At the BOMidi luncheon on January 12, we had the pleasure of welcoming Marta Rocamora Gonzalez, senior community manager along with sales manager Maxime Desourdy, both from WeWork Montreal.
The presentation focused on the phenomenon of co-working and the effervescent firm WeWork.
Connected Work
Digital devices and being digitally connected at all times are transforming the world of business and our attitudes about our professional lives. The number of independent workers is growing the world over, from freelancers to entrepreneurs to start-ups. The arrival of generation Y on the job market and soon also the millennials, is a prime factor driving this phenomenon.
Mentalities are changing. We live in an era of collaborative work, of responsive firms and the creation of communities of professionals. And that is precisely what WeWork has to offer.
The WeWork Community
Created in 2010 by three New Yorkers, WeWork invites entrepreneurs to rent offices in a shared workspace where a wide range of services are available and shared with others. The idea is to provide a platform and a combination of resources, as well as access to a worldwide community of professionals who have also adopted this new approach to work. Their credo? Make a life not a living, or in other words live your passion. For workers and firms involved in a wide range of business activities, WeWork removes the burden of the operational aspects of workspace management so that they can concentrate on growing their business.
The company offers several different packages, all of them payable on a monthly basis. It is a flexible, accessible formula that allows for considerable agility, adapting to the size, reality and needs of each business in real time. A subscription includes access to WeWork spaces all over the world.
WeWork now consists of a professional community of 80,000 members. It manages co-working spaces in 18 cities located in 6 countries. The company is still growing and now has more than 1400 employees. WeWork is responsible for office space layout and design, and for managing operations in all the workspaces it owns or rents the world over.
WeWork in Montreal: 2 Thriving Workspaces
Montreal is a city of knowledge, innovation and creativity, and it thus comes as no surprise that co-working is increasingly popular. The city enjoys a reputation abroad for being a laboratory, fertile entrepreneurial ground, an incubator for start-ups. 2 WeWork Spaces (Place Ville-Marie and L’Avenue) opened in 2016 and already have more than 1200 members. With its strong record and targeted approach, that would appear to be just the beginning.
It is still too soon to see how this trend will influence the work of building owners and managers, but all signs seem to indicate that this phenomenon will continue its upward growth. Our task is to understand it, to study its potential and then perhaps participate in this transformation of the workspace.