“Anyone here knows Photoshop –need help with it, will buy you lunch in return,” reads a post on the WeWork Member Network app as you open it. Scroll down and there are posts looking for a web designer and so on.

Welcome to the modern way of working. It’s normal practice for the over 2,68,000 members of co-working giant WeWork to post requests on the app and get work done without budging from their desks.

“70 per cent of members collaborate with each other; 50 per cent of our members have done business with each other at one stage or other. It is a pretty powerful number,” says Ryan Bennett, Chief WeWork Officer at WeWork India, as he gives you a demo of the app and then takes you on a tour of the latest facility at Bristol Chowk in Gurugram.

It’s striking in design with a large sunlit communal central courtyard with a lot of activities going on. Climb a few steps and you are at a vibrant cafeteria area that serves organic healthy meals — the desks are scattered across floors in many formats, hot desks (cheapest), reserved desks, cubicles to private offices. TrueCaller has a large office here.

It’s been exactly one year since WeWork, the largest co-working space provider in the world and ranked the fifth most valuable tech start-up in the US ($20 billion valuation) entered India. The shared spaces operator, founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, is constantly creating headlines — the latest being its decision to reimburse only vegetarian bills of its employees (soon it will make this vegan). The plastic-free workspace, which does not use leather in its furniture is hell-bent on creating a WeGeneration — people who will demand more from their work than a job, who crave experiences and have an idealistic vision.

In many of the cities it operates in, it is the largest office space creator. How will this late entrant to the India co-working story, which according to JLL has over 300 players in the fray already, grow in India? The early lead here has been taken by local start-ups that are attuned to the market.

Bennett doesn’t seem worried. Scale and its formidable community of users spread across the globe are the two strengths that WeWork will leverage on. Its member network app is configured in such a way that you can look at what people at the facility you are currently in are posting, or switch it to global and see requests across the 23 countries, 76 cities and 237 locations WeWork is present in. “We have seen cases of businessmen in India posting requests for a vendor in China and tying up everything even before they go across all through our network,” says Bennett.

The app is one of WeWork’s strong suits. Bennett points out that apart from collaborating on it, members can also get huge discounts on the app’s shoppable services store. WeWork uses its scale to negotiate with enterprise solutions players like Microsoft, Amazon web Services, GoDaddy, Slack, etc, to offer as much as 20 per cent discount to its members. It has over 100 top partners on the services store selling everything from productivity tools to finance, legal, marketing and tech solutions.

Even as it is digitally connecting up its members, Softbank funded WeWork also spends a lot of resources in face-to-face community building initiatives, connecting them over yoga and pilates, or knowledge workshops.

While most shared spaces in India are 40-50 desk locations, WeWork is banking on big box formats to scale up fast in India, carefully hand-picking buildings that can house from 600 to a 1,000 or more. From catering to 2,200 members in WeWork Galaxy last year in July, WeWork today has over 10,000 members across India. But it’s just a small fraction of what WeWork would like its India numbers to be.

According to JLL’s projections, the potential size of the co-working segment across India is in the range of 12-16 million users by 2020. This includes start-up employees, freelancers, staff at emerging businesses as well as large corporate office employees.

Bennett makes no bones that they would like a sizeable chunk of this 16 million to be at WeWork facilities — and are rapidly sewing up big spaces in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi NCR to fuel this ambition.

So how will they do customer acquisition? Bennett says the idea is to get people working in traditional work spaces to shift. “One of the things we see as we continue to grow in one market is that as soon as we put additional supply in the market, demand actually increases.”

The surprising thing in India, says Bennett, is that enterprise clients are bulk of WeWork users here. Globally, enterprise members form only 25 per cent of WeWork’s membership. In India, the demand has been coming from enterprise customers. This means the way WeWork sources and designs buildings has had to change. “Some companies use WeWork spaces as their regional headquarters. Some companies use it as temporary space building new headquarters. A lot of enterprises move to our spaces when they want to downsize,” he says.

A surprising use case is companies that are starting innovation labs. They want their people to be housed in a more innovative place to fuel creativity and a funky shared space is ideal for that. “We are also seeing that enterprise companies are now moving into our space as they realise it attracts and retains talent — because employees want to be in a more inspiring workspace,” he says.

As a global operator have they had to do some adjustments to understand India’s cultural nuances? On the contrary, Bennett feels that India is proving an easier market because the values that WeWork rides in on — creating community — is already embedded here. Also, when WeWork entered India it did so through a partnership with a local real estate group Embassy.

Future thrust

Globally, says Bennett, a lot of companies are now approaching WeWork to manage and operate their office facilities. “We are starting to roll out this service around the world. Though we haven’t yet done these projects in India, we are in talks,” he says.

“Essentially we go to a company, literally design their workplace according to their HR strategy. The fact that we are the largest builders today — we create one million sq foot space in a month — helps us drive down prices,” he says. “Some companies also ask us to help us with community building initiatives to grow employee engagement,” he says. After taking away the office manager’s role, it looks like WeWork could soon be taking away some of the HR Manager’s tasks as well.

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