How coworking just became the new normal of working
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of workplaces will be operated by the same principles first seen in coworking spaces. It is time to acknowledge that “coworking” is becoming “working” in 2021.
As a species, we have developed the skill of creating narratives and stories about the world we were living in some 70.000 years ago. Most of our cultural and economic life is centered around those narratives. For example “religion”, “economy”, “sports”, “family”, “home”, and many more. These help us collaborate and build resilient societies.
“Work” and “the workplace” is one of those big narratives of our times. It used to be that you went to the same office, 9–5, five days a week. This has gradually changed within the last two decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has finally pushed this transformation to the tipping point.
The reign of the traditional office is now over.
The Origin
Nearly two decades ago a small but significant group — mainly freelancers and entrepreneurs — was suddenly freed from the need to come into the office every day. Enabled by cheap laptops and the rise of the internet they could work from where they want. They had no boss that would tell them to come in. They could get all their work done anywhere where there was a stable WiFi connection and electricity.
They would start work on their own terms outside the boundaries of 9–5 and the traditional workplace. They worked from their homes, coffee shops, libraries, holiday resorts, and many other locations. Eventually, they started their own version of the office: the coworking spaces.
At the core of those new spaces were two principles:
- Community: A workplace should be a community hub and not a sea of desks. It should be mainly a place to network, collaborate, and work together.
- Flexibility: A workplace should be totally flexible to use. No long leases, everything bookable and changeable by the day to reflect changes in personal, professional, and family demands.
Those principles weren’t absent from the classic workplace that came before, but at coworking spaces, they were front and center.
Now that the classic 9–5 office was gone, people could choose their working times and places due to what is best for the task, the project, or what the family needed. On some days, people would come into work at a coworking space and on other days they would stay at home depending on what they had to work on.
Those flexible spaces would also become the breeding grounds for innovation and entrepreneurship because of the diversity and social nature of the environment. Successful startups would from now on be founded in coworking spaces rather than in garages.
The Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic was a black swan moment for this new way of working. A change that would otherwise have taken more than a decade. A hybrid work model that was previously only used by a slowly growing “niche” group of the workforce was now being adopted by millions of people around the world.
Twelve months after the outbreak, the idea of “going to work” meaning “going to the same office every day” starts to sound ridiculous. A more hybrid approach towards the workplace is what most organisations embrace and implement currently into their workplace strategies. From now on the average corporate employee will be able to stay at home a couple of days per week or only go in for a reason.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed within a few months what otherwise would have taken years to materialise.
The “Co” in the post-pandemic workplace
Organisations and companies around the world are now rethinking their office space, whilst moving forward with a flexible and social perspective. They are correctly taking into account that if people no longer come to the office every day, the workplace needs to put a bigger emphasis on human interaction, and provide better flexibility for our ever-changing lives. The offices now must be community centred.
Salesforce describes this in their official new “Work from everywhere policy” as follows:
“We’ll be redesigning our workspaces over time as community hubs to accommodate a more hybrid workstyle. Gone are the days of a sea of desks — we’ll create more collaboration and breakout spaces to foster the human connection that can’t be replicated remotely.”
What started in early coworking space models is now coming to the offices of the world. The hybrid work-style between home and office, juggling workload, family, projects in a non-binary non-9–5 manner went from the fringes of the coworking spaces and the gig economy to the mainstream this year. Organisations big and small now look to coworking spaces and gauge how much of their headquarters should work like a coworking space and how much of their workforce might work from one in the future.
Convergence
Companies like Shopify, Facebook, Spotify, and many others moved to a remote- or hybrid-work model this year. They not only have to rethink the way they operate their headquarters, but they also will rely heavily on flexible workspace providers to host their remote or hybrid employees.
Providing office space to employees stops being a primary function of the organisation. And as a secondary service, it might as well be dealt with by external providers. We already see this convergence happening in many ways:
- Corporate headquarters that are run by coworking-as-a-service providers
- Hub and Spoke Models where the spoke-part is hosted inside coworking space providers.
- Multi-Workspace-Memberships that provide access to an office on an individual basis.
In a not-so-distant future, it seems most companies will be real estate-less and run their workforce on some kind of coworking-cloud. If you want to deploy a team of 50 to Berlin, push this button. The coworking-cloud will form an office around them. It might even look very inevitable in hindsight because “why would you run your own office… can you believe they used to do that?”
The Golden Age
It nearly looks like we are heading into the golden age of coworking. The operational principles of these originally independent community workplaces for “freelancers, entrepreneurs, and start-ups” are now the new standard for everybody. We all become coworkers. It allows people more choices and makes them happier and more productive. It even reduces the ecological footprint of work because of less commuting and smaller offices. And it all happened much quicker and in a totally different way than we would have thought twenty years ago. What else can we hope for?
The one thing that ironically might happen along the way is that we no longer call it coworking. Instead, it will just become the new normal of working.
About me: I am a serial coworking entrepreneur for more than 10 years now. I founded betahaus, one of Europe’s first coworking spaces. Next to betahaus, I am currently working on One Coworking to build the future of flexible workspace access.
I write about my work and speak at conferences. I also advise companies and organisations on how to embrace the transformation of work, hybrid work, and real estate, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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