Coworking Europe 2020 In Review: Panel Appearances, Standout Sessions, Live Streaming Booths and More

As we’re sure many of you will have seen, last month (from Wednesday 25th to Friday 27th of November) teams and individuals across the coworking community flocked to Coworking Europe 2020.

The annual event, which strives to bring together all of those who are passionate about coworking, is held at various cities across Europe and was set to be hosted in Vienna this year, but was moved to an online format, due to the current situation.

The event provides an amazing opportunity for industry professionals to meet and network with like-minded individuals to assess what they’ve seen so far, challenges they’ve faced, and make predictions about the future of coworking.

To have a presence at the event, attendees accessed the Coworking Europe Hub, a virtual conference environment where visitors could attend talks, visit hangout and networking areas and communicate amongst themselves, just as they would be able to at a physical, in-person event. The online space is not just available for the duration of the event either! The Hub runs on a permanent, ongoing basis, and serves as a place where coworking specialists can interact, ask questions and discuss all year round.

If you didn’t attend, allow us to fill you in on some of what you missed!

Standout Sessions

Impact Hub - Coordinating the world’s largest independent coworking spaces network

Impact Hub is the world’s largest network focussed on building entrepreneurial communities at scale, and we are proud to be a provider to a number of their hubs, including Impact Hub King’s Cross and Impact Hub Madrid. We also produced some exciting video case studies at both their King's Cross and Madridlocations! Barbara Inmann, Managing Director at Impact Hub Vienna displayed the organisation's focus on social and sustainable innovation and how their work is helping entrepreneurship to tackle social challenges that our world faces. Barbara spotlighted just some of the work being carried out by the 17,000+ entrepreneurs working on sustainable and social innovation, such as CRIC, Ioniqa and African Clean Energy, as well as detailing the ways that they go beyond providing a coworking space to by providing entrepreneurial support, accelerator programs and much more. You can catch a preview of the session here.

Workplace wellbeing and how spatial design can help in the times of COVID-19

In this session, Christina Disler, Founder of Werklab in Vancouver, Canada assessed our relationship with office space, and owing to the amount of time spent in this environment, its contribution towards our overall mental wellbeing. She discussed the distressing impact of the pandemic, and that now more than ever before, member wellbeing needs to be improved. The way that spaces are designed can have a huge effect on this, and that by setting up spaces that put member experience first and keeps member wellness in mind, we can continue to help coworkers to connect to ideas in a unique way, and generally lead them to live better lives. After all, we spend a lot of our lives in our places of work!

Coworking Customer Journey - A step by step process to improve lead conversion and member retention

This session was aimed at early-stage coworking spaces hoping to provide a better experience to their members, featuring insight from Consultant Alexandra Ramió and Founder Vanessa Sans at Happy Working Lab, a coworking and consulting agency based in Barcelona. They talk through the typical customer journey that is involved when a client’s enquiry to a coworking space, all the way through to their recommendation to peers. They show that by improving the customer journey and experience for your members, you not only increase the likelihood of retention but help you to gain organic referrals from these members. As well as recommending Nexudus as an all-in-one tool to minimise operational costs and timings and to maximise productivity, they gave reference to many other tools that can boost efficiency in a workspace, and you can find out more information on these by reaching out to them here.

Virtual Booth

This year, for the very first time, our booth went virtual! Attending from home wasn’t going to stop us doing what we do best - talking enthusiastically about Nexudus! Our very own Carmen was tuned in from home, ready to answer any questions from attendees about how they use or plan to use Nexudus in the future. And she was able to do so in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French too!

You may have missed Carmen at the conference, but she would still love to speak to you! For that matter, any of our team would welcome an opportunity for further discussion - if you have any questions that you would like answers to, do not hesitate to get in contact with our team, we’d be happy to set up a call at your convenience.

Lunch and learn with Nexudus

During each day’s thirty-minute lunch break, we took to the exhibition area and used the time to show attendees how Nexudus can help them to automate and streamline processes in their workspace. Attendees had the opportunity to see Nexudus in action and could ask questions in real-time.

We covered a lot of content on these sessions, ranging from a top-level overview of the Nexudus platform and its functionalities from an administrator and end user’s perspective, along with some information about our suite of companion apps and tools, our integrations, and insight into our plans for the year ahead. You can access the session's recording here.

On the final day of the event, our presentation was mainly focused around contactless technology, and how despite being around for quite some time, the nature of the current situation has led us to repurpose this increasingly relevant technology into useful tools. We discussed contactless options available for access control, made possible due to our integrations with Salto and Brivo, and how our suite of apps can reduce the need to physically come into contact with touchpoints in your space.

We went on to discuss Wi-Fi access control, our integration partners IronWifi and Isofy and how check-in can be automated at the network level. As well as this, we looked at kiosk-based contactless check-in, visitor check-in, how floor plans can allow for safer coworking, and how to ensure that you safely remain below your capacity limit.

To stay in the loop, you can access the session here.

Panel Session: Automating coworking processes - the latest developments and opportunities

In case you missed it, Our CTO and Co-Founder Adrian had the pleasure of speaking alongside some industry experts on the role of automation in the coworking process. All panellists discussed how their latest developments are meeting the challenges and opportunities posed by the coworking industry of today, and the role played by software providers in delivering the best technical experience to flex space members to streamline their process. Some of the key points discussed included…

Prospective integration partners

Panellists discussed the abundance of new technologies coming onto the market and were asked to briefly summarise their organisations’ criteria when making a decision on who, out of the numerous options, to integrate with. Adrian mentioned that Nexudus’ first consideration is always that the specific integration has to make obvious sense and to provide value to our existing customers. Additionally, as we know that our users are often building large ecosystems of various, often contrasting technologies, Nexudus looks for systems that allow users to make this multi-pronged connection possible, so a willingness to connect to other services from a potential partner’s side is key.

Innovation brought on by the pandemic

The discussion led on to contactless technology, which as we all know, has become increasingly important due to the current situation, and that despite this technology having been around for quite some time, has rapidly become as relevant as can be.

As the conversation led on to hybrid workspaces, and how in the future, employees will be approaching work in a more flexible manner by spending some time in the office, some time at home, etc. We discussed how some of the developments that were brought to the fore by the current situation will go on to be increasingly useful.

The virtualisation of meeting rooms, such as the always-on option made possible by our integration with Jitsi has proven to be extremely useful in this time in replicating the spontaneity of the office environment when in-person meetings simply could not happen, at the height of the pandemic.

NexClicker proved to be very effective when spaces began to open up again and gave spaces the opportunity to count people at a distance, and our improvements to Passport by Nexudus gave members another way to connect with each other.

Coworking for a better future

As the conversation moved towards how technology can have a positive effect on mental health, Adrian touched on the 15-minute city concept - the idea that your workplace becomes a first necessity service, just like a supermarket or a pharmacy and should be easily accessible from your home. Technology, service providers and spaces all can play a significant part in making this a possibility and can lead to improved wellbeing in the long term.

How to deliver the best technology experience

When asked how to deliver the best technology experience to customers, Adrian highlighted the importance of education, and how we dedicate a lot of our time and effort into making learning materials readily available so that our customers and users can get the most out of the platform. As you can see through our various mediums such as Nexudus Academy and our webinars, we maintain a strong focus on teaching our users exactly how to use our platform and believe that a strong understanding of our software can take a user’s experience to the next level.

We learned a lot from this panel, and hope to attend more like this in the future!

Unconference Sessions

Unconference sessions are always exciting ways to bring exciting new ideas and concepts to the table, and they are especially relevant for coworking enthusiasts, who as you already know, like to do things a little differently! Day two of Coworking Europe is always dedicated to this - the sessions bring interesting ideas year on year, and 2020’s version was no different. Due to the year that we have all experienced, we had a lot to discuss! Topics ranged from bringing coworking to corporate clients, to reducing climate change, to themes of inclusion, diversity, equity & accessibility. Needless to say, discussions were engaging, and we took away a lot from these participant-driven sessions.

Despite not being able to attend in person, it was amazing to see so many familiar names and faces, all joining together to keep this exciting industry moving along at a fast pace.

Huge thank you to the Coworking Europe team for their organisation, and to all of our coworking companions for joining the conference! We hope you all enjoyed it!