Here’s Why Your 2024 Corporate Workplace Strategy Needs Coworking

• Coworking started as a grassroots movement and has evolved into a legitimate industry, especially after the 2008 recession disrupted traditional office leases.
• Major companies adopted coworking for flexibility before the pandemic, and now post-pandemic work strategies are embracing coworking spaces for their convenience and design.
• The shift toward hybrid work models and coworking arrangements offers companies cost savings and employees the benefits of choice and autonomy, suggesting a reevaluation of workspace strategies is in order.

The coworking “movement,” as it was originally defined, has been part of the workplace landscape since around 2006 — long before the pandemic. Indeed, what started out as a scrappy, not-for-profit social movement has evolved into an industry in its own right. 

The Great Recession of 2008 triggered such disruption in the commercial real estate market that, ironically, coworking became a viable alternative to long, fixed-lease office arrangements. At first, asset owners and brokers wanted nothing to do with coworking — it was a new, untested business model based on subleasing, untested credit worthiness, and radically shorter leases.  

In the window from 2008-2010, buildings across the U.S. sat idle, unleasable. Asset owners and brokers faced the question: Will I continue to insist on 5-10 year leases to heavily credited tenants only, or am I willing to take a flier and earn some money versus no money?

And thus an industry was born. But that is just the economics of it. What I want to talk about here is how coworking now occupies a viable and attractive, if relatively small, node in the larger context of workplace strategy in the post-pandemic era.

Thank You, Early Adopters

As coworking leader Cat Johnson has documented here and here, coworking businesses are not only thriving, but are here to stay. What were once the groovy, Millennial-only alternatives to adult officing, coworking spaces are now viable nodes in the larger world of work.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, companies of all sorts are struggling to balance employees’ genuine needs for flexibility and autonomy with the organization’s needs for co-presence, trust building, and cultural cohesion. Hybrid work has become shorthand for slightly tweaked work schedules which allow people to work from home a few days a week, and at the office the other days. But how new or innovative is this?

Between 2010 and 2020, many forward-thinking companies embraced coworking as a site of work for some portion of their workforce. That list includes household-name companies such as: Dell, Samsung, GE, Deloitte, Unilever, Accenture, Microsoft, and Salesforce, among dozens of others. These companies rented offices for various-sized teams during transitions where they were either building out new spaces or moving to cities where they did not have a permanent office presence. In other cases, the coworking memberships were meant to be much more permanent.

Despite the recent implosion of WeWork, there are thousands of viable coworking businesses out there providing bright, well-designed, and community-forward places to work. As companies make critical decisions about shuttering large-footprint offices in central business districts, coworking spaces located closer to where people live are perfect alternatives where corporate teams can gather — regularly or periodically — in ways that corporate leaders want.

WorkLife Shift at Fujitsu

This is obviously not a novel observation. However, many companies still view coworking as a dubious alternative to a “real” office. Not Fujitsu, the giant Japanese digital transformation firm.

In response to the pandemic, Fujitsu launched a program they call WorkLife Shift. The company closed their large central business district offices and shifted to satellite locations in the suburbs, near where their employees live. However, this was part of a much larger cultural shift at the company.

They embraced a flex-forward, coworking-like arrangement that is quite inspiring:

1. They closed their central HQs.
2. They adopted a digital-first working policy, allowing people to work from home if they choose.
3. They opened satellite, coworking-like spaces where employees can plug in when they do want to work with colleagues. These are located closer to where employees live, to shorten commute time.
4. The satellite offices also house startup companies that are part of Fujutsu’s technology accelerator program. This creates the very type of multi-company environment that gave coworking its secret sauce in the beginning.
5. They now allow employees to seek outside work/passion projects on top of their Fujitsu jobs.

The Name Doesn’t Really Matter

Fujitsu doesn’t refer to their satellite offices as coworking, nor does Dropbox refer to their studios as coworking spaces. But the name really doesn’t matter. What matters is that employees, when they want to work alongside colleagues (rather than working from home or the office), have a convenient and thoughtfully-designed alternative to do that. That there are folks from other companies there too does not take away that team co-presence. As in the case of Fujitsu, the churn of younger, more dynamic startups in the building only adds kinetic energy to the experience.

Coworking and Your Workplace Strategy

As companies continue their long and gradual adaptation to hybrid work, simply scheduling days at the office with days at home is not enough. The cost of 30-40% space occupancy in traditional offices is too great, and more recent efforts to lure people back to offices with amenities is more trickeration than substance.

Despite their high cost per square foot, per month for full-time access, when used on an ad hoc, just-in-time basis (which is what employees are saying they want), using local and easily accessible coworking spaces for company co-presences is significantly cheaper, and more effective. 

Using a simple coworking access tool like Deskpass, companies can offload expensive and underutilized real estate assets and provide places for their teams to meet up in person, in one move. Like all types of change, this entails a change in mindset. Nor does this discount the need for mentoring and learning among younger employees, so co-presence with senior team members will also always be important.

However, it seems time to acknowledge, in general, that there is a massive glut of spaces out there. The idea that a company needs to build more space, or to project power through its legacy of monumental architecture, only further contributes to that glut.

As your company works through its workplace strategy, it makes sense to ask your employees where they would like to work, and how often. Doing the math on that, and comparing that with the ever increasing costs of conventional commercial real estate, is a simple calculation.

Creating a curated list of coworking options in the city, and integrating those into approved locations as part of official workplace strategy, is the obvious first step. Many companies have already done this. Such a move gives today’s employees exactly what they want: choice, flexibility, autonomy, and community.