How can established companies use coworking spaces to their advantage?
While shared office facilities have long been thought of as entrepreneurial or incubation centers, they can also be just what an established business needs to accomplish specific organizational goals.
So when should established companies turn to more flexible coworking?
1. Remote Meeting Rooms
Most coworking locations have either meeting areas or private offices to rent by the hour, so they can be perfect as remote meeting rooms. Your employees on the road can connect in person with prospects and clients in professional conference rooms or day offices, which can enhance their results. Look for a brand with locations across the geographies your business serves to increase the effectiveness of this tactic.
2. Satellite Offices
Rather than manage small offices across several locations, all requiring the infrastructure support that employees need, established companies can use coworking offices to give salespeople, client-service reps, and other remote workers the professional, productive space they need to do their best work. Save your telecomm, operations, and tech staff to support business headquarters and major employee centers, and let coworking spaces support your remote employees.
3. Smoothing Out Growth
As your business grows, your office needs will expand, and sometimes you’ll outgrow your existing space before your new office is ready. Rather than cram people into occupied offices, increasing stress and reducing productivity, look to coworking spaces to help you manage the transitions to bigger office space. Flexibility to arrange space for a couple months is a great benefit to an establshed organization in a short-term space crunch.
4. Project Teams
When an established business has teams with focused, time-bound deliverables, a coworking solution is ideal. Private offices, meeting rooms, lounge space – coworking spaces have everything your team needs to get off and running quickly so it can dig in and bang out its work free from the distractions of the home office. And when the project is finished, you can vacate the space with no additional expense or commitment.
5. Growing Culture
Whether we like to admit it or not, traditional offices often stifle creativity. Office-furniture company Haworth summarizes a study by German industrial-research institute Fraunhofer IAO that found “[w]ith their infrastructure, supportive information technology, and established culture, traditional office systems – while perhaps effective at supporting business outcomes such as continuous improvement – can stifle creativity and innovation.” Coworking is a natural collaborative environment, bringing together people in many different fields to share a work space. Broadening exposure can foster breakthrough thinking and bring new ideas to an established company.
6. Community
For employees working from their homes, a coworking solution can bring a much-needed sense of community. Studies show loneliness in the workplace is on the rise, and working remotely is a significant contributor to isolation. Having employees in a physical space with other people increases job fulfillment, and that translates into better performance: according to global research by Deskmag and Deskwanted, coworkers are 74% more productive than their non-coworking peers.
While coworking spaces are terrific answers for enterpreneurs, solopreneurs, and freelancers, they can also work well for established companies with specific needs, whether those are supporting remote employees, providing carve-out space for project teams or managing organizational transitions.
If you think coworking might help your company, Office Evolution is happy to talk with you about your needs.