Today coworking spaces are taking the business world on a more innovative, productive, flexible, cost-saving, and work-life balance enriched platform. Due to such benefits, a large number of entrepreneurs are moving towards this emerging wave to take its benefits. Considering this huge set of responses, the growing trend is expected to shoot up the number of coworking spaces to nearly 50,000 by 2022. But sailing the boat of coworking space is not as easy as it sounds.
So many things are going on in the single workplace, and to ensure that it is managed in the best manner, it is pretty essential to set up your team well. Along with giving outstanding perks to attract members to your space, you need to magnify in-depth the top roles and their respective responsibilities that fuel up your coworking space management.
By reading further, you will get in-detailed information related to key positions and their primary responsibilities required in your coworking space for the unstoppable growth of your business.
What Is a Coworking Space?
Coworking space is all about forming a common infrastructure for a number of employees that come from separate companies to undertake their work in a better environment than the traditional workplace. Occupants, including freelancers, entrepreneurs, remote workers, digital nomads, and startups, use this flexible space for doing their job under the roof of the best affordable and flexible culture.
Surely it is a great moment to thank Brad Neuberg for setting up the first official coworking space in San Francisco. He became a substantial part of the flexible workplace evolution joined in 2005, as shown in the image below.
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Why Has Coworking Space Become Essential?
Coworking space works as a perfect blend of a relaxed environment with the flavor of professionalism. With the growing demand for working remotely in a pliable and much comfortable way, the importance of this working model has risen dramatically.
The space-as-a-service model lessens the burden of expenses from the head of many business owners by providing a common growing workplace for their employees. To add more aspects to the list to better showcase the worthiness of coworking space, refer to the figure below.
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List of Roles and Their Responsibilities in Your Coworking Environment
Staff allocation needs to be carried out in the most precise way to form the best-ever team for your coworking space. By wearing different hats, your team can work collectively to flourish the name of your coworking space by giving proper and best services to the members coming over there to work.
Employing staff for your space for the key roles is the most crucial task to walk on the path of achieving success. But as stated by factoHR.com, nearly 61% of the managers are not sure that they have the right employee in the right role in their company. To ensure that this case does not happen with you, segment out the most needed roles for your space.
How to do that?
The answer is by reading the following points, as it addresses six major roles with their responsibilities that need to be filled for streamlining all the tasks in your coworking environment. Also, it will help you to solve the significant challenges that come in your way, as shown below.
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1. Senior Authority or Leadership
Like other workplaces, coworking spaces also need to run under the leadership of senior authorities to bring maximum potential to the space with their proper guidance. They must be enriched with leadership, communication, influencing, delegation, motivation, and self-awareness skills.
To better understand the role of senior leadership, it is further divided into two sections:
a. C-level authority and Directors
C-suite executives comprise the CEO (Chief Executive Officer), COO (Chief Operating Officer), and other directors. COO lies on the top of the chart that is majorly linked with managing almost every aspect of your space. This role must be filled by an individual that is motivated enough for improvement and expansion of business.
The topmost duties of this role are:
- Managing people
- Fundraising
- Developing meaningful partnership
- Searching for a proper avenue for business expansion
- Framing further growth tactics
b. Community Partnership Manager
Another name for this role is business development manager. This role falls below the C-level executive. The major focus of community partnership managers is on developing relationships with the partners. The respective individual should be in continuous contact with the community and should have good experience in your needed business area. They work as the most trusted assistant of the directors for serving the requirements of the team and the whole space in the best way.
Brief responsibilities of this role are:
- Conduct partner research and development process
- Secures corporate sponsorships
- Networking
- Manages partnerships
2. Operations Team
The operational team usually works behind the scenes to ensure that all the business processes are running correctly. The central focus of this team relies on bringing more efficiency with the aim of achieving the organization’s bottom line. More hands-on duty on a daily basis falls under this role.
a. Operations Manager
The primary responsibilities relying on the shoulder of the operations manager are:
- Maintenance of systems including CRM (Customer Relationship Management), system integration, network reliability
- Supervision of operational staff
- Management of facilities provided to the customers
- Access control management
- Procedure development
- Handles daily logistics
- Employee supervision
b. Operations Coordinator
The role of the operations coordinator is more concerned with handling the hands-on operations of your space. For filling the position, an experienced IT individual is required to administrate all the operations.
The top responsibilities for Operations Coordinator are:
- IT and Wi-Fi service management
- Administration of security solutions
- Facility maintenance
- Manages the access given to the members to perform their work
3. Marketing Team
The most needful and competitive advantageous role in the coworking space is of the marketing team. They work as a sole identity to generate a captivating identity in front of the public. The team together works on promoting your space in the best way. The more you pay attention to developing a sole team for marketing, the better you will be able to rank yourself in the competitive market.
They work on behalf of the coworking space to attract leads and prospects to your space as it is one of the major issues faced by coworking space, as shown in the figure.
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The required list of skills for the marketing team are engaging audiences, analytics, creativity, understanding of different marketing aspects like SEO, advertisement, content marketing, growth hacking, and digital promotions.
a. Marketing Manager
The marketing head strategizes and carries out various marketing campaigns. This process goes hand in hand with the event manager and community manager. They work on showing the uniqueness and benefits of joining your coworking space in the market. The manager has to come up with an ever-changing set of activities to differentiate your workplace from other competitors.
The list of responsibilities to be performed by the marketing manager and their team are mentioned in the following points.
- Forms various strategies for conducting brand awareness
- Handles and schedule posts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc
- Selects channels for marketing
- Growth of online community
- Online marketing management
- Perform analysis to understand the market better
- Perform supervision and co-ordinates with other activities of your space
4. Security & Admin Department
Safety and administration of the members working in your space is the topmost priority job for your team to perform. This directly reflects the need for a dedicated team to handle the security and admin concerns of your coworking space.
The list of responsibilities to be handled by the security and admin team are:
- Access control of different systems
- On-site security
- Authentication management
- Handles network security
- Management of security portals
- Screening of members coming to the space
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5. Member Management Team
The coworking space’s central focus is on their ‘members.’ Every owner desires to take care of the members coming into their coworking space in the best possible way to make them come to your place regularly.
This leads to further subdivision of member management team into the following roles:
a. Community Manager
The community manager is called the relationship development identity with the members. They are considered the most crucial element for succeeding in your coworking business plan. An extrovert and network-builder personality that likes to communicate and connect with people is the best fit for this role. Along with this, experience in the administration, hospitality, and service industries work as a plus point for your space.
They must be strong enough in interpersonal and networking skills. The Community Manager is considered the go-to person to which the members can approach for asking questions related to the facilities provided to them.
Their primary role is to give the best and most suitable to the members for making them come back to your space.
Primary duties of this role are:
- Framing the membership communication strategy
- Taking care of the facilities
- Interacts with members
- Development of membership policy
- Organizing gatherings and fun events for members
- Forms sales tactics for attracting new members
- Accountable to fulfill long-term goals
- Generates the factor of attachment with the members by engaging them well
b. Assistance Community Manager
The role of the assistance community manager is often linked to the performance of more grunt work. They work under the hand of the community manager to work further as per their guidance.
The list of tasks that falls under the role of the assistance community managers are shown in the points below:
- Enrollment of members
- Actively communicate with members
- Administrate trips
- Well-introduce new members to the whole group for developing a smooth connection
c. Front Desk Associate
The front desk associate is the proper authority to serve the clients to give the best greeting feeling to the members. It would be more beneficial if they have experience in office reception. This is one of the critical roles that defines the first impression of your coworking space as the member arrives into the space.
A significant set of responsibilities for this authority are:
- Receive calls and emails of clients
- Manages all the documents, packages, and other delivers
- Welcomes all the members coming to the space
- Direct visitors to their desired location
6. Event Management Team
Last but not least, it is essential to rightly conduct events to bring more uniqueness to your coworking space. That’s why the role of the event management team comes. A dedicated team can handle all the processes related to the event in the best possible way. Beginning from organizing the event to successful completion, all the major functions are managed by this team.
The skills required for fulfilling this position are self-motivation, staying calm, positivity, creativity, time management, organizing, logistic functioning, multitasking, and a people-focused personality.
a. Event Manager
An event manager has to take care of both the categories of the events: interior and exterior gatherings. For this position, someone with potent strategic thinking capabilities is in high demand. Moreover, they should have experience in managing events and partnership building to get the expected result of setting an event in the coworking space.
Major responsibilities of this role are listed in the points below:
- Proper planning event
- Crafting of the proposal to use their co-working space in the best way
- Taking care of all the basic requirements that the clients have
- Quick solution of the issues faced by the clients
- Sorting of staff requirement
- Content building
b. Event Coordinator
The individual who is passionate enough in handling different sets of events in the most energetic way can rightly fill this category.
The event coordinator handles various tasks, including the following:
- Setting up the venture
- Promotion of the event
- Handling the catering and entertaining stuff
- Check-in list of attendees
- Rentals of the events
- Examining A/V systems
- Take care of the execution of the event.
Conclusion
To give your coworking space a ‘perfectly running’ tag, it is pretty crucial to distinguish the job of all your team members based on their roles. This leads to the formation of more strategic and systematic growth of your space. After reading this article, I hope you will get a clearer path for boosting the development of your coworking space to get a better tomorrow.
The article was written by Meet Vara. Meet is a passionate content writer and an avid reader, having expertise in creating various ideas for creative writing. He is passionate about researching and exploring blogs, checking out the latest trends, and replicating his expertise in crafting exclusive content. His approach and readiness towards writing quality content are exceptional.
