New sharing economy is a money spinner
Technology, millennial tendencies, new business models and globalisation are changing the way we work. The very nature of work is under scrutiny.
What are the contours of formal work: a pension? Regular hours? A written contract? A boss? A desk of one’s own? The forces shaping work are contradictory. There is freedom that comes with being a partner or member, rather than an employee.
The appeal of entrepreneurship and independence has spawned a lifestyle of (mostly men) who dress like “urban poets” and do not have to conform to the strictures of office life. The scenes of The Office or the frames of Dilbert no longer speak to the reality of many adults in major cities across the world. However, this footloose “worker” has also lost stable benefits, a predictable career trajectory and a sense of community.
These shifts in the way we work express themselves in the spaces and communities where we spend our days. Gone is the quadrilateral office with a door that I got for my first job. Even at corporates, the demands of openness and flexibility mean I have spent most of my career working in open-plan spaces, even hot-desks.
The loss of community, and basic amenities like printers and canteens, that comes with independent pursuits has spawned a new category of offices: the co-working space and the platforms that advertise them like Coworker and WorkNasi (which helps to navigate the African market).
This movement has created the obligatory unicorn in the form of WeWork, the category leader in flexible, shared spaces, now valued at $20bn. Though the numbers are impressive (175,000 members out of 200 sites in 65 cities and 20 countries; the largest office occupier in central London), the company’s valuation is the subject of heated debate.
It is indisputable that the company does more than tart up disused warehouses and parcel them out. Like similar tech start-ups, it generates incredible amounts of data about how people work and what keeps them productive and inspired — a gold mine for employers seeking to maximise output per worker.
Spaces run by companies like WeWork and Regus don’t just appeal to independents and start-ups but also to corporates. They use them to meet their overflow needs or to remove the impact of long leases from their financial results. Others do it to offer the “co-working” lifestyle and networking opportunities to specific teams, especially creatives.
Critics have argued that these companies sell the idea of community to a new generation of workers facing precarious conditions, profiting from the plight of gig workers without so much as a desk of one’s own. The amount of data and insight into people’s movements and habits can turn these open spaces into new-age prisons.
A few weeks ago, I took a tour of a co-working space in Montreal. Over Skype, with laptop in hand, one of the cofounders took me around the building, beautiful and cosy, designed with a collaborative community of independent workers and entrepreneurs in mind. It was early morning in Montreal, but I got to meet and see a couple of members, including a father who had come in with his daughter.
I am engaged in research to take our company’s modest communal work offering to the next level, to create a womanand parent-friendly space but also one that practises an inclusive business model.
The space in Canada is organised as a co-operative. This suggests avenues for the new sharing economy to evolve in an inclusive and sustainable manner. As things stand, the sharing economy threatens to generate new concentrations of wealth, with limited benefits for the communities its giants purport to serve.