Coffee & Coworking: What Coworking Means Today – with Workbuddy Founder Gaurav Joshi

In this series Coffee and Coworking, we take an in-depth look at the coworking industry. We’ll speak to industry experts, as well as businesses and individuals who use coworking spaces, to get their insights into what’s happening in this exciting space.

In the first article of the series, I sit down with my very own mentor Gaurav Joshi to pick his brains on what ‘coworking’ means today, and how the concept has evolved.

Gaurav is the founder of workbuddy and FlexFinder  – the latest solution for finding the best coworking spaces in Hong Kong. He has been a professional in the area of workplace strategy and real estate for more than 16 years, having led sales teams at global flexible workspace operators Regus and JustCo in the past. Gaurav has a passion for mobile and flexible working, is a speaker at industry events and is actively involved in the startup space. Gaurav believes collaboration is the key to success and the sharing economy opens a world of collaborative opportunities that never existed before. That’s why he founded workbuddy – an app that gives you access to coworking spaces all over Singapore and went on to launch Hong Kong largest aggregator of coworking spaces at flexfinder.com.

Here’s what he has to share.

Coworking is a mindset

Contrary to popular belief, coworking is not a new phenomenon per se; it became popular thanks to WeWork in the early 2000s, but the concept actually goes back further. Coworking combines shared office space with flexible working, and has existed in its previous format of serviced-office space since the late 1980s.

In my view, what has changed is that whereas coworking used to be all about location, now it is more of a mindset.

Difficulties for small companies

Small companies in particular used to find it difficult to rent office space in Grade-A buildings in busy business cities and towns, so having a shared office made complete sense. Firms were able to install their operations at a good address, use shared services without having to invest in them and didn’t require a foyer with a receptionist. Furthermore, there was no need to come with capital upfront for fit-outs and furniture, and new companies had the flexibility to test the waters before deciding to occupy their space.

This has all changed, despite the Oxford English Dictionary definition of coworking remaining more or less true to a concept that’s now four decades old: “The use of an office or other working environment by people who are self-employed or working for different employers, typically so as to share equipment, ideas and knowledge.”

Coworking today

However, these days many aspects of coworking are now greatly different. For example, the reason why businesses use shared workspaces is much more than just about saving money.

More importantly, I would say that one thing that’s changed for good in the aftermath of Covid-19 is the way people work.

Both large and small businesses have had to adjust to many new norms in working life. Some of these key differences are:

• Small companies want to act like big corporations, and big corporations want to learn from small businesses. This collaborative interaction is very well supported by coworking spaces.
• In order to hire and retain top talent, companies need purpose-built spaces that encourage innovation, collaboration and creativity.
• We now have multiple generations of employees at work at the same time. Hence, their workplace needs are different.
• The idea of the workplace where employees worked for hours at the same time – a space where people merely got work done – is a thing of the past. These days, employers cannot tell their staff where and when to do their work, because people don’t work in the same way as they did 10 or 20 years ago. We have moved instead to a results-based working culture, for which coworking spaces are ideal.
• Now that the age of the gig economy is in full swing, people are working for themselves and often working on multiple projects simultaneously. Working with other people on one project, and then going to work with different teams on other projects, has become the norm. Coworking spaces are very well suited to this.
• Companies now understand the importance of community. We are moving towards a workspace future where office views, rental price per square foot or floor number no longer matter. What matters instead is the community your business is a part of, how you can enrich that community and, in turn, how it enriches you.

The future

We should not feel that coworking is going to stay the same way we see it today.

As the experience of the last two decades has borne out – and in particular over the last few years – the shared workspace industry is ever-evolving, and that scenario is likely to continue well into the future as more and more companies adopt coworking as their primary model for business.

Coworking spaces is one of the fastest growing market segments right now and I’m excited to see how it’ll continue to evolve. My team is as passionate as I am; we strive to help businesses of all shapes and sizes get into the best space possible.

 

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