Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Walk down any business district today and you’ll see the same thing under a dozen different names — office centers, business centers, private offices, managed offices, serviced offices, workspaces, flex offices. They all promise roughly the same thing: flexible, managed space where businesses can operate without the headache of owning or maintaining real estate.
And yet, the industry that powers the modern workplace can’t decide what to call itself.
Too Many Names, One Shared Purpose
The confusion is linguistic as much as it is commercial. Each term grew out of a slightly different business model.
“Serviced offices” came from the corporate real estate world of the 1990s, “business centers” from the early 2000s, and “coworking” from the start-up and freelancer movement that followed.
Today, those boundaries have vanished. A single provider might offer all of them: private suites, shared coworking desks, meeting rooms, and virtual office services — all under one roof. Technology, hybrid work, and client demand have blurred the lines completely.
Yet search engines, corporate RFPs, and even real estate databases still treat them as separate categories. This fragmentation creates real business challenges, from inconsistent market data to misaligned expectations between landlords, operators, and tenants.
A New Standard: The “Flexible Workspace”
At UltraSoftBIS, we believe the industry needs a single, globally recognized term that captures this evolution: Flexible Workspace.
It’s simple, inclusive, and scalable. It covers every use case — from a freelancer’s hot desk to a multinational’s managed headquarters.
It reflects what clients actually value today: flexibility. And it aligns with the language already being used by global investors, CRE analysts, and workplace strategists.
But the case for standardization goes far deeper — touching nearly every part of the business.
Why a Standard Is Now a Business Imperative
1. Marketing: One Term, One Market
With so many labels, operators are forced to guess what customers are typing into Google. Are they searching for “serviced office”? “Flex office”? “Coworking”?
This dilutes SEO, weakens brand consistency, and raises acquisition costs.
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A single term — Flexible Workspace — gives the entire industry:
- Unified search visibility
- Clearer messaging across regions
- Stronger category recognition
- Easier consumer education
We saw this effect before: when “coworking” became a globally understood idea, it didn’t matter whether a space offered desks or private offices, because customers knew what they were looking for.
That clarity fueled 10 years of explosive growth.
2. Sales: Shorter Conversations, Fewer Misunderstandings
Sales teams lose time explaining what they offer, not because the product is complex, but because the terminology is.
“Serviced office” implies corporate formality. “Coworking” sounds too open-plan for many decision-makers. “Business center” implies something dated or conventional.
A unified term allows sales to:
- Remove friction from the sales process
- Present the offering in a modern, relevant way
- Avoid misaligned expectations during tours
- Respond to RFPs that finally use consistent language
- Position products under one easily understood umbrella
Less confusion = more conversions.
3. Operations: Standardization Enables Standard Systems
Operators today run multi-product environments without a shared operating definition. This makes software harder to integrate, performance harder to benchmark, staffing models harder to optimize, and service delivery inconsistent across locations.
A global standard would allow operational teams to build unified SOPs, consistent service tiers, cross-regional workflows, and standardized reporting structures.
Software platforms (including UltraSoftBIS) could also automate more because the underlying business logic would be universal.
4. Finance: Comparable Data = Stronger Industry
Investors, lenders, and analysts still categorize serviced offices, coworking, and managed offices separately, even when the products are nearly identical. This lack of standardization distorts revenue benchmarks, occupancy comps, forward leasing predictions, cost-to-serve analysis, and operating margin targets, creating an inaccurate picture of performance and slowing the sector’s ability to scale with confidence.
Adopting a single term helps finance teams and investors compare apples to apples across portfolios, markets, countries, business models.
A standard lets the industry be measured as one definable asset class — the way “hotel,” “self-storage,” or “multifamily” already are.
5. Industry Recognition: One Voice, One Sector
The biggest missed opportunity is recognition.
As long as the industry uses five different names, it cannot present itself to the world as one sector. That means:
- policymakers treat operators inconsistently
- researchers don’t aggregate data properly
- media coverage stays fragmented
- associations struggle to represent everyone
- the public still thinks “coworking = freelancers”
A cohesive identity unlocks clearer policy advocacy, more accurate market research, stronger investor confidence, consistent media narratives, and better education for corporate occupiers, allowing the entire sector to be understood, measured, and communicated as one unified industry rather than a collection of loosely related terms.
The hotel industry has STR. The coworking movement had WeWork. Flexible workspace as a sector now needs its own standard identity.
How a Standard Would Help — Just Like “Coworking” Did
The rise of “coworking” is the clearest example of the power of naming.
Coworking wasn’t the first model. It wasn’t even the most profitable. But it had one advantage: it was a word the world could agree on.
Because of that single term, the industry gained viral visibility, mainstream cultural acceptance, global recognition, consistent investor attention, and formal category creation in every major real estate database — all stemming from the clarity and momentum that come from speaking with one unified voice.
Flexible workspace can (and should) be that next unifying term. It captures the full spectrum of what the modern office has become, without limiting the business model.
A Call to the Industry
As an industry, it’s time to speak the same language. Whether you run a business center in Berlin, a serviced office in Singapore, or a private office in London — you’re part of the same movement.
Let’s call it what it is: the Flexible Workspace industry.
That’s how we move from being a patchwork of labels to a unified, data-driven sector ready for the next phase of growth.
