Skift Take
Companies that went hybrid are now being urged to "reuse" their office spaces by renting them out to other remote workers. Here we go again.
“There is no such thing as a new idea,” Mark Twain famously said, as we find ourselves back to square one: it turns out that offices are, in fact, pretty convenient places for people to work in.
The twist is they’re about to be used more frequently by non-employees.
This is the latest trend one co-working space platform is discovering — and it could prove to be a relief for landlords across the globe, particularly in cities like New York which is losing out on $12 billion because of remote work.
Booking platform AndCo is seeing new behaviors emerge. During the pandemic it saw members head to coffee shops, restaurants and even bars to work. But with those venues no longer delivering the customer experience needed, the UK startup switched its focus to adding more hotel lobbies and spaces — but more recently growing numbers of remote working teams want to return to offices. So much so that it launched a new platform, Skift can exclusively reveal, called NO HQ to meet that demand.
"What we started to see was some teams wanted a space that was a little more exclusive, dedicated to them," said co-founder and head of marketing Tom Wordie. "They’re fully remote, but need to call somewhere their home one day a week, or a couple of days a month."
'Anchor Days'
It's a classic lesson in supply and demand economics. Many companies scaled back on their office space during and after the pandemic, or got rid of it entirely, but today find they do still need somewhere to get the team back together again. These a
