Paulina Serrato and Joseph Orr met in New York at WeWork 222 Broadway in 2016. They now run a mobile nail salon together that sends manicurists to offices in the city. Jordan Rushie is a lawyer in Fishtown, Philadelphia. He’s written about the ethics of using a shared workspace to run a law firm. He’s also landed at least three clients he met through WeWork events. Krystal Ariel picked up a PR client she met at WeWork. The two eventually agreed to merge their businesses and form an entirely new company.
Other WeWork members have gone even further. Global Pricing Innovations, a company that provides analytics to the biopharma industry, used WeWork to expand from offices in Mumbai to a new location in Cambridge, England. According to Mathieu Proust, General Manager at WeWork, UK and Ireland, a remarkable 49 percent of the company’s enterprise members say that WeWork hasn’t just given them a place to work. The company’s global community has also enabled them to enter new markets. WeWork has effectively acted as a network that has provided channels of growth.
WeWork has been in the news a lot recently. Its IPO was a flop. Its founder has been defenestrated. It’s joined Theranos as an example of what can go wrong when a startup idea has a charismatic leader and overenthusiastic investors. But for all of its financial struggles, the company is still in operation—and it’s still working. The model of offering digital nomads, freelancers, start-ups, and small businesses the ability to rent office space for short periods of time and relatively low costs remains popular. The company now has 609,000 members who can access office spaces in 625 locations in 127 cities and 33 countries around the world.
The main benefit that WeWork offers is a place to work. The company’s main sales points are location, flexibility, and office facilities, including meeting rooms. They provide a way for small businesses to operate when their owners don’t have a garage, need more room than the kitchen table, and want a more professional setting than the local Starbucks.
But no less important, even it’s less flouted, is the company’s networking opportunities—or its clustering effect. This isn’t just the ability to land new clients through personal contact or to find people offering the resources and services you need to grow. It’s also about the exchange of ideas that takes place when sufficient numbers of people doing creative things mix and talk about what they’re doing. Studies have found that a ten percent increase in street density or connectivity in an urban area can produce as much as a 1 percent increase in innovation measured by the number of patent applications. As people crowd into an area, meet in bars and restaurants, and tell each other what about their work, they receive feedback. Their ideas develop and grow. Partnerships are formed. New businesses take shape. It’s why places like Silicon Valley have remained so innovative and have continued to draw in new workers and entrepreneurs despite their astronomical cost of living. Put people together and things happen.
WeWork offers a similar dynamic. Its offices give each member an average of 50 square feet. That means WeWork spaces should be hives of activity where members aren’t just wearing headphones at long tables or sitting alone in tiny, cubicle-like offices. They’re also chatting on couches and drinking coffee together while they describe their concepts and share their learnings. That mixing should create mini-Silicon Valleys everywhere the company has offices, whether that’s Barranquilla, Brussels, or Brisbane. The clustering that WeWork generates is a vital benefit that the company brings both to entrepreneurs and freelancers, and to the places in which the company sets up sites.
WeWork itself recognizes that benefit and encourages social mixing among its customers. The company offers curated events, community initiatives, and networking tools both in each WeWork location and through the company’s app.
“We know that a diverse working environment helps inspire creativity and build collaborative relationships,” says Mathieu Proust. “Forty percent of enterprise members choose WeWork because they want a more creative and entrepreneurial environment.”
Community events typically consist of happy hours, which are informal get-togethers held in the early evening. Lunch-and-Learns are more like pitch sessions: members get to display their products or pitch their ideas while providing a complimentary meal. The company also allows non-members to bring people together at their sites. Events held at WeWork in New York at the start of 2020 include a workshop on conflict resolution; a discussion of non-fiction publishing; and a $65 workshop delivered by a coach who promises to teach “successful professionals” to “make a better impression during introductions. The WeWork office at 10 York Road, London, which is the world’s biggest, has hosted more than 900 events for both members and employees since it opened. Fitness activities include yoga sessions and High Intensity Interval Training. They can take place during the day, time that sounds like it could be better spent poring over a spreadsheet or debugging code.
“These classes are a great opportunity for our members/employees who want to work up a sweat for 45 minutes, and feel more productive throughout the afternoon,” says Mathieu Proust. “We love to see our members taking time out of their busy days to reset the mind and socialise with people outside of their company.”
WeWork even applies the benefits of clustering to its own staff. WeWork’s employees are encouraged to build new partnerships with the site’s members. In March 2019, the company started working with Change Please, a member that was training homeless people to be baristas. Change Please have now put baristas in thirteen WeWork locations in the UK and Ireland. Eleven more locations will be added in Paris in 2020. The fitness events at 10 York Road are run by Reset LDN, a company which was a WeWork member and is now a company partner.
Making the Most of Co-Work Networking
Each of those events creates new opportunities but they also create a challenge. WeWork, and other co-working spaces, provide a table and chair to get things done, but the networking benefits depend on a special kind of effort. They require members to get out of their chairs, look away from their screens, meet new people, and actually talk to them.
Making the most of those networking opportunities is a skill in itself. Judy Robinett, author of How to Be a Power Connector: the 5+50+100 Rule for Turning Your Business Network into Profits, suggests “seeding” conversations with information about you so that people will remember you without feeling that they’ve been sold. She also recommends Stephen Covey’s strategy of “making deposits in others’ emotional bank accounts” by providing favors in advance that build interest and trust. A website designer, for example, could offer some advice to a small business owner so that they’ll pass on their name to a client who needs a new site.
In other words, those Yoga sessions, workshops, and free lunches need to be treated as much a part of work as the design, social media marketing, and Powerpoint planning that takes place at a typical WeWork desk. Members joining a WeWork space need to plan their networking as carefully as they plan their work day. They’ll need to have prepared their elevator pitch, know who they’d like to meet, make sure that their LinkedIn page is optimized and up to date, and understand the impression they want to leave with the people sharing their co-working space. They should also know how to work other members’ networks to reach people outside the site who can help them.
That networking should be enjoyable—and sometimes it might even be too enjoyable. WeWork’s customers have an average age of 36, and women may make up as much as 44 percent of a site’s membership. That ratio declines dramatically for employers but among company employees working in a co-working space, women are even a small majority. That doesn’t just make places like WeWork a good place to find business partners, clients, and sounding boards for business ideas. It’s also a good place to build personal relationships.
When Paulina Serrato and Joseph Orr started working together, they found that more than their skills matched. They also moved in together. Krystal Ariel’s PR client and business partner also became her romantic partner, and that combination of love and business creates risks. Serrato and Orr told WeWork that they leave their phones and laptops in a different room after 7pm, and silence their phones when they go out for meals. But they still talk about the business “almost everywhere” they go. And clearly, when new relationships involve both business and personal, there’s a risk to both if either one of them fails.
WeWork was overvalued. But it still has a value, and that value extends beyond the cost of a hot desk or a private office. It includes the value that can be extracted from the people you meet in WeWork’s clusters, and how you make the most of them.
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