You might have heard about Coworking, but it is much more than resources and a place to do business. It’s a community and its the future of how work is going to be conducted. It’s easy to preach about the benefits of coworking for a professional in particular, but not mentioned enough are the ways in which a coworking space uplifts the local economy. Coworking spaces house various businesses in one central space, which makes them a thriving ecosystem, ready to share their resources with the local business surrounding them and helping the local economy. The very existence of this style of working is based on encouraging and supporting other businesses; members support one another each day when they come in for work, but that trend doesn’t just stay in-house– members carry it with them to local stores, coffee shops, restaurants, and everything in-between.
Most people can imagine what shared office space looks like. It’s more difficult to understand the larger economic benefits of participating in such a space until you experience it first hand. If you’re on the fence about joining a coworking space, here are some positive impacts it has on the local economy.
Coworking supports small businesses.
Enter a coworking space and most of the desks will be occupied by a small business. It could be a freelance designer, a small startup for organic milk (Yes, we do have someone like that working from our coworking space), or a person who just decided to start their own 3D printing home decor services. These small to mid-sized businesses are the lifeblood of a local economy. Unlike mega-corps, they live, work and shop locally and care about giving back to their local community and care much more about their employees. These businesses help bring down the unemployment rates locally. Joining a coworking space means that these tiny businesses have a safe space to launch, scale and learn from more experienced members. When’s the last time you saw Reliance swapping trade secrets with the young startups?
Coworking creates a Network for collaborative consumption.
Collaborative consumptions means reusing, growing, renting, bartering and making instead of buying. A sharing economy requires a network of friendly and trustworthy people and who better than the people working next to you in the coworking space, to create this network. Coworking allows you to share your professional expertise and network with others on a daily basis with other upcoming businesses and freelancers. You might think, this could happen once a month even without a coworking space, but what makes coworking unique is that the sharing that happens, happens on a more personal level over lunch or coffee breaks or at community events. When a community is open to collaborations and sharing, people in the community benefit, save money, learn new skills and reduce their impact on the environment. Collaborations fuels progress and new ideas take birth from cross pollination of people from different specialisation. The community at large reaps rewards of a happy independent workforce.
Coworking reduces Brain Drain.
Coworking spaces are work space for people who have it in them to create their own jobs in a not very booming economy. Without coworking, many tier II population would have to commute or move their families to bigger cities with more opportunities. Coworking provides them a corporate style office at an affordable price and keeps this talent in the town, preserving their money, talent and enthusiasm for use in the local economy. New restaurants, cafés, and malls are desirable for economic development, but local coworking spaces are the attraction that cities should be seeking relentlessly. Why local coworking spaces? Because if a business is started locally, it’s going to spend its money locally and encourage its members to support other local businesses, too. What are you waiting for, go try a local coworking space NOW!
If you want to know more about the coworking spaces in Surat - find it here.
If you would like to visit our coworking space and check out cool business that operate out of here and want a desk for yourself reach out to us here.