Community Building at Co-working space

A Community is a group of likeminded people or bunch of folks with a common goal, may it be building a tech startup or preventing people to get affected by Coronavirus. Community can be as small as a bunch of 3 people and can be massive as much as 1,000’s of members in it. In ancient time these communities were built on basis of religion, demographic location but right now its built on basis of interest. There are a lot of community building stories from coworking spaces all over the world.

This is the reason a lot of co-working spaces in India and infact in Cities like Jaipur, Indore, Jodhpur have started focusing on community building. Different communities like – Marwari Catalyst, Startup Grind, Startup Oasis, FICCI are working towards growing startup ecosystem in these cities.

Image Source : – Jaipur Startups Meetup at Coworking space in Jaipur @ Cowocoli

https://www.instagram.com/p/B88jfnWAa_x/

A lot of people don’t understand the difference between community and networking organizations. Communities are network for benefit of everyone and with shared ideals. Following are some best strategies to start your own community.

Find out a common problem:- You should be aware what’s going wrong and bothering everyone. A topic which catches everyone’s attention and is challenging to resolve. Example In India there is still a huge gap between employee skill set and the organization’s requirement.

Filter out the Right Mindset: – Your members should be selfless and with a long term approach, they should believe in growing together and be ready to give first. Example in above case, only people interested to bridge this gap can be Human Resource team or Recruiters ready to train these unemployed people without any fees so that they can be placed.

Technology should be involved: – Avoid Hosting a physical meeting on every weekend or organizing panel discussion. Its better to bring everyone on a technology enabled platform which helps you manage community members online. It also keeps people connected and is easier for everyone to access. Example – Online training sessions can be given or some video tutorials can be shared by recruiters.

Start Small:- You can always start with a small number of people because others only join you when they see something happening and worthwhile. So if your core values are strong people will pour in automatically. Example –When HR who are not a part of this community will notice these applicants giving results in other companies they might even join HR community and start trainings jobseekers to get better workforce.

Wework, Coworks, Innov8 or Regus are leading this business space because they have got a strong community. Coworkers there celebrate festivals together, they spend time with each other, they co learn, collaborate and achieve together. Community managers initiate activities but until there is active participation it’s a failure. Hence this requires a cumulative effort.

Conclusion

Now, you will realize that the struggle of community managers who started from various demographic locations long time back is now reflecting at various forefronts. And in coming times communities will be dominating and coworking spaces will have very less to do with stationary and furniture. It will become evident for a shared office provider to develop a community to stand out. Also coworkers might migrate from traditional coworking centers to those with a strong community because they will now realize the hidden benefits of it.