Tag: What is Coworking?

"Hybrid" workspaces, Community Leadership, Coworking, Coworking Communities, The Future of Work

What Will Coworking Become?  “All Ages Coworking”

It’s inevitable.  Workers get older every day, and, as most workers discover, new hires get “younger” every day.  Colleagues can be decades apart in life and in work experience.

Coworking spaces have historically skewed toward younger workers, but that isn’t inherently necessary.  Self-selected coworking communities do tend toward peer groups with similar age ranges, which has a feedback effect of attracting more “workers like us”, perpetuating the pattern.

But in the bright new world of post-Covid “hybrid” working, remote working and coworking are for everybody.  Including workers of all ages.

This spring Will Kinnear writes to ask “How Do We Create Space That’s Attractive To All Ages?” [1]  It’s a good question.  What does Kinnear suggest?

“The problem for workspaces is age.”

(from [1])

(Well, a problem is age.)

First of all, I have to say that Kinnear’s analysis of the problem is shallow and mostly wrong.  He imagines that older workers date back to some stone age “without computers, mobile phones or any of the digital technology”.  I hate to break it to you, but these older workers are, in fact, the ones who invented that stuff, and have been using it since before you young whippersnappers were born.  So, no, it’s not about grandma who doesn’t know what a computer is. It’s about workers with a decade or two experience using multiple generations of technology.

Humph.

Anyway, Kinnear is correct that different people have “different expectations for what a workplace should be like, and their needs vary”.  But this is not about technology, it is about culture and experience.  And it is not about age per se.  There are many sources of individual differences in expectation and desires.  (I’d also note that the needs and expectations change according to task and over time—there is no one right answer for all time, even for one worker.)

Kinnear then poses the question,

“So how do you create offices that can suit young talent but also the generation more used to traditional styles of working?”  

Humph.  So there are two kinds of workers, “young talent” and “traditional” non-talent? Right.

Anyway, again.

The main point is, how do you create a workspace in which workers can find a variety of ways to work, to suit their own preferences? 

This is, indeed, the right question.

Unfortunately, Kinnear gives us no answer, except to pay attention to what workers want.  In particular, “Unless a business is only interested in recruiting 25-year-olds, the office space has to appeal to the majority.” (You may wish to consult your legal department about the ramifications of only recruiting people under 30.)

My own view is that this challenge is actually about the social dynamics of the community, not in technology or furniture layout.  Sure, there are features that might attract older workers (child care, for starters) and features that likely won’t (e.g., all night videogame tournaments).  But the thing that will keep older workers is a comfortable set of friendly colleagues of whatever age.  Sound familiar?   That’s what keeps workers of any age.

So focus on the culture, not on the décor and technology.

And, if I might be so bold to suggest:  don’t just hire freshouts as “community managers”.  Include some grey hairs in community leadership.

  1. Will Kinnear, Generational Shift: How Do We Create Space That’s Attractive To All Ages?, in Allwork, April 27, 2022. https://allwork.space/2022/04/generational-shift-how-do-we-create-space-thats-attractive-to-all-ages/
"Hybrid" workspaces, Coworking, The Future of Work

What will Coworking Become?  Kane on “Productivity as a Service”

We’re all wondering just what coworking will look like after the pandemic shutdown.

The “flexible office” industry is stepping forward with pitches, including spiffy new jargon.

This fall Kenny Kane writes about “Productivity As A Service”, which he links to the future of coworking [1].

Huh?  What?

OK, the “as a service” tag has been popular for a while, riffing off the original breakthrough, “Software as a Service” (i.e., rent, not own).

So what in the world could “productivity as a service” even mean, with or without coworking?

I mean, productivity is a statistic, a number which can be computed for a person or a group.  You can’t buy or sell “productivity”, so how can it be rented as a “service”?  This makes no logical sense.  Or, more to the point, it is making up a new, trendier word for “renting office space”.

What I think Kane is talking about are the features of an office that help workers and groups be more productive.  Good connectivity, comfortable work areas, appropriate meeting spaces, etc.  These are things that operators do sell to their users, and I think the notion is that operators should be sure to provide the right array of features.  He’s thinking that you charge more for features that arguably pay off for the business, i.e., improve results, AKA “productivity”. So you are renting not just space but valuable infrastructure services.

The “as a service” part also suggests that the operator should provide these features as part of a menu that renters can select from.  I.e., they are not built to order, they are built in as standard parts of the workspace, though possible with options.

OK, this all makes sense, even if the term “PAAS” is an abuse of the historic sources.

What does this have to do with coworking?

I think Kane’s point is summed up in the section header, “Beyond Coworking: Physical Spaces Designed For Productivity”.

He focusses on the original format of coworking, the open plan shared workspace.  As he notes, workers need more than a desk and a chair.  Or at least, many workers, some of the time, want other things.  Such as a quiet space or private office.  So, Kane says, building managers should offer more than just desks-by-the-hour in a big “chatty” room.

“For this reason, we may start to see coworking evolve from chatty social hubs to productivity destinations.”

(From [1])

Kane also notes the important value to workers of having someone else run the office space.  As workers and organizations work back from Work At Home, everyone has a new regard for professionally maintained office and infrastructure.

Of course, Kane makes some good points here.  I’ve been making the same points for quite a while, long before the pandemic.

However, his implications that flexible office space is the future of coworking is dubious. 

For one thing, the idea of coworking emerged out of flexible office rental, so Kane is describing devolution, not evolution.  Coworking spaces have always provided a variety of features, including everything Kane describes here.

In fact, what Kane describes here is basically what I call “sprinkling community on rental office space”.

As I have argued for many years, the essential product of coworking is not office space, productive or otherwise, it is community.  That is why coworking spaces always have a “chatty social hub” at the core.  The social part is what the coworking space is selling.  The rest is just infrastructure.

Tellingly, Kane provides for this crucial function in the form of “Designated collaboration rooms to keep noise levels at a minimum.”  Let the hippies have their little room, he is saying, while the real workers hunker down alone in quiet, private offices.

Is this the future of coworking?  Hardly. 

A successful coworking space must be all about building and sustaining community, not about selling “productivity as a service”.   This requires community leadership (i.e. talented humans) and plenty of face to face interaction.  And, no, there is no such thing as “community as a service”.

Is this PAAS future of rental offices?  Maybe, but who cares?

The good news is that you can build a good coworking community on top of many variations of flexible office space.  So PAAS may enable coworking operations to build and sustain their communities.

“Community as a Layer on Top of PAAS”  There’s an Nth order buzzword!

  1. Kenny Kane, The Rise Of Productivity As A Service In The Coworking Model, in Forbes – Forbes Biz Council, October13, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbizcouncil/2021/10/13/the-rise-of-productivity-as-a-service-in-the-coworking-model/

Coworking Spaces, The Future of Work

Trends: Just how expensive is a coworking desk?

Part of the attraction of a coworking space is reasonable cost.  Independent workers generally can’t afford to rent conventional office space, so a local coworking space or spaces offer cost-effective alternatives. 

Part of this savings comes from “on-demand” rental, with only-what-you-need pricing.  If you need a desk for one day a week, or for one week a month, you don’t need to pay for unused capacity.  Similarly, other facilities, such as meeting rooms, are available just as needed.

Of course, in the best case, when the worker is part of a community of peers she is getting a lot more than a desk and utilities.

But just what does basic coworking cost? 

This spring, Circleloop reports a compilation of coworking in major cities [1].  These figures reflect local conditions, of course, supply and demand and the availability of competing alternatives.  But they are surprisingly similar across the survey.

It is interesting to see that the most expensive cost per month, Lichtenstein at £464. is not that different from many other cities.  And even the least expensive in the survey, Buenos Aires £37, is not that different.  Mainly, I suspect, these figures track the overall cost of office space in these locations, as well as the general state of the local economy.

Naturally, these figures are a bit hard to interpret precisely.  Are these “hot desks” truly equivalent in all these facilities?  Probably not, at least in the sense that the cities have overall different infrastructure and environment.  For that matter, these are averages with no indication of the variation among different coworking spaces.

In any case, I predict that prices will be quite a bit lower in the next few years.  Vast amounts of commercial office space is empty and looking for users.  There will be opportunities to open or expand coworking and offer very much cheaper rents.  This will mean new coworking spaces, and, I expect, many smaller, boutique-y spaces. 

I hope many will be attached to child care facilities, which will benefit working parents, and possibly provide income for child care facilities.

There will also be a lot of coworking spaces outside city centers, and even—gasp—out here in the corn fields.  We have learned that we can work remotely, but remote workers still need colleagues. 

In short, these statistics are both out of date and probably not representative of several important trends in the near future.

  1. CircleLoop, The Co-Working Index:  Where in the world is the best city to co-work post-Covid?, in Circleloop Blog, May 7, 2021. https://blog.circleloop.com/the-co-working-index

What is Coworking? What will Coworking Become?

Coworking, The Future of Work

What is Coworking?  Let’s Think About What Coworking Will Be

I have been observing and investigation coworking since 2015 or so.  From my earliest explorations, it was very clear to me that the key feature of a coworking space is that it is a face-to-face community.  As Zachary Klaas put it in 2014, coworking is “a respite from our isolation” [1].

As I have put it more than once: “Community, community, community”

Furthermore, I have argued for more face-to-face time, and less digital “community” throughout all aspects of life.  “Turn It Off”.

I stand by these arguments.

But, of course, in the face of a global pandemic, we are all forced to isolate.  All we have at this moment is digital community, for better or worse.  (And we should all be thankful that back in the day my generation was down in the basement booting up the Internet designed to survive a nuclear war.  We sure need it now.)

It is impossible to know for sure, but I’m pretty sure that coworking as we knew it has completely halted along with practically everything else.  Freelance workers and coworking space operators are facing extreme losses, no one can work together.  It just isn’t safe.

So whatever coworking used to be, it sure isn’t that right now.

We will make it through this.

But for a blog about “What is Coworking?”, we must surely turn to the question, “What Will Coworking Be Next?”

I can’t answer that question today.  But here are a few thoughts.

The gig economy will likely reboot, and there will be plenty of freelancers.  (Who knows whether there will be a living wage, though.)  These workers will still need and want places to work.

Absolutely everybody knows about digital remote working now.  A lot of people are going to be (indeed, already are) hungry—starving—for face-to-face community.

So, yeah, the basic psychological drivers for coworking is and will be there.

The big question is, how will this demand be met?

Another interesting question is how existing coworking communities may weather a period of digital only contact.  One scenario would see communities coming back together in person as soon as it is safe to do so.  But it is also possible that community will disintegrate if the separation is too long.

So, we’ll all stay tuned.

Stay safe.  Be good to each other.  Hang in there.

Peace.

  1. Zachary R. Klaas, Coworking & Connectivity in Berlin. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/11486279/Coworking_Connectivity
  2. Robert E. McGrath, What is Coworking? A look at the multifaceted places where the gig economy happens and workers are happy to find community. 2018, Robert E. McGrath: Urbana. https://whatiscoworkingthebook.com/

 

What is Cowworking?  What Will Coworking Become?

 

Coworking, Coworking Communities, Coworking Spaces, The Future of Work

GCUC Coworking 2019 Projections

It’s Global Coworking UnConference (GCUC) USA time again, and that means this year’s  round of of reports and surveys.

As I commented after attending the 2016 GCUC, this conference has mutated into mainly a trade meeting for operators of “social office” spaces, which is certainly not the whole, or even the most important aspect of coworking.  (For a fuller picture, see the book, What is Coworking?)

This focus is on clear display in the pre-conference (or pre-un-conference) release of a study of “the future of the flexible workspace industry” [1].   (This report was prepared by The Instant Group [2])

The study reports “33,072 centers” world wide, and project 14% growth. (I’m not sure what a “center” is.)  Much of the growth is expected to be in “secondary and tertiary” cities, AKA, fly-over country.  (I have advocated for this move for quite a while.)

There is also projection of strong growth outside Europe an North America.  Basically, it’s last year’s trend, so it’s going to be big in the hinterland, no?  (Not that China, Africa, or Latin America are secondary except in the minds of US and European analysts.)   Also, this reflects not only saturation, but also real estate prices.  There ain’t any such thing as affordable real estate in major cities, so even “tertiary” cities look interesting.

The most telling part of this report is what they consider to be the topic of the survey: “Flexible workspace industry”. This actually refers to a business model for real estate operations, not how workers work or anything else.   From this point of view, the growth is driven by “awareness among clients of all sizes of alternative ways to occupy office space”:  the “client” is someone who “occupies office space”.

If you wonder where the “community” or even “work” went, so do I.

The report discusses the growing interest in “hybrid” spaces, which “cater to a mix of SME businesses that want privacy, alongside start-up, freelancers”.  Conventional companies rent a block of space, but share common areas with un-affiliated  workersand other companies.  “The key for operators of these spaces will be to provide services that cater to both groups while creating a sense of community that encourages all occupiers to mix and feel part of something bigger than just themselves.”  (It’s telling that the workers are characterized as “occupiers”, no?)

I’ve heard that this arrangement is popular with workers, though I have yet to see any evidence of its effects for either the conventional employees or the independent workers.  I can see the benefits of getting outsiders to motivate, help, and “share” with your company’s employees—for free.  But  I have difficulty imagining how employees of a company can “share” with outsiders.

I think it will be interesting to see how this hybrid model actually works out.

In every survey of coworkers, the workers rate “a community of like-minded workers” high on the list of benefits.  Are these hybrid groups “like-minded”?  I doubt it.  This hybrid model does not seem very “peer-to-peer” to me—some of the workers are part of a hierarchy, and others are not.  And some are “inside” and others “outside” the companies.  And what independent worker would donate intellectual property or anything to a company that doesn’t pay her?

The report also contains the same bad news as last year: “we can expect to see increased investment into the industry, potentially leading to increased consolidation from larger scale providers, while smaller independents continue to look towards niche sectors to carve out sustainable business communities.”  Classic, community-based coworking suffers from competition from the massive build up of “flexible office space”.

As the report says, “smaller independents” will continue to exist, but not by competing on price or scale.  “Carving out a niche” simply means “crating a real, local community”, which is kind of the whole point of coworking.

The good news is that this kind of community has been the essence of coworking from the start, and is the very stuff that the giant corporate spaces are selling to their cold soulless face sucking corporate clients.  So I say, pay more attention to the community and the workers, and less to the “clients” who “occupy office space”.  You may not conquer the world or make millions, but you’re community will be happy and successful.

  1. Global Coworking Unconference Conferences (GCUC), The Future looks Juicy – What can we Expect from the Flexible Workspace Industry, in GCUC Blog. 2019. https://gcuc.co/the-future-looks-juicy-what-can-we-expect-from-the-flexible-workspace-industry/
  2. The Instant Group, Flexible Workspace Trends – 2019 and Beyond, in Instant Offices Blog. 2019. https://www.instantoffices.com/blog/featured/flex-workspace-trends-2019-beyond/