Host community meals
If your coworking space does not have this kind of informal space, there’s no need to fall into despair. You have some other options to get your community nice and tight. All it takes is a motivated associate and some organizational skills. One thing that coworkers (or anyone for that matter) love besides coffee is food, especially if it’s free once in a while. So treat your members to breakfast every now and then and give them a chance to get to know each other over some croissants or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Don’t like getting up early? Make it lunch, and cook together in your kitchen or order some pizza. You’d be amazed how much this can do for your community. A great example for this is set at the utopic_US coworking space in Madrid, which hosts a community meal/speed-meeting once a month, helping the members to get to know each other.
Thomas Schranz, CEO and Co-founder of blossom, who has a lot of experience with coworking environments around the world, said that he didn’t find the close-knit community he had at sektor5 in Vienna anywhere else. “Most of the spaces in the US only have these self-service coffee stations, where you go and get your `draft coffee´ and sit back down. You don’t really get the chance to get to know the others. Here [at sektor5] we have the common area where we sit down to have lunch together, or even beers when the workday gets longer. I did miss that in the US”.
Did anyone say jelly?
Talking about jelly, you’ve probably never heard about jelly in the non-sandwich-topping sense before. These so-called “jellies” are casual coworking events where everyone’s invited. They are a great chance to extend your community for a day by inviting anyone and everyone to join for a coworking and networking session. It also gives the regular coworkers an opportunity to interact with each other and the visitors. It already happened this year, but you should really consider joining World Wide jelly week next time around.
Meet up and exchange your skills
You still don’t have enough community activities? Host meet ups or a skills exchange at your coworking place. Maybe the IT-guy that sits in the back needs some help from the social-media-dude from the big table up front. Bring some beers and nametags, let people write their own skills and some skills they’re looking for on each tag, and let the coworking speed dating being! The HUB in Tel Aviv is hosting “tech on beer” meetups every month as a way to help their members interact.
Party anyone?
Who doesn’t like parties? Of course we do not want to glorify the mass killing of your precious brain cells with alcohol, but parties are a great way to get to know your coworkers on a more personal level. We do not mean these awkward corporate Christmas-parties where you get just a little bit too drunk and give your boss a lap dance, we just mean a nice informal gathering for your community. Do it like betahaus does at their maker party: get some musicians, put the work tables aside, dim the lights and may the jamming begin. Mingle you guys. Mingle!
