🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🎂 Hera Hub turns 10!
Felena Hanson shared that Hera Hub is celebrating a decade of supporting women-owned businesses. Fantastic milestone!
🎂 Freedom Works turns 5.
Jon Trigg shares a few of their community’s impressive milestones over the last 5 years including over £1.4M of member collab deals, and self-funding expansion to 6 locations.
Congrats team Freedom Works!
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📰 Coworking updates.
📲 On an issue that may crash the success of on-demand access.
Last week we saw Phil Kirschner, a future of work expert at McKinsey & Co (and ex-WeWork), shares their frustrations around how on-demand access to coworking and flex space is still broken.
Given my passion for workspace tech stacks, I’ve received a bunch of questions about how tech could be improved to ‘fix on-demand’.
So I wrote about how it’s not just the tech that needs to be improved to enable truly on-demand access to workspace, that scales efficiently.
🗓 New service connects businesses to share offices.
Jon Dweck shares that his new service SpaceThreeTwo is up and running. The service connects (I believe very manually) businesses who only want to use offices a particular number of days a week in the same areas, and shares their budgets.
There must be a way to connect some of that demand to coworking space and/or private suites.
🇬🇧 Gov. launches a consultation around flexible work legislation.
The UK government have announced plans to support 2.2 million more employees in having the right to request flexible working.
The plan is to enact legislation that would allow all employees in Great Britain to request flexible working from day one, cutting the period employers have to consider requests, and better supporting care givers.
“Empowering workers to have more say over where and when they work makes for more productive businesses and happier employees” said Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng.
h/t to both Mark Smukler and Daniel Hinden for sharing.
🇸🇮 Slovenian coworking coop launched.
The Aurora Coworking Network is a cooperative to connect and support Slovenian coworking spaces operating in areas with under 50k inhabitants.
🏋️♂️ Shared space and club for wellness industry launches.
3 lockdowns and two false-starts later, a membership club and shared space for health & wellness professionals in the UK has announced the opening of their first club ‘Until Soho‘.
The club offers shared space: from gym space, expert treatment rooms, to coaching rooms. They also offer access to the latest tech, business support, training & tooling, and networking.
📈 Connecting the dots on the local impact of coworking.
In the last instalment of Atlanta Coworking Alliance‘s series on the local impact of coworking (a topic all alliances should be exploring and sharing), they bring it all together and show how coworking does so much more than just provide desk space and wifi.
🧐 How else could vacant offices be leveraged or shared?
Sophia Kunthara‘s post in Crunchbase post from August came across my desk this week. In it, they explore some other creative ways that businesses and platforms are enabling vacant office space to be shared and leveraged.
Mentioned are things we’ve discussed before like storage space, but what’s interesting is to see a resurgence of things like microschools (or learning pods) and microgyms – which are both resurfacing auxiliary amenities being explored by flex workspace operators.
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💻 Coworking technology.
🔐 Smart lock manufacturer and digital key app partner up.
Parakey and Unloc have announced a partnership to collaborate in the Norwegian and Swedish markers. The latter app will also be able to unlock doors using the former’s hardware.
Expect to see more partnerships and movement in the access control space, especially following the Apple news shared in week 27/21.
⌨️ How proptech is modernizing office buildings for the FoW.
Kenny Kane of Firmspace shares a few ways that property technology (or proptech) is being used to future-proof and modernize existing office buildings.
They explore how proptech is aiding environmental controls, to improving shared tenancies (and coworking ops) and enabling hybrid organizations to become long-term tenants.
🇨🇦 Workspace pass network expands internationally to Toronto.
Deskpass shared their first second international expansion, launching with indie locations across Toronto.
Social media around this announcement also officially breaks the news of Ashley Proctor‘s involvement with helping the platform expand.
*Corrected from second to third, as Deskpass did launch in Australia back in week 19/2021.
Coworking data.
📊 New Vitality Index shows who’s returning to offices, and where.
Avison Young have announced a free visualization tool to help understand who’s returning to offices, and how quickly specific cities are ‘returning to normal’.
Powered by their AVAST data processing system, and utilizing anonymized cell phone data from Orbital Insight, the tool shows measured foot traffic to specific locations across 24 US regions.
🤔 How did coops do, and behave, during the global lockdowns?
Assistant Professor Frédéric Dufays shares a short video highlight how cooperatives behaved differently during the crisis and lockdowns, as well as how it affected them.
With a growing number of coworking spaces exploring, or turning to, the cooperative (member owned) model, this offers some fascinating insights.
h/t Jeannine van der Linden for sharing.
📄 Report explores how coworking has created a strategic asset class.
Lloyd Budd shares the FLEX & SHARE report by Bayleys that explores how coworking’s growing popularity has caused a ‘quantum shift’ affecting office investment, development and leasing.
✅ Article highlights 3 of the trends we’ve been following.
Jon Muller shares 3 big coworking trends shaping the industry as we march into the fourth quarter of 2021, and beyond.
TWIC readers will be no strangers to any of these, as they’ve been shared and discussed again and again on our weekly calls. They are the rise of corp coworking, the shift towards suburbia and landlords entering the market.
h/t Miroslav Miroslavov for sharing.
Coworking market moves.
🛒 Dutch flex spaces pilot staff-less convenience stores.
Annelou de Groot shares that IWG in the Netherlands have announced that they’re also piloting with unmanned convenience stores in some of their flex workspace locations.
These fully automated stores will allow tenants to buy fresh juices, sandwiches, salads, soups and other meals from local suppliers.
This pilot, in partnership with Wundermart, is the another ripple in the growing trend of workspace operators exploring ways to efficiently bring in more food/drink options to improve tenant value.
Global RE developers bring flex space management in-house.
Annie Rinker shares that Hines & Ivanhoé Cambridge are bringing the management of The Square (THE SQ) at Texas Tower in-house and to their future global HQ.
They mention that this move will allow them to collectively solve fo their customers’ long term, short term and flex needs internally.
💵 Startup lab co-founders launch alumni fund.
Matthew Shampine and Jesse Middleton founded WeWork Labs over 10 years ago. Now they’re inviting all WeWork alumni (ie ex-employees) to invest in a rolling fund, a newish kind of venture fund, to invest in early rounds of startups created by other alumni.
A fascinating move, similar to one started by Airbnb alumni, that I believe is the first fund of this sort from within the coworking/flex space industry.
🏨 Pioneering coliving operator falls into administration.
Aayat Ali shares that The Collective may be broken up by it’s lenders after failing into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Whilst this may be due to liabilities accrued during long periods of lockdowns and downturns in local and international travel, I do wonder what it means for other coliving operators, or coworking operators who expanded into the sector pre-lockdowns.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Ryan Anderson chats with Dr. Andrea Chegut from MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab about how the digitization of corporate real estate is transforming future work experiences, improving our world, and positively impacting bottom-lines.
📆 Coworking events.
🇪🇺 Rural Coworking across Europe.
Sep 30. The London Coworking Assembly are hosting a free event to discuss some of the challenges rural coworking space operators face -from finding (public) funding to the need to explain coworking and its value proposition all over again.
🇦🇺 Australian panel on flex space resilience.
Sep 30. Building Resilience in your Flexible Workspace by Flexible Workspace Australia.
👋 Clubhouse: The future of work has (finally) arrived.
Sep 30. Join Ashley, Shervonne and Denise as we celebrate how far coworking has become, and how fast we are growing still.
💻 FlexWorld 2021 online in October
Oct 21. OfficeRnD have announced the first edition of their FlexWorld Conference, diving into the opportunities and challenges of flex & hybrid work. The event features two tracks, flex & hybrid.
f/d I’m speaking on a panel on future-proofing demand generation.
📸 Coworking + email marketing.
Oct 29. Coworking Convo dives into how email marketing for coworking spaces.
💼 Coworking jobs.
Find or post coworking jobs for free here.