and the rise of technology has instigated this shift. These people can work from anywhere there is an internet connection, and are better off for it. Workers and job seekers alike are placing more emphasis on flexibility, and young people entering the workforce are among the most insistent in their desire to have a healthy work-life balance.

Those who have taken the plunge rarely look back and if they do it right (it isn’t hard to do) their employees are happier, more productive and they are more loyal. Allowing employees to work remotely not only benefits them, it is benefits their employers, who save time and money by giving their workers the freedom to work when and where they want. An employee who doesn’t feel like they are just part of the daily grind will be more willing to put in the work that needs to be done and less likely to burn out, as the lifeblood of any business, the workers’ welfare should be top priority.

For the purpose of this blog a business called Clever T-shirt Co. (CTC) has been invented, and this hypothetical business will be used to outline the ideas expressed within. Now, it might be appropriate to give you some kind of a back-story to this made up business, so let’s just say that Clever T-Shirt Co. is an Australian start-up company based in Sydney that makes T-shirts with clever prints on them.

They are still in the midst of establishing their business, and they have been watching the market and collecting data on what their consumers want and what their competitors are doing. They can see that they would benefit from having some presence online, but the team that they have in Sydney at this point is just a small collective of artists who want to sell T-shirts, they don’t really know how to go about it all. They could hire a graphic designer from Melbourne, programmers from Buenos Ares, and content writers from Delhi, London, Seoul, or anywhere else in the world. Outsourcing work has never been easier than now, and freelance workers are fast becoming one of the most viable resources available, these freelancers could build their online profile for them in a fraction of the time and cost it would take if they had hired locally. CTC could essentially become a twenty four hour operation in this period, but who’s to say it has to end there?

There are companies like Brisbane based clothing company Black Milk who have managed to successfully run an online-only business, to the point where the cast of Game of Thrones are posting selfies of themselves wearing the company’s leggings on Instagram. Black Milk has built up a strong brand online, and they use social media way to market their product – at times it’s almost like self-willing celebrity endorsement. While it may seem counter-intuitive to run a clothing business solely online, this company has flourished within those parameters and might even act as an example of things to come in a world that is increasingly digital.

If CTC were to take this online-only approach, they would eliminate the need for a shop front, and if they outsourced their manufacturing & distribution, all they would need to do is provide designs and hire a couple of people to market their product and manage their social media networks. If they  chose to go online, they would open themselves to a much larger portion of the market as they would not be restricted to the borders of their city in terms of consumer base.

Smaller companies now have the chance to compete with the big brands and corporate-powerhouses that dominated the market in the past, and this is because the internet has done so much to level the playing field. It has given ‘the little guy’ access to resources that would have been impossible to attain in the past, from the skilled workers needed to build a website to the manufacturers who make the product.

If you set your mind to it you can achieve great things in our new world of work, we have more opportunities than ever before to create things and collaborate with brilliant people and it’s time we took advantage of the age we live in.