Flex Engine’s founder, Michael Dubicki, recently took part in a discussion panel as part of the London Coworking Conference hosted by eOffice. An insightful discussion encompassed many topics from data to hospitality and was attended by a broad cross-section of flexible office space operators and partners.

Below are some takeaways from the discussion and Flex Engine’s contribution to the conversation:

What is hybrid working? 

There are two hybrid evolutions affecting the coworking sector:

1) The way in which end-users consume the built environment and how their definition of “fit-for-purpose” is changing.

2) The way in which commercial real estate is moving into flex space market share and vice versa as the line continues to blur between flexible leases, managed offices and serviced offices due to ongoing market fragmentation

The first has always been a huge opportunity for the flex sector since it was pre-positioned to act as a natural target for companies evolving their office space usage post-pandemic to more flexible models.

The second remains a significant risk because it stands to eliminate much of the competitive differentiation which made our niche stand out as a unique real estate sub-product in the first place.

I talked about this two years ago in my piece “The Thin Flex Line” penned for the Coworking Conference 2022 and it was just as relevant, if not more so, in 2024 market dynamics which we touched on in this year’s conference.

Coworking still accounts for single-digit percentage when it comes to commercial real estate market share, but it retains 100% ownership over its product identity.

If the future of office space is “Flex”, broadly defined as products offering quality of space, inclusivity of price and flexibility of contract, than that 100% ownership starts to diminish very quickly indeed.

Differentiation through more than product is the key to the future.

What about return-to-office? 

“Productivity is a result of satisfaction, not of physical presence. Our job as the flex space sector is to make physical presence satisfying.”

This was my takeaway statement to close the panel discussion on the question around how to move discussion away from arguing about RTO mandates.

We can’t kill the RTO voices… but make no mistake: each upcoming lease expiry will bring the purpose of the existing built environment to the debating table.

The EY Future Workplace Index 2023 listed the top motivations for companies bringing employees back to the office at that time:

Increase employee wellbeing: 9%

Maximising return on existing / recent workplace investment: 18%

As the open question session with the international attendees of the conference showed: regardless of where we are in the world, when we pose the RTO question from a “company” perspective, mandates are swift to follow. But when we pose the question from a “people” perspective, real change starts to happen.

The top motivation for RTO in the EY report, by the way?

Increasing productivity: 29%

But for that, please scroll back up to the opening sentence!

And the future of the flexible office sector? 

“How does the coworking sector evolve to protect it’s competitive advantage?”

My short answer was: it can’t.

Insofar as the “competitive advantage” of coworking has always been defined through the uniqueness of the product proposition – quality of space, inclusivity of price, flexibility of contract….

10 years ago, mainstream CRE agents binned any requirements below 5,000sqft.

2 years ago, the entry threshold for plug & play managed office solutions was again around 4,000sqft to 5,000sqft.

Now anything from 1,000sqft upwards is a viable requirement, driven by increasing adoption of flex concepts in office space by landlords looking to shift troublesome space and a growing number of agents specialising in quick turnaround.

So the “product” crowd is getting bigger. It will be more difficult to stand out.

The biggest opportunity for flex now lies in moving from “product” to “purpose”.

To re-define the competitive advantage.

Brands that are able to articulate the meaning of their product and tangibly quantify it’s impact on user experience (both landlord and tenant) will be the winners of the future.