Remote work
Five problems distributed teams hit
Distributed teams run into a predictable set of problems, usually around the second year, once the novelty has worn off and the structural gaps become visible. Shared workspace answers two of them well, one partly, and one not at all. Knowing which is which saves a great deal of money.
1. People stop having colleagues
The first problem is not loneliness exactly. It is the disappearance of low-stakes contact with anyone outside your household. Video calls cover coordination and cover essentially nothing else, because every one of them has an agenda, a start, and an end. There is no equivalent of the walk back from a meeting.
What shared space fixes: most of it, though not in the way companies expect when they pay for it. A member's coworking colleagues are almost never their teammates. They are strangers from unrelated businesses, and it works anyway, because the need being met is contact with other working adults rather than contact with the org chart. Companies buying desks to make the team feel connected are solving a different problem than the one they think.
2. Home stops having an edge
Work bleeds into evenings, the laptop takes up permanent residence on the kitchen table, and people report working longer hours while feeling less productive. The boundary a commute used to enforce, however much everyone claimed to hate it, is simply gone, and nothing replaced it.
What shared space fixes: nearly all of it, and this is the strongest single argument for a membership. A desk somewhere else reinstates a beginning, an end, and a journey between them. Even two days a week restores enough structure to change how the other three feel. Of everything on this list, this is the effect people report most consistently and most gratefully.
3. Nobody can meet a client anywhere credible
Coffee shops are noisy and lack privacy, home is inappropriate for most professional relationships, and hotel lobbies are a visible last resort. For consultants, agencies, and anyone selling to other businesses, this becomes a genuine constraint on the work rather than an inconvenience.
What shared space fixes: completely, and usually as the cheapest available solution. Even a light membership typically includes some meeting room hours, and a bookable room with a door, a table, and a screen satisfies the requirements of the overwhelming majority of client meetings. Some people buy a membership almost entirely for this and treat the desk as a bonus.
4. New hires take much longer to become useful
The absorbed knowledge that used to arrive by sitting near people for six months has to be replaced with documentation and deliberate onboarding, and most companies underestimate how much of both is required.
What shared space partly fixes: only the isolation half, and only if teammates are genuinely in the same room, which for a truly distributed company they are not. A membership near a new hire helps them feel less adrift. It does nothing whatsoever for their onboarding, because the people who know things are still elsewhere.
The real fix here is written process: documented decisions, recorded context, an explicit first-ninety-days plan. Companies that buy desks hoping to solve onboarding are consistently disappointed, and then conclude that coworking does not work, when they simply bought the wrong solution.
5. The team never occupies the same room
Culture, trust, and the informal repair of small conflicts all suffer when a group has never shared physical space. Disagreements that would resolve in a corridor in ninety seconds instead calcify over three weeks of asynchronous messages.
What shared space does not fix: this one, at least not through individual memberships. Scattering eleven people across coworking spaces in nine cities does not put anybody together; it just gives each of them a nicer place to be alone.
The pattern that does work is periodic co-location: quarterly or twice-yearly gatherings in one location, using day passes or hired event space, plus meeting rooms for regional subsets who can reach each other more easily. Solve this with travel budget and calendar discipline. It is not a real estate problem wearing a real estate costume.
How companies actually buy this
Roughly in order of prevalence:
A monthly stipend the employee spends on a membership of their own choosing. Administratively simplest, most popular with staff, and it sidesteps the problem of head office picking a space in a city they do not know.
Direct reimbursement against submitted invoices. Slightly more paperwork, more control, and it produces cleaner records.
A corporate account with a national or international operator, giving access across locations. Suits companies with heavy travel or genuinely mobile staff, and it is usually poor value if people mostly sit in one city.
A small private office in a city where several employees already live. Only makes sense where that local density genuinely exists, and it tends to recreate a mild version of the head office problem for everyone who does not live there.
The honest summary
Shared workspace is an excellent answer to isolation, to the collapse of boundaries between work and home, and to the client meeting problem. It is a poor answer to onboarding and to team cohesion, both of which are process and calendar problems.
Buy it for the first three and you will be pleased with the result. Buy it for the last two and you will conclude that coworking does not work, which will be the wrong conclusion drawn from a reasonable experiment.
Related reading: coworking 101 and what coworking costs.