5 Community Building Secrets from the Coworking Values Podcast Series: Part 2
Community is the key to a successful coworking space. It makes the “co” of coworking, but it’s a sense of community that makes people feel safe and welcome in any space or place.
We know that community matters, but how do you build it, and what do you need to do to sustain it? For the answers, we turned to three community experts.
Following an event powered by SALTO on this theme in October 2022, I’ve been collaborating with Bernie J Mitchell , the producer of London Coworking Assembly , and Lucy McInally , The Inclusive Coworker, on a series of SALTO-powered episodes of the Coworking Values podcast.
In Part One of this article series, we heard from the following three experts: Stefanie Mayr Mayr (Leasing Manager Office Austria for ImmofinanzArchitect), Matthias Hollwich , (Founder and Principal of HWKN Architecture, and author of “New Aging: Live Smarter Now to Live Better Forever”), and Matthias Zeitler (the legendary founder of Coworking Bansko, Bansko Nomad Fest, and now Coliving Semkovo).
In part two, we share secrets according to:
Here are 5 things those speakers told us about community building.
Shortly after Ali Kakande launched Carib Eats, she met a lonely widower named Malcolm. Ali encouraged Malcolm to join her community lunch, serving the residents living around Old Street, many of whom are older and experiencing loneliness. It’s changed Malcolm’s life. Ali puts this down to the welcoming and friendly people in her community, but it’s Ali who brought this group together in the first place, with food enabling those connections to form.
For Ali, ‘food is our hook…what we do is about connection. When you’re disconnected, life is so different when you’re connected, with people.’ Similarly, in Part One of our community building series, Matthias Zeitler shared how bonding within his coworking community happens when they have lunch together.
Equally, while designing global WeWork offices, Dean Connell found that eating together has huge cultural significance, like in Indian cultures. ‘Instead of having canteen style tables for 2-4 people,’ he says, ‘we would design lots of big banquet tables with benches to pull up to the table, to give the coworkers a huge communal dining session.’ Dean refers to this as thinking glocally – combining global and local.
Indeed, having physical in-person connections can make people feel good. Caleb talks about the ‘physiological response of being around other people. We get endorphins from giving high-5s, fist bumps, and hugs, just being around other people, there is that energy.’
Caleb is a strong believer in brand, describing it as ‘the value, the belief system that gets aligned with’ the business or community that’s being built. For instance, Nike founder, Phil Knight, founded the brand after being inspired by ‘the hard work, the discipline, the journey that athletes go through to be inspiring. He built a brand around championing athletes and he championed lots of other people and they bought the shoe,’ says Caleb. Now, there is a community of people wearing Nike shoes. Community comes together when a core mission is established, and that community is placed at the heart of everything.
‘The key to community is creating fans…and environments where people feel like they belong and they feel taken care of and they’re around like-minded people,’ says Caleb. In coworking, operators can begin by identifying the professionals they wish to elevate and empower. For Caleb, he empowers entrepreneurs – they’re ‘our athletes, our superstars.’
Ali’s mission is ‘to help people and feed them.’ Working primarily with older people who live alone, Ali wants to help her community overcome loneliness. This innate drives comes from Ali’s personal experience of feeling lonely. When she moved to London, she didn’t know anyone apart from her mother. Loneliness ‘ is a really awful emotion to feel,’ says Ali. ‘When I gave that meal to that [first] guy…I know what that felt like, to be in that house by himself.’ Ali also shared how when she first began delivering meals in lockdown, she noticed how at first, they would open their doors slightly but several weeks later, they’d be chatting with her for a while.
Dean’s design consultancy exists to reduce waste in the workspace industry, under a circular approach. In fact, only 10% of office furniture is recycled, according to the European Federation of Furniture Manufacturers. Dean felt that the industry as a whole could ‘adopt more circular processes that are aligned with nature.’ He reckons it’s really important to understand what people want in their spaces, and make conscious choices when procuring objects.
Not only does Dean advise operators to think carefully about office design decisions from a sustainability perspective, he also links design to community building, urging operators to think – ‘how do we create the best environments for people to occupy?’ For example, ‘Where would we place the coffee machine?’ a water cooler of the twenty-first century, and ‘Where are we going to place the reception to facilitate the best communities to grow.’ Likewise in Part One, architect Matthias Hollwich shared that he has designed communal spaces enabling people to meet, like a small staircase that encouraged social interaction in a coliving space.
Similarly Caleb believe that community is designed around ‘our why…and our individual purpose.’ Once that’s established, it can be ‘put front and centre in all our communications. Then we attract people who align with that….whatever it might be…the more those people grow, then we’re in the centre of a community that we’ve curated.’ In the coworking world, operators must decide who they’ll support, help and empower in their professional lives. He advises: ‘Start communicating your values, attract people who align with that, and that’s who you support.’
While Ali has only just begun coworking, with her first coworking experience being at Urban MBA , the friendly and welcoming nature of the place has been a fantastic introduction to coworking. She’s fortunate not to have ‘experienced that kind of coworking where it’s cold, you go in and no-one knows your name and you leave,’ adding – ‘I don’t thrive in those environments.’ Of course, this space, like many others in the workspace, understood who it is for before building out the community.
But before a community is even established, or designed for, the needs of that community must be understood. Ali, for instance, understood her community from the very beginning, with the first iteration of Carib Eats requiring Ali and her friends to cook and deliver meals to the front door of their community. They understood that first of all, these people needs a delicious food before a community was brought together under the second iteration of the organisation.
Caleb is working in a realm of the industry known as Space-as-a-service which exists to give ‘somebody the exact space they need, for the exact length of time they need it, for the exact thing they need to do.’ It’s about serving them, and truly understanding what they want and need. That ties workspace into the hospitality industry, which Caleb defines as a way of ‘making people feel good about themselves.’
In his experience, Caleb has delivered hospitality to his community by hiring people that attract and align with the type of people he wishes to become a part of the community. They do this by hiring a community manager, someone who runs the space well but who also ‘becomes friends with our people, who fist bumps them everyday.’
Dean similarly believes that the community must be understood first of all. He advises operators to consider who they’re creating space for, and possibly undertaking a community survey to confirm that. For insurance, a large workspace complete with a cafe and barista simply won’t work for someone who might be better off working from home distraction free. But it may work for a young professional who are otherwise working from their bedroom because they share a home with friends. Dean concludes: ‘understanding what people do is key and finding out what people are doing.’
‘We can all agree that coming together face to face is valuable, especially in a virtual world,’ explains Caleb about the purpose of workspace. But he caveats that by questioning whether we need to meet every day. ‘The reality is that you sometimes need to go in, some people don’t and some people do. There’s a lot of nuance to that.’
Dean believes that work is ‘nuanced for every individual,’ because ‘the nature of work has changed fundamentally, especially with the advent of AI.’ Post-pandemic, a greater pool of workers can work remotely, and more flexibly. For example, an individual in client relations meeting their client in a trendy coffee shop is still working, like Dean and Bernie were when they recorded the podcast together. Caleb goes on – ‘during the Covid years, the world learned you don’t have to be in the office.’
Dean proposes that the definition of coworking refers to when you’re working around people who are also working, but not necessarily working together or in the same company. He theorises that working can be batched into sessions, with workers deciding which space works best for them.
Community doesn’t just exist in coworking spaces, and often coworking spaces aren’t just spaces for work to happen in. A coworking spaces might double as community hub, like in Ali’s, it becomes a canteen which is hosted at UrbanMBA, an EdTech space in London. Equally, Bernie launched the Creator Write Club in different coworking spaces across London so that writers had a place to get focus work done.
Community is the key
If these insightful episodes teach you anything, it’s that you can’t underestimate the power of meaningful human connections. Community is the key, and we’ve learned so much from these exceptional community builders.
How will you go about building your coworking community?
Read Part One of this article series, and listen to the Coworking Values episodes:
If you’d like to be featured in an episode of Coworking Values or just want to exchange on how SALTO WECOSYSTEM is involved by digitizing building the future proof way, get in touch.
100% agree that community is the beating heart of coworking, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to build at Zenith Workspaces. We’re brand new, so the community is still growing, but the goal is a space where connections happen naturally, and people feel supported. What do you think is the best way to bring those first few core members into a coworking space?
Building a strong Community
9moVery nice article! Thank you for sharing your secrets! :) I totally agree “community is key!”