When looking for coworking space, the range of choice is often very confusing. The world of serviced offices has become so fragmented that different things mean different things to different people. So the challenge is to help customers by focusing the range of choice to the simplicity of a restaurant menu.

In the normal course of events, clients will look to coworking brokers to navigate this confusion. The idea is that a specialist with inside knowledge of the market will be able to distil user preferences into a workable shortlist where every choice hits the spot.

And for the most part this happens – serviced office brokers are good at what they do.

But there still doesn’t exist a unified method for placing flexible offices into defined categories. So in the absence of a formal classification system, each individual in flex space will use their own experience and discretion to put specific products into specific tranches – funky, corporate, professional, functional, no-frills etc.

The issue here is that depending on who you ask, serviced offices will sit across different categories based on personal interpretation.

A more formal classification system would frame the whole coworking market into easily-understandable chunks.

Flex Engine founder, Michael Dubicki, proposes FACCHTS as a potential starting point, where each letter covers Function, Aesthetic, Community, Cost, Hospitality, Technology and Size.

Each category would be measurable through data gathered both from coworking operators and customers using their services – allowing for a true reflection of where each service proposition stands:

Function: the purpose of the coworking space, their USP, brand differentiator. This would allow for ranked specialisms or goals that the office provider is trying to achieve.

Aesthetic: a dynamic and evolving group of descriptors to define the look and feel of the space, defined by regular member / tenant polling. Often there is a big difference between how a coworking operator describes themselves and how their clients perceive the space in reality.

Community: specific products, services and processes provided by the serviced office operator for the benefit of their overall membership, both internal and external. Defined by the coworking operator and evolved by regular member polling.

Cost: a grade of where the headline cost of a desk sits in relation to the rest of the local market. If the price of space locally is between £300 and £500 per desk per month and the cost in this building is £400, they would be in a mid-range band. There is very little by way of this kind of measurement publicly available and it would benefit customers’ understanding greatly.

Hospitality: a ranking score gained from tenants evaluating the service level of a given coworking space on a range of key service provisions. Front-of-house quality, speed of response to queries, cleanliness, that sort of thing.

Technology: what actual hardware and software is going into the building? The size of the broadband line, speed of connection, uptime, do they have an on-site IT team to handle queries? A tenant app, tech-led meeting room and event space booking systems? There is a huge amount of tech-driven services that would really help customers figure out which solution had the ones they really need or want.

Size: similar to cost, this would be a grade based on the overall size of the space in relation to others locally. This could be represented either as an overall number of square feet for the building, or by the total number of desks – useful for helping clients understand the total number of people they would be sharing the space with, especially if this might be a concern.

Using these data points, the coworking market would be able to give customers a data-backed way to navigate choice without relying on personal interpretations.

This is a big project, but one that would have a market-level impact on coworking and the ease with which customers can navigate choice.