How does coworking prosper?

There are as many solutions as there are types of coworking offices, but a few touches can serve to stand out and create brand value as a collaborative space. The small details are important because the wide variety of professionals, who are looking for a coworking space, are going to look at them to sign up.

"Coworking as a connection catalyst

A coworking is not just a workspace. It is a catalyst for projects and innovations of the companies it hosts. Therefore, it is essential that the collaborative center makes all possible tools available to its coworkers and thus motivate, by all means, different synergies between them. It could be said that the main task of a coworking is to ensure the emergence of connections that lead to a strong and useful community.

Therefore, the prosperity of a coworking will depend on the health and strength of its community; without it, it is doomed to failure. Studies conducted by Coworking Europe, after the coworking boom of 2012, suggest that only those that managed to manage, maintain and grow their communities stayed afloat.

"What is your value proposition?

One of the keys, which we have already told you on other occasions, lies in finding the value proposition of coworking. However, attractive spaces and a community are not enough. Times are changing fast for coworking and users are becoming more demanding.

There are different ways to give a shared office a unique value. The most common is specialization in a niche market: craft coworkings or even cookworking coworkings were among the first to be launched. But there are many more ways. One of them can be to maximize the space and location of the site. If the coworking is in a privileged enclave or has areas that others would kill for... why wait to take advantage of it?

Another possibility to generate a value proposition, aimed at the community, is the coworking philosophy itself. Something that a priori seems to be only within the reach of large spaces. The idea is not to focus on a niche, but on currents such as training, business start-ups, innovation, work-life balance... And if none of that works, you can always resort to expanding the list of services for customers or join a larger entity that provides visibility and dissemination.

What is clear is that there is no magic guide, as some articles on the web would have us believe, nor any manual for dummies, on how to create a coworking space. coworking spaces successful coworking spaces.

"Coworkers are the foundation of the space.

What do coworkers take advantage of all this? There will be those who do not take full advantage of what coworking can offer. But for the rest, the possibility of weaving a networking network, which works as a gateway to a myriad of different projects to make your company rise like the foam, is most motivating. And it is this day by day, this project by project, which gradually creates a community of entrepreneurs. All that is needed is to promote offline and online omnichannel strategies to create synergies, encourage coworkers' own initiatives to make the space their own and participate more.

Creating a community is the first step in building a platform of potential clients. A dense network of interconnected professionals is not sewn in a day: it requires a lot of measures, initiatives and tenacity on the part of the space organizers. As we have said, there is no master guide to create a community, that is the challenge of coworking.

AUTHOR: CARLOS LLERENA

IT executive, entrepreneur, communicator and academic with international trajectory, expert in technology, marketing, project management and complex problem solving.

On the cover: image from the Star Trek movie