When Anne Hendrickson was driving around the Twin Cities as a freelance consultant, she found herself wishing for a space where she could easily combine work with physical activity.
The ambition inspired Work It LLC, a new business Hendrickson opened last month in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood of St. Paul.
It's a "co-working" space that rents desks to freelancers, with the twist that clients can walk on treadmills or pedal a stationary bike while they work. There's also a small on-site gym, showers and a kitchen complete with free olive oil for cooking.
Hendrickson hopes the action-oriented amenities will help the business stand out in the increasingly crowded co-working market.
"The fitness integration is brand, brand new," Hendrickson said. "I think 10 years from now all offices will look like this."
The co-working trend is now in full swing in the Twin Cities, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of shared office space for freelancers and those who work far from corporate headquarters.
COCO, which was the first collaborative office space business in the region, is expanding in Minneapolis, where national chains WeWork and Industrious are opening new offices. Several buildings in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul are experimenting with short-term leases; the real estate company CBRE Group says more than 640,000 square feet of office space is occupied by shared workspaces.
Meanwhile, there's continued interest among desk dwellers in becoming more active. The share of HR managers who say their employers provide or subsidize desks that let workers sit and stand during the day has grown to more than 40 percent, according to a recent survey.