GigaOM » Liz Elam

No one agrees what coworking is, academic finds

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 13:04:32 +0000

Clay Spinuzzi, an associate professor of rhetoric (yes, rhetoric) at the University of Texas at Austin, took an interest in the area’s budding coworking movement just as it was getting off the ground in 2008. For three years he immersed himself in the community, speaking with space users and owners, studying written and electronic materials put out by spaces and generally trying to get a sense of what exactly coworkers were up to?

The results of that research were published recently in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication in the form of a long and quite academic article (light reading, it is not) that tackles the seemingly simple question: What is coworking, and what do people get out of it? But, it turns out, the lived reality of coworking is not as tidy as Spinuzzi’s straightforward question. He got a bewildering set of contradictory answers from space owners:

Coworking space as community center. The proprietors of Soma Vida and Space12, mixed use spaces, told Spinuzzi that coworking as they all understood it was all about serving the local community. “The object was to work alongside, but not with, others. Consequently, both had quiet policies in their spaces,” writes Spinuzzi.

Coworking as collaboration space. If some spaces were all about offering community members peace and quiet, others insisted they were focused on creating a buzzy environment. Calling this type “the unoffice,” Spinuzzi notes spaces in this category, which includes Brainstorm, Link, and Perch, “encouraged discussions; interaction between the coworkers.” Spinuzzi summarizes the object of these spaces as recreating “characteristics of the traditional office environment that independent workers may miss.”

Some proprietors in this category even ruled the community center type of space out of the coworking movement entirely. “If a space had a no talking policy, ‘then it’s not coworking,’” Link’s Liz Elam told Spinuzzi.

Coworking as networking hub. Conjunctured, Cospace and GoLab Austin, “saw the mission of their coworking spaces as fostering more active connections between coworkers, connections that could lead to working relationships between businesses—contracts or referrals,” writes Spinuzzi. “Their focus was on entrepreneurship.”

He notes that while these spaces were as buzzy as so-called unoffice spaces, they were more focused on formal collaboration rather than informal connections and saw themselves as catalyzing the shift towards more independent work by allowing independent workers to clump together. “Proprietors saw these spaces as comprising a collocated network of potential contractors,” concludes Spinuzzi.

That’s how proprietors thought of their spaces. What did the actual coworkers within them tell Spinuzzi? “The coworkers I interviewed tended to emphasize the unoffice model, in particular, the combination of space and social interaction,” he says, but notes that they were far from in complete agreement about what they hoped to get out of coworking. “Some coworkers expected to work in parallel whereas others expected to work in cooperation,” he writes, noting different expectations for collaboration at coworking spaces.

The fundamental question, what is coworking then, is far from settled, and Spinuzzi isn’t expecting a single definitin to emerge anytime soon. “As cities become more porous and workers become more mobile, we can expect coworking and variations to multiply,” he writes. With larger companies looking at ways to adapt cowoking to their needs, and more corporate remote workers utilizing the spaces, things in fact may get a whole lot more complicated.

What’s your personal definition of coworking?

Image courtesy of Flickr user torisan3500.

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Design stores doubling as coworking spaces

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:03:58 +0000

The web, one observer recently argued, is transforming all our public spaces into coffee shops. Fast internet connections mean fewer of us need to go to the office, for example. Where do we end up instead? Coffee shop type environments. Online shopping, likewise, may transform retail stores into relaxing spaces to ogle products, pick up goods and, of course, down some caffeine. Universities? Online education is pushing them the same way.

If you buy this argument that many types of public spaces are converging on this coffee-shop-like future, then perhaps the latest development in the evolution of coworking won’t surprise you. If both work spaces and shopping spaces are becoming more like coffee shops, why not have them occupy the same space?

That’s what a handful of design and home furnishing stores are doing, inviting coworkers into their tastefully designed showrooms to work. Konzepp, a concept store in Hong Kong, combines the functions of boutique, events space, cafe and coworking space, while in Texas District Workplace coworking has set up shop in Austin Business Furniture. In Hawaii, The Box Jelly coworking makes its home in furnishings store fishcake.

The concept, as Shareable’s Beth Buczynski points out, is clearly an effort by furniture sellers to understand and market themselves to the growing coworking movement. Buczynski writes:

Every work space, whether it’s a large coworking facility or a home office, needs chairs, desks, tables, lamps, file cabinets, and various other tools of the trade. Office furniture companies want to meet those needs, and several have discovered that coworking is a great way to gain exposure among the independent workforce.

“Over the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with most of the major furniture providers: Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase,” said Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of LiquidSpace. “They are all quite aware of the coworking movement, so no surprise to see them dipping their toes into the water. It’s a natural thing for them to do as they observe changes in the work behaviors of their major corporate clients (eg steady shift toward mobility) and seek to apply their knowledge of what makes for a great/productive/healthy/high performance space to the new places where work happens.”

Steelcase has taken a number of experimental steps to understand this new world. They’ve operated Workspring in Chicago for 2+ years (not a coworking space, but an incredibly cool collaborative workspace that can be booked for off-site collaborative meetings) and also operate the 654 Crowswell coworking space in Grand Rapids Michigan

Unsurprisingly given the communitarian leanings of Shareable (the hint is in the title), Buzcsynski advocates welcoming retailers to the coworking fold. “Are businesses advancing their own agenda by offering space to coworkers at no charge? Absolutely. But the onus is on the coworking movement to respond in the spirit of collaboration and community. These values minimize competition and nurture the health of small businesses and local economies. If non-coworking businesses understand those goals and want to lend a hand in their own unique way, why exclude them?” she concludes.

But others in the movement are more skeptical about the interest from retailers, suggesting that their participation in the scene could dilute the spirit of community support that coworking strives for. “It is pretty clear that coworking is the afterthought not the focus,” Liz Elam, founder of Link Coworking in Austin and producer of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, says of these retailers-slash-space providers. “It’s like people working in hotel lobbies. It’s not the primary business and I think you would always feel like a squatter,” she says.

Should coworking fans welcome retailers with open arms or regard them with suspicion?

Image courtesy of Flickr user yutaka-f.

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The conversion to coworking 2.0 continues

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:05:17 +0000

Coworking may have started among idealists and the community-minded as a way to band together to make work better and more ecologically friendly, but as Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, told GigaOM earlier this year, it’s a movement in the midst of a major transition. Coworking is shifting (in fits and starts and with many owners determined to hold to its initial ideals) toward greater professionalization and is increasingly run by the more traditionally business- and profit-minded, King said.

Is he right? Evidence from the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, which was held last week in Austin, Texas, to take advantage of the SXSW influx, suggests he is. Coworking magazine DeskMag attended the annual get-together of space owners and those interested in the movement, and it reported that, among those in attendance, “everyone agreed that the movement is undergoing intense growth and change.” What sort of change? DeskMag describes shifts that sound very much aligned with what King outlined.

GCUC director Liz Elam opened the event yesterday, standing in front of a ballroom full of participants who looked surprised by their surroundings. For the coworking “veterans” (those who have been around the scene for two, three or more years), the surprise was due to the professionalization of the movement and the influx of new businesses.

Or as Mark Gilbreath, the CEO of LiquidSpace, said at the conference, “Today we legitimized a movement,” a fact that was reflected in the organizations that attended. Big business “dropped in to see what all the fuss was about,” according to DeskMag. The increasing interest of corporate America in coworking reinforces the notion that it is moving from an outsiders’ movement to a recognized phenomenon even slow-moving organizations are hoping to exploit. King mentioned that bigger firms were exploring developing “internal collaboration spaces” in the coworking mold to spark creativity and collaboration, and this is something other commentators are starting to catch on to as well.

HR exec and blogger Jason Lauritsen, for instance, recently posted on coworking, noting that the folks using coworking spaces are exactly the sort of corporate runaways big business would like to lure back. “These are the people who we covet in corporate recruiting circles, but who have opted out of the corporate hamster wheel because they don’t like being told how to work — and they are talented enough to dictate their own terms,” he writes. Forget tempting them back to cage-like cubicles. Instead, he suggests:

If we want to attract the next generation of highly talented rock star employees (read innovators) into our workforce, we may need to completely rethink how we organize our workplaces. Instead of assigning desks or offices, we create spaces and places where people can choose to work based on what kind of work they need to do that day or how many people they are working with. We may need to rethink the idea of housing departments together and instead mix it up. Coworking spaces bring together people doing completely different work in completely different industries and they benefit greatly from the collision of ideas and perspectives. What would happen if we mixed up the product people with the business development folks and (dare I say it) the HR folks. One thing you generally won’t find in a coworking space, cubicle walls. Cubicles are miniature silos. They kill creativity and openness. They make us think and behave smaller than we are.

Depending on your business, why not build a network with some other non-competing businesses to create a network of coworking spaces for employees to share and use. These spaces don’t need to be anywhere near your brick and mortar corporate palaces. They just need to have the basics that employees need to work and be designed to feel like a place you’d want to go to do work.

Coworking, it seems, is growing up and moving out of its original geographic and industry-specific enclaves, penetrating the consciousness of more mainstream institutions. That suggests a movement with a wider reach, which slowly but perceptibly, is fulfilling the aim of changing the way work gets done. Or, like hip-hop and graffiti in fast-food and car commercials, corporate use of the original movement might also signal that it has been co-opted, its message of change to the status quo of work lost with only the shell of style (No cubes! Funky interior design!) remaining.

Is corporate interest in coworking a good thing, the first peal of its death knell or something in between?

Image courtesy of Nick Simonite

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Groupthink: Not an argument against coworking

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:03:01 +0000

“Solitude is out of fashion,” declared Susan Cain, the author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, in last week’s New York Times Sunday Review. “Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place,” she continues, arguing that this fetishization of collaboration and the resultant space design and work style it produces is often bad for introverts and bad for innovation.

So how does the fact that “no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” these days affect the coworking movement, which is predicated on the notion that getting together in social spaces improves work? Are coworking spaces the enemy of the “more nuanced approach to creativity,” Cain advocates for, an approach that encourages “casual, cafe-style interactions” but allows people “to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone”? Or can spaces accommodate both needs? We asked a number of coworking space owners for their thoughts.

Don Ball, the co-founder of CoCo coworking in St. Paul, Minn., was unruffled by Cain’s piece, seeing it as directed more toward “ham-fisted” corporate collaboration efforts than the environment at coworking spaces like his. Like several members of the coworking movement who emailed in, Ball felt coworking was actually well positioned to allow the balance of solitude and sociability Cain is championing:

Some of the writer’s assertions actually jibe with our experience at CoCo. Our most popular membership option is what we call a part-time membership, in which members work in our space one day per week to get their social group time. And then stay at home (or who knows where else) to get their heads-down time. So, it’s a sanity insurance policy, if you will.

David Moffitt, the founder of Coworking Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., was equally unruffled, agreeing that coworking allows an ideal situation for workers to regulate their own need for human contact (or lack thereof):

From observing our members in the context of coworking, the thing that strikes me is that people here are able to self-regulate their level of intro/extrovert or community involvement. Some members will pull others into discussion and spend half an hour on tangents ranging from database architecture to preferred coffee or beer brewing methods, while others are perfectly content to make their desks their own bubble or personal island.

But he does stress that it is incumbent on coworking spaces to help members get away by providing private spaces. Cain may feel that the current fad for open-plan offices and collaboration may be bad news for introverts, but Liz Elam of Link Coworking in Austin, Texas, feels that while quiet-craving personalities may be common, those that desire to work in complete isolation aren’t.

“Steve King and I discussed yesterday ‘Hermitpreneurs’ — people who like working from home because it allows them to avoid other people. We guesstimate this is less than 5 percent of the population,” she says. “Most people are not Hermitpreneurs.” Like Ball and Moffitt, Elam thinks coworking provides a good balance for the remaining 95 percent of the population. “Many of my Link Members are introverts but they work from a Coworking space because it allows them to be amongst people and they can interact when they want/need to,” she says.

Like Ball, Moffitt underlines the point that while corporate mania for collaboration obligates introverts to attend more meetings and listen to more office chatter than they would naturally want to, coworking allows complete control over your level of interaction.

At least as long as you have a good pair of headphones. “I think noise cancelling headsets are wonderful,” says Elam. “Why do you need walls to isolate? You can choose to isolate in the workplace.”

Do you think coworking is a symptom of our mania for collaboration or a solution to it?

Image courtesy of Flickr user clagnut

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