Workbar on “What is Coworking?”

Boston based Workbar coworking talks about “What is Coworking?”

Hey!  That’s my line!

So, what’s their take on the question?

Their subtitle gives a hint: “Benefits, Perks and the Most Important Facts You Need to Know About Shared Workspaces”.

The crux of the matter, in their view, is “Coworking offers many advantages that have proven to help companies and individual professionals grow.”   (This is not exactly the Coworking Manifesto).

Workbar does get the most important point:  “coworking is not only about sharing a physical space to get your work done. Most professionals using a coworking space enjoy the sense of community….”

They list five key features:

1. The Community Aspect
2. Creativity and Productivity
3. Effortless Networking
4. Lower Costs and Flexibility
5. All-Inclusive Services and Perks

They correctly identify that community thing as number one, and make the common assertion that connecting with others increases happiness and productivity (number two and three).

The other two points are arguments for Workbar’s specific approach.  In their view, coworking competes on price and convenience.  Obviously, your mileage may differ—these aspects shade into other workspaces, such as home offices and public cafes.

Workbar has a second list of benefits, “Five ways coworking makes your day great” [Infographic].

This list overlaps with the first one, but item number one is “No More Distractions”, which means “get out of the house”.  Item three is “Professional Space”, e.g., for meeting clients.

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Finally, Workbar sees coworking as something of interest to “an increasing number of large companies”.  Clearly, this is an important potential market for Workbar.  But I remain extremely skeptical of how well it can work to have, say IBM and Microsoft workers salted in to a room full of freelancers.

“Today an increasing number of large companies are asking employees to work at coworking spaces or at least offering them the option to work from a remote shared workspace on a part-time or full-time basis.”

Sure, it’s cost effective, and might be popular with workers.  (I mean, who wouldn’t like the flexibility of a freelancer with the security of a real job?)  But I have to question whether these workers can really be fully part of a community of independent workers.

Is, say, IBM going to let its workers share their knowledge and activities with random non-IBMers?  They never have been easy about that in the past, with good reason

And should freelance workers freely commune and help out workers from, say, Microsoft?  This might be great for Microsoft, but I personally don’t like giving away knowledge to mega corporations who give me nothing in return.

And will IBM and Microsoft employees be able to talk to each other?  That’s generally not allowed, for good reason.

Look, the idea of a coworking community is that it is a community of like-minded peers.  And corporate workers may be “like-minded”, but they cannot be peers with people outside their organization.  And vice versa.

In short, conventional employees, especially of large corporations, are not going to fit, and may tend to break the community that is so critical for coworking. So I have to strongly disagree with the notion that coworking is going to work the same way for companies as it does for independent workers.

However, I can see that companies will like flexible, inexpensive, even Bring-Your-Own workspace.  And I imagine that some workers may like working near, if not exactly among them as peers.

But I really don’t think this is a formula for good community.

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1. Workbar. What Is Coworking | Learn the Many Benefits of Coworking | Workbar. 2019, https://www.workbar.com/what-is-coworking/.