Coworking – A further trend from oversea?

If an inno­v­a­tive trend, char­ac­terised by a mod­ern atti­tude towards life and dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, leads to a deci­sive change in the busi­ness and work­ing model, then we are talk­ing about a unique solu­tion for employ­ees and employ­ers from which every­one can ben­e­fit. It is about cowork­ing, but what is cowork­ing and how does it work?

Cowork­ing – an inde­pen­dent com­mu­nity

Cowork­ing does not only lit­er­ally stand for work­ing together, rather it stands out in its uniquen-​ess through col­lab­o­ra­tive work in large open rooms. Employ­ees are not nec­es­sar­ily mem­bers of the same com­pany, but rather meet dif­fer­ent peo­ple who work inde­pen­dently of each other and can nev­er­the­less form a com­mu­nity. As a gen­eral rule free­lancers, cre­ative peo­ple, dig­i­tal nomads and smaller start-​ups come together and make use of all the advan­tages of cowork­ing.

How it works

A few years ago, the Amer­i­can con­cept of tem­po­rary office rent also inspired Europe, as the joint offices can impress with a spe­cial flair, an unusual or inno­v­a­tive design and a cen­tral loca­tion in the trendy dis­tricts. In fact, the cowork­ing spaces offer a daily, weekly or monthly flat allowance. There is the model Fix Desk , which guar­an­tees its own rented desk with postal address and tele­phone and 24/​7 access. It is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter with the “Flex Desk”, as here any work­sta­tion is selected daily. W-​Lan, the kitchen and the con­fer­ence room are included for every­one.

Flex­i­bil­ity at rea­son­able prices

With cowork­ing, a flex­i­ble expan­sion of the team, even if only for a shorter period, is just as pos­si­ble as a reduc­tion, because the usu­ally short notice peri­ods have no long-​term com­mit­ment and there­fore only the time is paid in which the desk is actu­ally used.

These flex­i­ble rents are what make cowork­ing spaces so attrac­tive for young com­pa­nies or start-​ups, when the price for a day ticket is only 10 – 20 Euro and the monthly ticket is between 100 – 250 Euro. Of course: More expen­sive always works. How­ever, clear pri­or­i­ties are set here with most com­pa­nies, whereby this cost fac­tor has pri­mary impor­tance. But that’s not all yet! In addi­tion to the included eco­nomic use of resources such as paper, there are also soft drinks as well as cof­fee and snacks. Not to be for­got­ten is the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture: net­work, printer, scan­ner, tele­phone, fax, beamer and meet­ing rooms are stan­dard and all this included in the rental price.

Net­work­ing at it’s best

Of course, in the cowork­ing spaces is being worked inde­pen­dently in the same space, but pro­duc­tive exchanges with peo­ple from dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions, indus­tries and nation­al­i­ties can take place, pro­vid­ing a fun­da­ment with for new ideas and new busi­ness mod­els – a ver­i­ta­ble growth booster for every startup! It has even come to this point that some large com­pa­nies rent office spaces in order to ben­e­fit from the prox­im­ity to star­tups and pos­si­bly also to realise joint projects.

Every­thing already per­fect?

In the Space every­one is mostly inter­ested in con­cen­trated work. Two out of three peo­ple even say that they can con­cen­trate bet­ter while cowork­ing. Nev­er­the­less, there is still some crit­i­cism of the noise level, which can be rel­a­tivized by the num­ber of work­ers and the size of the rooms. But if it gets too loud, head­phones can help. Of course, it can also hap­pen that the meet­ing room, which you absolutely need at a cer­tain time, is occu­pied and there­fore not avail­able. In such a case: Keep calm and find another appoint­ment!

Cowork­ing – just a hype?

Cowork­ing rightly iden­ti­fies itself with the val­ues of open­ness, col­lab­o­ra­tion, sus­tain­abil­ity, com­mu­nity and acces­si­bil­ity and proves that a trend could also become an estab­lished and respected work­ing model. This is also shown by the fig­ures: While there were 14 cowork­ing spaces in Ger­many in 2007, more than 26,000 are pre­dicted by 2020. Accord­ing to this, an end to the boom is far from in sight.

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