Are Third Places the answer to FIFO mental health challenges?
Loneliness has been highlighted as one of the main contributing drivers of poor mental health amongst remote workforces.
Facilitating positive interactions and the formation of social bonds between workers is vital to creating the home-away-from-home environment necessary to mitigate the mental health impacts associated with FIFO schedules.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of a third place, it is an idea that articulates a distinction between the kinds of locations and environments that people spend their time. The first place represents the private place of one's home, the second place encompasses formal places of gathering such as universities and workplaces, and the third place represents public or commercial spaces that provide informal opportunities for people to gather, mix and socialise on neutral ground.
There are a range of examples of Third Places that we interact with in urban locations such as dog parks, community gardens, cafes, farmers markets and public pools. While these places certainly exist in regional and remote communities, it is more common for third places in decentralised populations to be associated with alcohol consumption.
Integral features of Third Places relate to their utility in facilitating social interaction and connection in a way that is welcoming to a diverse range of individuals. While some third places have demographic membership specifications such as women's associations or men's sheds, the underpinning value of third places in general is their ability to remove barriers to interaction between people, regardless of social, economic, demographic or physical differences.
While some third places certainly centre around the supply and consumption of alcohol - like the phenomenon of the local pub in Australia, where locals go to passively socialise with other members of the community - many of the factors that make third places positive and welcoming spaces don't gel with the
realities of Australian drinking culture, which is often associated with the antisocial behaviour that goes hand in hand with Australia's drinking culture.
The reality of remote accommodation options in Australia is that companies looking to house their workforces in remote locations are limited to outdated models of highly utilitarian accommodation in the form of homogenous rows of sardine-tin rooms. The bed and four walls approach to housing remote workforces leaves workers at a higher risk of developing mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, as their accommodation barely provides a reprieve from work, and certainly doesn't provide the kind of home comforts known to mitigate the discomfort and loneliness of working in a remote location for extended periods of time.
The Stayover Model, pioneered by Ausco Modular, provides a potential blueprint for the integration of Third Spaces into remote accommodation camps from the design stage. Ausco's Stayover location eschew the traditional remote camp approach of prioritising utility and homogeneity, and instead embraces a design that uses philosophies and concepts from the hospitality industry to combine the practicality required of large-scale accommodation, with the customer-centric comforts and practices of hotel and resort style accommodation.
Looking at an aerial view of Ausco's Stayover Village in Chinchilla, the care and attention paid to design and maintenance of the living environment for guests is immediately clear. Rather than straight lines of buildings packed together with no consideration for guest comfort, the Stayover Village shows winding pathways interspersed with verdant gardens, and buildings centred around the comforts, amenities and gathering spaces available to guests. Further than this, what cannot be seen from the aerial view, are the other hospitality and guest-centric aspects of the Stayover experience, tailored specifically to the needs of FIFO workers, such as the layout of rooms to ensure that those on night shifts are placed further away from social spaces to mitigate noise impacts for trying to rest during the day.