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An undersung benefit of coworking: More weak ties

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:03:30 +0000

Weak is generally not a desirable characteristic – not in bodyguards, not in cocktails and generally not in networking. Why would you want a weak tie to a potential collaborator or client when you can have a strong one? A thoughtful recent post for DeskMag by Emergent Research’s Steve King and Carolyn Ockels explains both why weak social ties are desirable and why coworking is effective at providing them.

Having close associates is a great thing, of course, but King and Ockels explain that those we know less well offer different but also important benefits:

Weak ties generally connect people who move in different social or business circles. Because of this, they tend to have different information sets – things you don’t already know, or aren’t aware of, or new ways of looking at things.

It’s not that strong ties (close friends, business associates, etc.) aren’t good at providing information. They are. But because they are strong ties, you are likely to already know much of what your regular social network knows. You are also likely to share similar points of view and approach things in similar ways.

Or in other words, by cultivating weak ties you expose yourself to novel ideas and information. Can coworking help you get more? Emergent recently interviewed nearly 100 members of U.S. coworking spaces to find out. They concluded that, “coworking members tend to see an increase in the size and usefulness of their weak tie business networks.”

Why is this? The full post offers a lengthy explanation and is well work a read in full, but basically coworking encourages the development of profitable weak ties by providing opportunities to socialize more broadly, enabling members to locate and tap their weak ties when desired, and deputizing a community manager to nurture members’ relationships.

Of course, all of this is fancy way of saying that meeting new people broadens your horizons and teaches you things – and coworking helps you meet people who aren’t friends of friends of colleagues of colleagues (and thus more likely to be similar to you). It’s hardly earth shattering news, but nonetheless it’s easy to forget the importance of not sinking into a social rut and helpful to be reminded of what you’re missing out on when you do so.

Are you guilty of getting complacent about branching out more widely with your social network?

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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?

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Nope, independent work isn’t behind rising inequality, says expert

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:00:38 +0000

Last week we highlighted a piece in Canadian magazine Maclean’s that explored the question of whether the rise of independent work was contributing to rising income inequality. And while I argued that it was pretty hard to see how independent work rather than government policy and the globalization of the evolution of tech was the root cause of increasing inequality, the post closed by pondering whether the growing number of independent workers was in some way contributing to the widening gap between the haves and have-nots once the process was under way.

I didn’t have any solid data to answer that question, but one reader did: Steve King, a partner at consulting firm Emergent Research. King shared his insights on coworking with WebWorkerDaily recently and shot us an email suggesting we check out his firm’s research on the question of inequality and independent work. In a blog post explaining his company’s position on the issue, King states unequivocally that there is no causal relationship between the two trends:

As part of the 2011 State of Independence study we looked at independent worker income. We found median per capita income for U.S. independent workers to be roughly the same as the median per capita income for workers overall.

We also found a fair amount of income inequality among independent workers. In particular 3 overlapping groups of independent workers significantly out earn other independents: (1) older independents (55+), (2) independents who have been independent longer than 5 years, and (3) independents that are highly satisfied with independent work.

In other words, income inequality among independent workers somewhat mirrors overall income inequality.

Our explanation — which is based on our interviews and other qualitative work — is independent workers with the right skill sets and experience are thriving and are much more financially successful than those who don’t. This is very similar to what is happening across the workforce in general.

Because of this, we don’t see the shift to independent work as a cause of income inequality.

Instead, Emergent Research feels that independent work and inequality are rising at similar trajectories because both trends are powered by the same phenomenon. Recommending former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism for those who want a deep dive into the subject, King pulls a quote from the book to explain the underlying causes of both trends: “The crisis marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens.”

Maclean’s view that “independent jobs are bad and we should return to a world of traditional jobs is widely held,” King commented. “But it’s not going to happen. The shift towards independent work is too far along and too powerful.”

Has King convinced you?

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One in three coworking space owners plan to expand in 2012

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:10 +0000

When Deskmag presented the results of its second annual coworking survey at the Coworking Europe Conference in November, we brought you the initial findings, promising more details as they were released. Recently, Deskmag published further details.

What did the new data reveal? As Steve King of Emergent Research recently told WebWorkerDaily, coworking, it appears, is exiting its infancy and moving into a more business-savvy second phase with fresh faces outside the original, typical community-minded founders taking an interest in collaborative work spaces. And coworking space owners have apparently gotten the memo about their movement’s exploding popularity, telling the pollsters in large numbers that they hope to capitalize on growing interest in the movement and expand their businesses in 2012.

More than one in three owners (36 percent) surveyed said they hope to open an additional location this year. But not all owners are aiming to be moguls of coworking with a chain of spaces to their credit. A further 10 percent are simply hoping to expand their existing space in 2012. Just over a quarter (27 percent) have no plans to expand at all.

Earlier findings from this same survey indicate only a modest 40 percent of coworking spaces were profitable last year. ‘Wouldn’t owners of spaces in the red shy away from further investment?’ you might ask. The survey results suggest that’s not the case. “Of the spaces that want to open a new location, only 44 percent are presently profitable, while the majority of the expansion-planners are either making a loss or breaking even,” reports Deskmag.

For more information on how expansion plans relate to the number of months a space has been in operation and other details such as owners’ predictions for membership numbers in the coming year, check out the full write-up from Deskmag.

Are owners of often unprofitable spaces looking to expand prematurely?

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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?

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Get ready for coworking 2.0

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:01:43 +0000

Big ideas and big societal changes don’t simply spring up fully formed. Instead, they develop. Whether it’s the several waves of feminism of the more numerically inclined progression of tech 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond, big impact movements spark arguments as they evolve and are relabeled.

According to Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, the same can be said of coworking, a nascent shift in work that involves far less than one percent of workers at this stage but is generating outsize interest from thinkers and writers. Born as a social movement to build community, reduce isolation and also, for some, save the environment from the effects of commuting, coworking is undergoing a fundamental shift in its nature from a social movement to a solid business sector, King told GigaOM. Like any new sector,

You start with a lot of people that are evangelists for the area and they’re really into it as a trend, or as a social movement, but they’re not necessarily the most skilled business people. The pioneers come in and get things going. There’s usually a lot of experimentation and a lot of the early people don’t make it work. But if the underlying business is solid, what you’ll then see is a second wave of people coming in that are thinking through it more as business people. That second wave, generally speaking, are the ones that tend to come up with the business models that work.

One of the very first coworking facilities we visited in ‘06, a place called The Hat Factory, you looked at it and said: ‘This is really cool. This has really got potential, but no time soon.’ But starting about 18 months ago we saw that business models were starting to emerge that were looking successful and that lead us to believe the trend had a really good chance of making it. We’re very optimistic and forecasting that there will be a lot of coworking going forward.

Of course, this influx of business savvy talent into coworking and the changes to how spaces are conceived of and run that they’re introducing, doesn’t mean the total demise of less profit-oriented ideas of coworking.

A lot of the purists will continue to be very successful on their own terms. Many people are much more motivated by other issues than money and building a business, and many of those will continue to be successful with their model. I would point to Office Nomads in Seattle. The owners there are committed environmentalists, committed to their community and their neighborhood and see coworking to push forward that social agenda in a way that they feel good about. In their case they’ve figured out a way to make the coworking thing break even. They have other jobs and they own the coworking facility. They’re smart people and they put together a business model that says, as long as I can make this sucker break even and maybe do a little bit better then that’s a huge success. No matter what else happens with the movement, they’re not going to suddenly shift and try to turn it into a bigger business or a more profitable business because that’s not their goal, and that’s true of a lot of people in the movement.

But folks like the owners of Office Nomads increasingly have company from the likes of NextSpace and pariSoma, says King. These new-breed spaces were founded with more traditional business plans and with both monetary as well as social goals in mind. And just as the first-wave feminists looked askance at some in the second wave and the third had issues with both its predecessors, this influx of new voices into coworking is stirring debate in some quarters.

“We had a coworking owners meeting a few months ago in Los Angeles,” King says. “It consisted of sort of the old guard and the new guard. The people that start a movement like this lose control of the movement if it’s successful and they don’t like it because it was their baby. That’s what’s happening with coworking. The original founders of the movement have effectively lost control and it’s very frustrating for them.”

As the term coworking morphs and spawns hybrids, from jellies and makers’ spaces to startup incubators and internal collaboration spaces created by corporations to spark innovation (and even to the horror of some, gets adopted by community-less purveyors of flexible spaces such as Regus) arguments are erupting about exactly what sorts of spaces get to wear the coworking label.

But for King, the expansive future of coworking is big enough to accommodate a wide range of models. “I do think coworking is in the sweet spot of multiple trends that are converging,” he says, citing the rise in contingent and independent work, tech trends and companies’ ever-present desire to drive down real estate costs. “This will be the year where the size of the industry starts to accelerate more rapidly,” he predicts, but it will diversify as it grows. And that’s OK with King.

Citing the difficulty his firms faces in even counting coworking spaces (about 700-800 in the U.S. is their best bet) due to the heterogeneity of the movement, King concludes: “Coworking is always going to be on a spectrum of which they’ll be sort of this far end, purist view of the world that actually fits the traditional definition of coworking all the way down to jellies at libraries with a lot of stuff in between.”

Are you horrified or excited by King’s prediction of a more profitable, more diverse future for the coworking movement?

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Coworking: A window into the future of work

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:56:32 +0000

First there was bring your own device, now there’s find your own office — and both trends could be equally revolutionary for the enterprise. That’s the gist of a coworking panel at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference that had operators, designers and consultants of coworking facilities talking about the increasing impact coworking is having on large corporations.

Don Ball, co-founder of the CoCo coworking and collaborative space said that many of the early corporate users of his facilities were “going rogue,” with supervisors not actually knowing that employees were working in a shared office space.

But these days, more and more corporations are leveraging coworking spaces, with motivations ranging all the way from real estate downsizing to perks to increased productivity. “When I worked in an office, I spent an awful lot of time to fool around,” said Emergent Research Partner Steve King. Offices tend to be social spaces with lots of parties and other non-work activities, something that doesn’t happen as much in coworking facilities.

At coworking spaces, people tend to be more focused, agreed Herman Miller Advanced R&D Projects Lead Consultant Jennifer Magnolfi. “These spaces simply feel more appropriate for the way we work today,” she said, simply because they reflect the tools we use to work today. She added than many coworking spaces follow different design paradigms than your plain old office, inviting people to learn as well as work.

So how big is the impact this new wave of corporate coworking is having? King said that nine percent of the people who attend coworking spaces in the U.S. now come from corporations that employ more than 100 people. That may not sound much, but LiquidSpace Founder and CEO Mark Gilbreath reminded the Net:Work audience that coworking is already influencing how big corporations design their offices. It might be that the coworking space of the future doesn’t even look like today’s coworking facility, where people rent desk space by time slot. “Hotels have spent 3 billion dollars to redesign their lobbies to feel like coworking spaces,” he said.

Regardless of what coworking spaces will eventually look like, all of the participants agreed that the trend will play a huge role for big companies in the years to come. “Coworking is a window into the future of work,” said King.

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