It’s been about 9-months since we published, “Introducing ‘Home Base’ — A Needed Office Space Alternative for Austin,” and as promised, below is our follow-up on this grand experiment!

To catch you up, we have ditched our traditional office for what we coined the ‘Home Base’ model.

The Home Base model leverages East Austin’s newest coworking spaces – Atmosphere Coworking – along with remote working options for our entire team.

Our space at Atmosphere allows us to enjoy exterior and interior branding while allowing the entire team tremendous flexibility on when, how, and where to work. Our entire crew meets every Tuesday at Atmosphere for team meetings, while a few stay on and work most days from our coworking space. Many on our team choose to work somewhere outside the ‘Home Base’ space.

And at 9-months in…

How does the space fair? What have we learned? Do we still like ‘Home Base?’

First off, as any Austinite can attest – Austin’s growth and traffic haven’t relented. According to the Austin Business Journal, the greater Austin area saw 159 net new people move into town in 2016 each day, which is 2 people per day higher than reported in the first blog post. We clearly enjoy missing most of the traffic.

How is the Home Base model going for team White Lion?

We surveyed the team and here is what we learned:

Top benefits of the ‘Home Base’ model

• Flexibility
• Avoiding traffic
• Making own schedule
• Interacting with new people outside of our company at Atmosphere
• Time savings
• Decreased expenses
• Face to face time we still have with coworking space

When asked, “How likely is it that you would recommend Home Base to a friend or colleague?” 82% of our team rated the move either a 9 or a 10.

Amy had this to say when asked, “What are 2-3 other things you like about Homebase?”

1. I like not having to deal with traffic.
2. All of our online/virtual tools work GREAT for collaboration.
3. The coworking space we have is amazing!

What are the downsides?

We haven’t really found any. When we asked, “If you were to describe Homebase to others, what would you say?” here is what a few of our team members came back with:

“Having an optional office, allows you to work where you want.”

“The freedom and autonomy to do what you need to do, when you need to do it, how you need to do it, where you need to be to do it. It is the ability to be successful on your own terms.”

“I work for a company that gives its employees the freedom to get work done in a manner that best suits their needs.”

“It is a must for any company wanting to attract and retain professionals in Austin.”

In short, we are thrilled we made the move and could have seen doing this a lot sooner.

What is my balance of remote versus working at our Home Base?

For the first 5-6 months or so I was working 3 days remote and 2 days at Home Base. For the past several weeks, I work most days at Home Base as it gives me a cleaner separation from work and home. Using Waze navigation app, I am able to outsmart the traffic so my commute time is around 30 minutes door-to-door. For the most part, I am cranking on my podcast learning time. That may change and if so, I have the built-in flexibility like the rest of the team to experiment and see what fits best.

As for the energy of our Home Base office, I compare it to the contagious energy of running or biking Lady Bird Lake around downtown Austin.

Do you have any questions or comments?

Feel free to reach out and let’s chat. Here’s to fewer cars on Austin roads!

Read Part 1 of this article:

Introducing ‘Home Base’ — A Needed Office Space Alternative for Austin