The rise in shared offices

What is a flexible workplace and who does it benefit?

As a result of the global pandemic, many organisations were forced to adopt to a change in office working practices.  Having seen the benefits of a flexible working approach, many organisations are looking to retain the flexibility of mixing home and office working.  The office is therefore becoming much more of a collaboration space, where staff primarily use the office to interact and collaborate with colleagues, rather than as a permanent base with a permanent desk assigned to each member of staff.   

A solution for reduced demand on space is office sharing

Demand on office space is reducing as a result.  An office originally accommodating 250 employees 5 days a week will now only need to accommodate half of that number at any given time, as a portion of the workforce will be working from home.  Offices are being redesigned and restructured to reflect this change in use, but what can be done about the space that is no longer required due to the reduced desk and staff capacity required?  

Long term leases or logistical challenges may mean relocating isn’t an option, while elsewhere another organisation with similar challenges around reduced demand on office space and the flexibility of relocating may be seeking a new office space that better meets their requirements. A solution which helps to address these challenges is the concept of sharing offices.   

Shared offices are seen to benefit both organisations, by generating a revenue stream from the space in the office that would otherwise have been unused, and by enabling organisations to relocate to offices that better meet their new space requirements and, in many cases, would have been unobtainable previously.   

This presents the new challenge of managing a mixture of private and shared resources within the office space, and the need to keep certain information relating to use of those resources private.  Enter Matrix Booking’s cross-organisational sharing functionality. 

Resource management software

Matrix Booking’s unique Cross Organisational Sharing (“cross-org”) functionality is helping to power this emerging wave of shared offices.  Initially developed to support Public Sector ‘hub’ buildings, where multiple Government Depts share a single building containing a mixture of private and shared resources, the same concepts and are now being applied to private sector organisations too. 

By using Matrix Booking in the shared office, private resources (such as desks and certain rooms) are bookable by each organisation but kept private and ‘hidden’ from the other, while shared resources, such as shared meeting rooms, are available to be booked by organisations with all systems, user data and booking information kept private.  This alleviates any security concerns that may have previously been highlighted around the sharing of resources and adoption of consistent booking platforms. 

The new shared office is now one with complete flexibility, where the space and all resources within it are used as effectively and efficiently as possible, supported by a powerful and flexibility booking solution in Matrix Booking.