Coronavirus Covid-19 Flatten the Curve

🦠 COVID19 Response
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Amid all the shut downs and social distancing some people may be concerned about the impact on their coworking spaces. While under extreme circumstances it could be impactful, for now coworking spaces offer a good local community space and aid in the ‘stay local’ and social distancing campaigns.

In Austin many tech companies have asked employees to work from home - some of those employees for various reasons opt for a coworking space instead. This may be counter intuitive but from the companies perspective simply having the workforce distributed makes a lot of sense. If everyone was in a single campus you could easily have the virus spread throughout the company causing a huge impact. Fact is a 60 person or so coworking space is a lot easier to manage, disinfect, and a smaller pool of people are at risk than in a 1000+ person campus.

Ironically this has been an appeal of coworking for a while. End the commute. Work close to home. If we all stop moving about and health officials can contain the places it flares up then we have a chance of slowing the roll so our hospitals can manage the most extreme cases.

Stay safe out there, wash your hands, and wipe down surfaces with disinfectant regularly.

disclaimer: this is just my 2 cents, I’m not a healthcare professional listen to the CDC and local healthcare officials over this or any other opinion piece.

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Hey all, here is some of the guidance we are giving coworking operators. Hope it is helpful!

  1. Follow the lead set by large operators (such as WeWork (https://www.wework.com/ideas/landing-page/update-on-wework-response-to-novel-coronavirus/)around employee quarantine and work from home behaviors. Also plan for added cleaning expenses.

  2. Expect that if your coworking business is heavily dependent on floating desks or month to month dedicated single desk users, many of these users will opt to work from home and may cancel memberships. For many, this is between 2-20% of revenue.

  3. Most team agreements and those on longer lease terms (6+ months) will be unaffected.

  4. Expect that some location decisions will be delayed, by as much as 60 days. Many companies are moving to remote work and this will allow them flexibility before they make a decision.

  5. Also expect that many companies experimentation with remote work will lead to greater demand for alternatives to their traditional offices. Much of this demand will go to work from home, but some will consider coworking and flexible offices as a result.

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