That is where their disruption strategy was. WeWork in hindsight had a brilliant idea. A readymade exciting, fun-filled work environment - the culture aspect. This would be virtually impossible to create by a single or handful of employees by themselves. Infact big companies struggle to create exciting culture for new age employees even with dedicated team and funds.
WeWork could have worked if it was managed well.
People are weird, man.
Maybe that's why I'm happy at home.
If such odds were more realistic, I would agree.
I am agreeing with you. Work can stay work. I don't need a contest for most scary cubicle. Still, some people go for that stuff. Let me them stay in office. For me, WFH all the way. I make my own fun there.
Maybe because it's 1/3 of a person's life and they want to make the most of it.
Eg in France the legal worktime is 35h, the debate is "32h proposed by the left, going back to 39h proposed by the right", but when I read the twitter people having to do 80h/week under Musk not only do I feel so horrible for them, but I understand then why a "fun filled environment" might be required to avoid people all falling into depression ...
And also there is no way those people are anywhere near productive for more than half of those 80 hours.
Not that I think work should be where people find relationships, but rather that different age groups have different needs and desires.
At my old company, there were two main offices - one in an office park in the suburbs for the "grownups" and a smaller one in a hip part of downtown for the "kiddies".
I worked remotely the entire time and that company also had a large percentage of remote folks like me, this was years before Covid.
tl;dr for a lot of younger/single people, work can be a big part of one's social life.
Full-time employees spend nearly all of their active hours at work. If they do not find relationships / friendships there, where and when will they?
I maintain that having sex with coworkers is ill-advised, but not for the same reasons as employers and their HR departments.
Because of the plitical climate. Very few people would be inclined to pursure romantic relationships with coworkers. Meanwhile people at the same coworking space is a fair game. I am speaking from my own experience. The bad thing is it also becomes like high school. Because there's no HR policy to keep people in check.
Perhaps this is not ideal?
Work relationships used to be not only completely normal, but expected and accepted.
I met my wife of 20 years at work. There were whole universities that had reputations as places where people went to get enough education to land an office job so they could find a spouse.
It is only in the last ten years it so that work relationships have become taboo, as HR departments seem to completely eliminate the risk of inappropriate relationships caused by a minuscule minority of bad bosses and the accompanying legal and financial response from eager lawyers.
While I find the notion of "inappropriate relationships" amusing and only really serving the interests of employers, I still consider it all-advised to have sex with coworkers. This really only matters where people have power or have a career to think about. People with low-accountability roles need not worry about it.
Regardless, I encourage single people to look outside of the workplace.
My own experience is that there is more than "a minuscule minority of bad bosses" that lead to problems.
Take a look at Office Space, that sort of sterile, glaring white environment was the norm for offices right up to the new millennium.
Yes, WeWork has some goofy themes (I had the misfortune of one that took Coney Island as an inspiration, so there were scattered silhouettes of Ferris wheels here and there), but at its core was warm, dark walls that were easy on the eyes, generally good interior design, and people who actually wanted to be at their jobs. I didn’t love it, but far from the worst place I ever had to work.
And once in a while I still drop by an authentic Manhattan office building, and it is like stepping back into the eighties. It’s no wonder jumping off buildings was so popular among stockbrokers…
I think tbh wework's vibe works quite well for temporary office/flex-space, low cost of entry.
The fact that everybody is somewhat of a transient at a wework creates its own cohesion too. e.g. I rented office space at a "real" office building once, and it was just weird for some rando telecommuter to share space with more established companies in more local industries. ymmv, but they did create something "new", or at least a niche office offering is now an established fixture in most metros.
There might have been outliers at places like Google and Facebook in the 2000s but it didn't start exploding till after 2010 when all the more traditional companies started thinking they needed to be like Google and Facebook.
Lots of boring offices got rehabbed into "culture" offices around 2010-2012, even if it was financially irresponsible. There was huge talk that it was required to have any chance of hiring millennials at the time.
The biggest ongoing cost for WeWork is leasing the office space. This cost doesn't go down just because WeWork has some brand recognition. Even worse, there's nothing stopping a property owner from operating their property as a co-working space themselves, cutting WeWork out of the equation.
It's not that WeWork couldn't be profitable. But it was never going to pull in the profits of a successful tech company.
So as they scale they’re signing up for a huge liability with a fairly uncertain stream of cashflows on the other side. Since there are only so many high-quality businesses that want temporary office space at a WeWork in a given area they also need to accept additional risk as they grow revenue regionally.
Add to this the intense correlation of WeWork’s customer base to firms dependent on VC$ and you’ve got a lot of correlated risk sitting on one side of a nasty liability. Not good stuff.
Not only was WeWork's customer base dependent on VC money, so was WeWork itself! So it's really VC money going around in circles until the music stops, which is now.
It reminds me of that old joke: startups are an inefficiency imposed on the transfer of wealth from VCs to landlords.
I had always imagined them to be similar to what I imagined the Google office to be like - lots of amenities, lots of space to goof around, lots of cool little and big things that are rarely found in offices.
Instead you get your plain old "overcrowded startup offices". Tiny desks, tiny rooms, average coffee, no real amenities. Some chic design elements here and there, but that's about it.
Nothing I'd pay 500 EUR / desk per month for.
I wasn't sold on WeWork in theory until I started going with a friend (as a guest) and I was sold immediately.
I tend towards the introverted side so its not the socialising or "networking".. It's the environment: - constantly kept clean - good view, aesthetics & lighting - productivity happening all around you. - Kewl kitchen area with expensive tea & coffee
All Access is gamechanger too, the idea that I can go to Miami, spend some time at south beach and then be super productive at Lex Avenue WeWork with a super kewl view is AWESOME! (I live in London)..
The idea that u can use the same keycard to work in a familiar yet different environemnt in London & Miami is super kewl. Its like the democratisation of the kind of lifestyle you'd have as a billionaire.
Pretty much everybody who looks for co-working places are working in non R&D type stuff.
People from other companies "comingling" is usually a REALLY good thing for the companies. Usually the best stuff comes out of this (Steve Jobs & Xerox's PARC)
What I find interesting now is seeing which companies have structured themselves to survive recession-like economic times. Really shows who has sustainable business models and who doesn't.
It's about having space, good sound-proofing, good chairs/desks, good internet connection, etc. Coffee/tea/water/snacks etc (even if paid).
A lot of the "boring" places don't have any of these.
- Internet outages that lasted for a significant amount of time (not great for a tech company) - Power issues - Bathroom/plumbing issues - Various key card issues - etc (I think a microwave exploded at one point)
It's nice if the fun stuff is there, but if they can't do the boring stuff of running a functional office space well, I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Gen Z doesn't want a beer fridge and ping pong, Gen Z wants fair wages and reasonable hours.
Isn't the prevailing narrative about the current tech layoffs that there were simply too many of these types of employees and not enough productive ones?
WeWork is failing because their most profitable customers are the big corps that buy space from them, not the broke startups and hustlepreneurs that these spaces are marketed towards.
This seems like a doomed idea. Every person I know who goes to a co-working space is because they want to get work done. They want good Internet and quietness. If they wanted a fun-filled work environment, they'd work from home. It almost sounds like WeWork based their model on the wrong part of office culture.
I could see WeWork working in 2012 by getting money from small startups and large company with overflow problems in their formal offices. They just missed the startup boom by a couple of years.