By Andrew Lynch, co-founder and COO of Huckletree

Businesses need advisors, not service providers – how the shared workspace industry needs to adapt to the Post-Covid world.

2020 has been a year of upheaval. Suddenly people stopped commuting into city centres, high growth businesses were at risk, cash (and the lack thereof) was on everyone’s mind. Almost as painfully as all of those points, team members were being furloughed, which impacted the speed companies could bounce back. As one of the key service providers to the innovation industry, we too had a serious identity shakeup. COVID-19 has forced us in the workspace sector to innovate our way out of a storm, to go bigger with our strategic thinking about how teams and spaces work together, and redefine what workplace of the ‘present’ looks like, not just hypothesise the workplace of the future. Our sector needed to do that almost overnight.

But seven months on, our social lives have found a new, slower rhythm, but many of us are still working long hours from cramped and ill-equipped spaces, and the long-term toll is damaging. Sure, you can solve a problem or come up with an idea from your kitchen table, but it’s hard to generate speed, buy-in, traction and to get the best out of teams that are not only distributed but are juggling things behind the scenes.

So what does this mean for the office? With unclear advice around restrictions and no fixed timelines around transitioning to work, landlords and company heads are turning to the co-working sector for counsel and guidance on how to create flexible working environments that suit pressures not seen or matched before. For these operators, like Huckletree, who have been sitting in the heart of the tech and flexible work model, they have cultivated years worth of data points on how to create environments that inspire positive and productive cultures of work. For Huckletree, there’s value in taking our knowledge of the sector or the patterns and trends we’ve seen play out for the past 6 years since we launched, to help firms rethink what they need and what is missing.

Corporate teams are right in the thick of this. Our enquiries have doubled month on month since March and we’re in live discussions with enterprise teams with headquarters in London and Dublin. Much of these discussions focus on how they can use shared workspaces more innovatively, to transition their distributed teams back into an office environment but without compromising on culture and without getting hit with termination outgoing costs attached to their traditional lease. This is not new for us, but it’s certainly new for them. What we’re seeing is more HR and operations teams re-evaluating their need for physical workspace, asking employees what they want and asking operators like Huckletree to not only manage their new, often complex, space requirements but to help them ask the right questions in the first place.

These larger firms are also starting to see the opportunities for growth, education and new business working in innovative and historically unconventional environments. Now more than ever, it can’t be just about clocking in or out, and presenteeism, but by being exposed to innovative ways of doing things, via founders and entrepreneurs. While this is a concept Huckletree has always been a big champion of, it’s amazing to see larger businesses discover this for the first time as they join our network.

Many shared workspaces offer programmes and schemes to help upskill and invest in their members. For instance, we launched The Hundreds club during lockdown earlier this year, a careers accelerator and mentoring programme for junior to mid-level team members and up-and-coming talent within organisations. Programmes such as these can help employees learn practical skills for how to advance in their field, but also to build vital connections across the ecosystem through networking events and communal spaces.

The pandemic has forced many businesses – from large corporates to small startups – to rethink their business models whilst also exposing the limitations of working from home. Shared workspaces are helping to bridge the disconnect between the traditional office environment with the flexibility and ease of working from home. This is a positive, not a compromise, as our new members are discovering, and one that is here to stay well into 2021.