Making a business case for ‘co-working’ movement
In the 1950s, San Francisco birthed the “beats” — cynical proto-hipsters who wore grunge clothing and wrote forgettable poetry. In the 1960s, the City by the Bay gave us hippies, the peace movement and psychedelic music. Later came environmentalism, urban planning, gay pride and open-source — visionary movements that represented new ways of relating to the world.
A more recent movement begun in San Francisco is co-working spaces. Designed to lure solo entrepreneurs and startup teams out of their garages and basements, the movement is grounded in the need for connections. Before he opened his San Francisco Co-working Space in 2005, tech entrepreneur Brad Neuberg says he wanted to combine “all the things I wanted at the same time: the freedom and independence of working for myself along with the structure and community of working with others.”
Co-working’s start was inauspicious. Neuberg rented a space from a feminist collective two days a week. He set up the chairs and tables every Monday and Tuesday for a month before signing up his first member.
A year later, he joined other local visionaries at the Hat Factory, a larger, full-time space dedicated to the proposition that co-working is all about community, collaboration and creativity — not cheap real estate. They expounded their idealistic principles on a Co-working Wiki that inspired entrepreneurs around the world. By 2008, there were 75 spaces globally, a number that has nearly doubled each year since.
Canada has about 100 co-working spaces, from Spacestation in Victoria, to Common Ground in St. John’s, N.L. All share the values of inviting individuals and small teams to rent desks, drink communal coffee, attend community events, and experience the creative collisions that take place when innovative entrepreneurs overwork together.
If you’re thinking co-workers are all Red Bull-slurping 22-year-olds eager to escape their parents’ basements, you’d be wrong. At a threeday Global Coworking Unconference Conference held last week in Toronto, I discovered it’s not just a movement for startups and opensourcers, but a solution to many business challenges. In that spirit, here are my key take-aways:
Co-workers aren’t who you think they are. A survey released at the conference by Emergent Research of Lafayette, Calif., noted that the average age of co-workers is 39. Just 20 per cent are under 30, and seven per cent are over 60. Nine per cent work for companies with more than 100 employees, and 48 per cent are female.
The Open Co-working movement has five key values: Openness, community, accessibility, sustainability and collaboration. But many people have also adopted “scrappy” as a core value. They shun the large, well-funded accelerators and incubators that have sprung up in recent years, believing they prioritize regimentation and results over collision and community. And don’t get them started on those mind-numbing “executive suites.” As two attendees told me, “We’re still hippies at heart.”
Engagement with work is a key benefit of co-working. Tony Bacigalupo, who founded the New Work Collective in New York, noted that “working” used to mean tolerating a job you hated and leaving promptly at five o’clock: “That is not the kind of relationship that the world should have with work.” Co-working lets people follow their heart and find the external support to succeed. As fewer people work “traditional jobs,” Bacigalupo predicts co-working will become a mainstream solution for happiness, economic survival and personal growth.
Canadians are pioneers in this space. Key milestones include the 2010 founding of Co-working Toronto, one of the first city-wide coalitions of co-working spaces, and the 2012 introduction of its “passport” program that lets members move between multiple spaces. In 2013, the Co-working Ontario collective introduced health insurance for co-workers (called COHIP, of course). The program will expand to include Quebec, British Columbia and eventually across Canada.
Canadian tech consultant Tara Hunt, who co-founded San Francisco’s Citizen Space in 2006, is a pioneer of the movement. Now working in online marketing in Toronto, Hunt spoke movingly at the conference about how coworking grew out of the collective Open Source/BarCamp ethos of that era. She was amazed to see the Co-working Google Group grow from 12 members to 1,200, as other entrepreneurs demanded to know how to set up their own spaces, set prices and create community. “We didn’t have the answers,” says Hunt. “We were pulling it out of our butts.”
The business benefits are real. A U.S. participant told me her tech startup looked all over town for a coding specialist, only to find him sitting across the table. Others talked about partnering with (or hiring) co-workers. Beneficiaries include bigger companies that encourage co-working for employees who live far from head office, a process that exposes them to new perspectives, ideas and opportunities. Emergent Research found 82 per cent of co-workers say the process expanded their professional networks, 80 per cent turned to other co-workers for help, and 64 per cent landed new business through co-working contacts.