372. 4 Ways to Build a Stronger Coworking Space Team in 2025
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TRANSCRIPTION
372. 4 Ways to Build a Stronger Coworking Space Team in 2025
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's in coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the Executive Director of the Global Workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the coworking industry."
00:00:43,"Welcome back to the podcast where we dive into the strategies and stories that power successful and profitable coworking spaces. Today we are tackling one of the most important topics for 2025 building a stronger, more aligned team to hit your goals faster and with less friction and a little bit more fun. So before we dive in, I just want to say a huge thank you to anyone listening who was on our Q1 2025 goal setting workshop last week."
00:01:23,"If you're listening before the holidays, before Christmas and New Year's, then our workshop was just last week. It was fantastic. I had so much fun and I hope that you guys had fun and felt like it was really productive and you workshopped at least some of your 2025 Q1 goals. We had a hundred people on Zoom and I had asked my team before the session, hey, what if I think we're going to be fine."
00:01:53,"Zoom caps out at 100. Are we cool? And we thought there's no way a hundred people are coming. We had that many people plus register. But you know how these things are. People get busy, they don't show up. We sent out the recording for those of you who registered, but I will tell you, I think attending live beats it by beats the recording by a long shot. It was really interactive, lots of great energy."
00:02:20,"So thank you and congrats to those of you who attended. So we're continuing on the theme of getting ready for 2025 because it is that time of the year and I know that's what's on my mind. And it's just kind of a time of transition and wrapping up this year, getting ready for next year. And it's a great time to be thinking about what do we want to do differently?"
00:02:44,"What can we do better? I know if you're listening, you already understand how critical your team is and most of you probably have at least some team. You're not running your space entirely alone. And if you are, then maybe 2025 is the year to add to Your team, even if you do it little by little, start with a va, start with someone part time, start with a trade, just practice letting go of some of the day to day community managers, especially as are the lifeblood of any coworking space."
00:03:19,"They shape the member experience, they keep operations running smoothly, they're the ones judging the pillows, cleaning the conference rooms between meetings, making sure your delicious locally roasted coffee is hot and full. And also they're in charge of building the community that hopefully sets you apart from other spaces that are really just about a place to work. So they wear a ton of hats and this is a challenging role because of that."
00:03:51,"And it can be hard to find the right team member, it can be hard to figure out how to shape their role, to align with their skills. But assuming that you're kind of in a good place on that, we want to talk today about how you can ensure that your team is firing on all cylinders in 2025. So that means you and your team members and your interactions that you have as a team."
00:04:18,"So we're going to talk about four ways to build a stronger team and these tips go beyond the surface level. We're going to dive into some deeper strategies that you can implement to create some alignment, accountability and growth. So let's dive in. So the first approach is to set goals. So again, if you are, if you're on our workshop for Q1 2025 planning, then you have a great start."
00:04:48,"Or you might have chosen to just do it on your own. Workshopping on a big zoom call is not for everyone. And if you haven't done them yet, carve out some time, block off your calendar. You don't have to do it with your team if you think better on your own. I know I usually I have to do a round on my own and then I like to hash through it out loud with the team."
00:05:09,"So step one, set inspiring and actionable goals. So you want your goals to not be generic goals like increase revenue, boost occupancy. Of course you all want those outcomes, right? But to truly align your team, you want to set inspiring and actionable goals that give everyone on your team a clear purpose and a way to contribute. So here's what I mean. Let's say your big picture goal is to increase occupancy by 20% by the end of Q2."
00:05:49,"Great goal. But your community managers don't necessarily work directly with numbers like occupancy. So how do you make that goal relevant to their day to day, break it down with them, tie their responsibilities to member retention, sales of private offices, increasing meeting room utilization. When you connect their work to measurable outcomes like that are tangible for them that they can easily measure and see tied to their day to day activities, then your team has more clarity around how they're contributing to the overall success of their of the business and giving them really clear goals that they understand how their role interacts with those goals and then they can actually see the outcomes will help them to make trade offs during the day."
00:06:45,"If it's do one thing versus another. Sometimes it's hard for a community manager to know where to focus and if you've laid out here's what we're going for this quarter, then it's easier for them to make those trade offs and make judgment calls that are more aligned with the calls that you would make. If you don't share those goals and make them really tangible and clear, it'll just be harder for them to make those trade offs on their own."
00:07:10,"Let's not stop there though. Goals should also ideally be inspiring too. For example, instead of just saying let's Keep churn under 5%, reframe it as let's create such an incredible member experience that nobody wants to leave. So that lights a fire, right? So that will start the brainstorming session around what does that look like? How does my interactions as a community manager with our members play into that?"
00:07:42,"What can make that tangible? And then the, the goal is the churn under 5% and then keep them visible. Right? So we'll just all lose track of our goals if we don't keep them visible and if we don't track them. So use dashboards, visual boards. If somebody has an office, maybe nobody has an office and you don't have a place for your own tracker, then keep it digital or keep it on a one of those giant sticky sheets that you can write on and hang up when you have in person meetings or even just reviewing the updates on your virtual team meetings to remind everyone what you're working toward."
00:08:24,"Because it's easy to forget we have a lot of competing demands every single day. Our community managers do you do as owners, it's really easy to get into reactionary mode and not stay focused. That's the goal. So creating these inspirational and trackable goals keeps the energy higher and creates that shared sense of responsibility. So again, instead of you just having this goal that's kind of in isolation, like really bring it down to the level of how does this shape what they're doing and what they're prioritizing every day."
00:09:00,"Okay, and then let's talk about fostering accountability without micromanaging. This is strategy number two. So accountability is important mostly not because we don't all intend to do the right thing, right? Owners, community managers, let's assume everybody has the right intent. I'm always Talking to my 13 year old about intent because she gets mad about many things in life. So I'm always telling her, okay, my intention was to do the right thing here."
00:09:29,"The challenge is we all have so many competing priorities. Fires that happen during the day. The community manager has a really hard time not being in reactionary mode, right? Because they're dealing with surprise. Member needs surprise, people walking in the door for a tour, meeting room, reservations, things that break, the printer's not working, something's not connecting in the meeting room. So accountability is really to help with that focus."
00:09:58,"It's not about the micromanaging because nobody wants to feel like they're being micromanaged. It's a way to empower your team rather than stifling them. So don't think about it as micromanaging. It's hey, we all need help with focus. So here's how we're going to approach this and think about it this way too. Accountability starts with trust. If your team feels like you trust them to do their jobs well, they're more likely to step up and take ownership of their responsibilities."
00:10:27,"But you have to be crystal clear about expectations and this is not easy. I will say I struggle with working with anyone who can't just take the reins and run, like, already knows how to do the job. In my own business, I've always been like that. Which is part of the reason I created Community Manager University in the first place, because I started realizing like, oh my gosh, it's such a heavy lift to train a new team member when they come on board."
00:10:56,"And most entrepreneurs just don't have the patience for that. Right. So how can we systematize the onboarding, the training, but in this context, being really clear about expectations. If you haven't read or listened to the book Clockwork, I've talked about it a couple times. It's been a really helpful kind of mindset shift for me because again, I don't have a lot of patience for going through expectations, requirement, projects, details, like in great detail."
00:11:33,"But you have to really understand as a visionary entrepreneur that most people who are not entrepreneurs actually do need a lot of context, they need a lot of information, they need the tools in order to own something. So we want our community Managers to have some ownership, we have to be very clear with them up front, give them the tools, the information, the support, let them ask them questions until they're ready to go off and own something on their own."
00:12:04,"So just be super clear. For example, instead of saying your responsibility is to handle member issues, you might say more specifically your role is to resolve member inquiries within 24 hours and follow up to ensure they're satisfied. So that gives clarity to your team and gives them the tools to succeed and something also that you can both measure and that's more concrete. So again, if you're just sort of vague, it's your job to handle member issues."
00:12:37,"They might take much longer than you would like, but they don't know what your expectation is. They don't know your expectation is it's got to be done within 24 hours and the member has to feel like it's satisfied, they're satisfied. So you have to be really clear. And this does take some practice. So build accountability into your rhythm. And I talk about this a lot in our coworking startup school in our community manager university."
00:13:01,"We, we're very big on the weekly meeting and sometimes you will not want to do the weekly meeting, sometimes you won't feel like you're ready for it. The secret really is to help your team take ownership of the weekly meeting. So you can have topics you put on the weekly meeting, but you want them to own it. So you're setting up an agenda that they fill in. They come to the table with the questions that they have, the issues that they need to have resolved and the progress they're making on projects versus you."
00:13:29,"Owning the whole meeting and asking for updates and really being the one to facilitate. Let them own it. But you have to set that up and you all have to practice. This is also where you're going to go through your KPIs, your key performance indicators, and make sure you're tracking against your project goals and that everybody's clear and has the resources they need. It's also your job in these meetings to check in."
00:13:50,"This is a really big challenge I see with community managers is that if it's not clear to them what the priorities are, they just might make different decisions about how they use their time than you would like. And if it, if making progress on a project means they need to find a way to get away from the front desk, you have to give them permission to do that."
00:14:14,"You have to find a way to help them do that, which can be really hard. I think that's Actually, probably fundamentally, the biggest challenge for the community manager role is that they are like literally tied to the front desk. They have to sit there, they get interrupted all the time. It's hard for them to make progress on bigger projects when they're interrupted all the time. It's also sometimes almost impossible for them to get out of the front desk if at all possible."
00:14:42,"In addition to their lunch break, try to give them an hour every day so that they can work on other projects and give some time to working on these goals that you're pursuing together and think about how their actions and what they're doing tie into that. I mean, even things like planning member events, if member retention is one of your bigger goals and member events ties into that connections, et cetera, they need time to plan those events, organize the logistics, et cetera."
00:15:14,"And it can be hard to do that when they're constantly interrupted at the front desk. So one of your Q1 goals or later on in the year might be, can I get somebody part time or trade with a member to take an hour at the front desk? Maybe it's in the afternoon when it's not when you. Or sometime in the day when you're least likely to have a tour."
00:15:35,"Maybe you just block that hour off from your tour schedule. Or maybe the person who sits at the front desk is actually great at giving tours. So it's up to you. But I know this is really hard, but I would encourage you to try to figure that out for your team. I think that can really also play in a role in your team's like, happiness and their longevity in the role."
00:15:55,"Okay, so back to the weekly check in. We these don't need to be long or super formal, although I find it's a minimum of 30 minutes usually to go through the topics to go through the KPIs. What questions do you have? The other nice thing about this weekly meeting is that it should remove and this take PRA takes practice. The constant slack messages your team, hey, what do I do about this?"
00:16:24,"What do I do about this? Interrupting your flow as the owner. Save it for the weekly meeting if you can, if it's not urgent. So we try to do that in our team because the constant interruption is very hard for everyone. So if it can wait, then these things can be discussed at a weekly meeting. So this is where you're reviewing KPIs, talking about roadblocks, celebrating wins, and when everybody's sharing what they're working on and what they're doing to help achieve the team's goals."
00:16:57,"It creates natural accountability without the need for you to feel like you're micromanaging. And don't forget to lead by example. If you expect your team to be accountable, you have to hold yourself to the same standard. So you have to show up to the meetings, be on time, be consistent, um, and talk about the things that you are doing to achieve your goals as well. Okay, strategy number three, prioritizing training and development."
00:17:26,"I know this is really hard, but we hire someone to be in our community manager role. Probably they stay for a couple of years and they're, they wear a lot of hats. Some of them, they're going to come to the table and it's going to be a no brainer for them. Maybe they've run somebody's social media before, maybe, maybe they've worked in a hospitality role before, so they just kind of drop naturally into some of these roles and they can just be off and running."
00:17:52,"But on the other hand, there are aspects of the role that you might want them to take on that they've never owned before, they've never done before. And so they work. They need the time, the space and the resources to learn and even things that they've done before. Probably never in the context of coworking unless you're hiring somebody who's worked a coworking space before. And so they need to be able to develop."
00:18:15,"And unfortunately they're probably not going to do it outside of business hours unless you have just a super rock star. But they may have conflicts, family, dogs, other jobs, you name it. And they may not be accustomed to listening to podcasts like you are doing to grow in their role. Some of them are. We have a lot of folks in our community manager university who are very committed to growing and want to be better in their role."
00:18:45,"So if you want your team to perform at their best, you want to be able to invest in their growth. This can be hard. I know you don't have a big budget, I know you don't have a lot of time, but think about the little ways that you can do this. So this may be working on a professional development plan with them. We have templates for that. We do that in our community manager university program and just picking a couple of things that you can support."
00:19:12,"Maybe there's a workshop that they attend, maybe there's something they can do online. Maybe you mentor them on something that you're really good at that they'd like to learn. Maybe they came to work for you because they, they see you as a professional that they want to be more like. Being a community manager is not an easy job. They're juggling everything from member onboarding to tricky situations to planning events to keeping the space clean, all the things."
00:19:42,"So if you're not equipping them with the skills they need to thrive, you're setting them up for failure. I think the other challenging thing about this role is some of the things I just mentioned are not very glamorous. And you may be hiring a community manager and you want them to do these strategic things for your business like help achieve goals around member growth, member retention, but at the same time they're the ones making coffee and clearing off the dry erase boards in the meeting rooms in between meetings."
00:20:13,"Right. So you've got this mix of non glamorous things that they have to do to get the job done. But then you want them to be able to think strategically and move your business forward. Investing a little bit in that aspect of the job can go a long way and help them feel continue to stay energized in the role even when they're doing the take out the garbage and clean the kitchen up."
00:20:36,"So how do you prioritize development? Try again to start with some ongoing training, make it creating even just a small budget for monthly workshops or training sessions. Maybe give them an annual professional development budget so that they can focus on skills that relate to the job, but also that help with their personal development goals that they feel like will be transferable skills that, that support their long term development."
00:21:05,"Because they're not going to work for you forever unless you have ongoing development roles or unless they just for whatever reason want to kind of hang out in this role and do it for a long time, which can totally happen. It's just not as typical. And some of these things might be hard skills like learning new software like a CRM for example. And some of them might be softer skills like how to close at the end of a tour or active listening or how do."
00:21:34,"How do you think about hospitality in a coworking space? And this is where I have to mention our community manager University because I was in your shoes for eight years and had two locations and community managers who came and went and had to get trained and I had to figure out how to retain them and secure support them and develop them. And it's totally overwhelming for an independent operator."
00:21:57,"You likely are not going to be able to produce your own curriculum, your own training tools. You're going to have to outsource it. So that's why we developed Community Manager University I am really passionate about training and development. My very first job out of undergrad was in that role and I learned a lot about learning. Actually my undergrad is in organizational communication and learning design. So I didn't do that for very long in my career."
00:22:26,"A much more of a business marketing, sales funnel, all those things. But that was where I started and so I that's where part of my passion comes. And I also as an owner who's always done had other roles that left me not in the coworking space every day. I really relied on having a great team. And so we developed Community Manager University to help your team grow, help people who are new in the role get up to speed faster, help even seasoned pros figure out how to level up and have access to what other great community managers are doing."
00:23:04,"And it's not just about skills, it's about confidence too. When your team feels equipped to handle challenges, that confidence can show up when they're interacting with members. The other thing I would say is when they're trying to figure out something that's kind of hard in their own business and they can get it normalized by oh, this is how other coworking spaces do it. And they're getting that information from people they know and trust, not just random people in a Facebook group that carries a lot of weight."
00:23:33,"This is a very minor example, but we just had a newer community manager ask how do we manage the snack budget in our space? And I know that seems like a trivial but if you. It's actually not right. We a lot of these things we struggle with because coworking margins, we're always managing them and expenses that grow are challenging. We want to have a great experience for our members."
00:24:00,"We want to be hospitable, but we have a margin to maintain. So things like how do we manage snacks? When everybody, if we put out snacks, they eat them all and and then we have to refill them and now all of a sudden we're spending so much money on snacks every month. How do we manage that? So we had a good hashing out of that in our Community Manager Slack channel and I hopefully it just helped to normalize."
00:24:21,"Like this is a challenge everybody has and here are some healthy approaches on how you might handle it. And sometimes it's just about the confidence of okay, I have done some market research on this and this is how other people handle it. This is totally normal problem. This is how we're going to approach it. And another layer to supporting your team is mentorship. So you can do this with your own team."
00:24:43,"If you have multiple locations or if you have bigger spaces and you have multiple employees, you're probably already doing this kind of naturally. You're pairing more experienced team members with new folks to help show them the ropes, which can make your mentor feel really great and the new person feel great and lessen the load on you as the owner. Okay, so the fourth strategy is around peer engagement."
00:25:09,"So this kind of plays off the mentorship and what I just talked about, reaching out to other great community managers who can give ideas, normalize, etc. Because building a stronger team isn't just about you and your leadership. It's about creating connections and collaboration within your team and then for your team in the broader industry. Why does this matter? People who feel connected are happier, more engaged and more likely to stick around."
00:25:38,"We know that about our members, right? These are the types of experiences and feelings we're trying to create in our spaces. And the same is true for your team. So your culture is everything. It's a big deal. One simple way to foster engagement. You could do team building activities if you have a team or, or if you don't have a team, even just you and your community manager do walk in talks."
00:26:02,"I think Tamara Payne mentioned this on her podcast recently and I used to do it with my community manager too. We in our Palo Alto location were right on this gorgeous nature trail and we just leave the front desk with the sign on it and we'd go walk and talk. And that would be when we would talk about kind of bigger things like our goals, career paths and challenging things that were happening."
00:26:25,"It's kind of magical how when you walk and talk, if you have kids, you know, this is the case that it just creates more maybe authentic interaction for some reason. And then another strategy in this category of creating opportunities for peer engagement is for is creating a space for your team to share insights and get feedback from others. If you don't have a team with multiple people on it so that you can facilitate that, then giving your community manager access to other community managers, maybe that's through a local coworking consortium where they can connect with other local community managers."
00:27:05,"Or mentioning, I'm going to mention again the community manager university where that's a big part of what we're doing. And actually this morning we had a mixer for our community manager. So we do a lot of interacting. Some of it's really focused on getting questions answered, coaching on goal setting, best practice sharing, and sometimes we like to just simply do mixers. So we do Breakout rooms. And we do some personal questions, we do some business questions to help people just really get to know each other so that they can build those relationships."
00:27:38,"And so when they see people on Slack, they know who they are and they feel more comfortable interacting. So creating opportunities for your team to do that and maybe it's just other like young professional organizations that are local as well and donors underestimate the power of celebrating wins. So celebrate with your team, even if it's just the two of you or shout outs if there's a broader team, you're probably doing this."
00:28:03,"Giving shout outs to team members who kind of go above and beyond or take actions against the specific goals that you've set. Even just things like Slack messages to say job well done. These things can make a big difference. Okay, so in 2025, the key to coworking success is not just about great spaces, clever marketing, having your sales funnel nailed down. Although all these things are important, it's about building a team that's aligned, empowered and engaged."
00:28:37,"So here are are four ways as a recap to build a stronger team. Set actionable goals that everybody can connect to that are clear and inspiring at the same time. No pressure. Strategy number two, foster accountability through trust and clarity. Strategy number three, invest in training and development to help your team thrive. And step four, create opportunities for peer engagement and collaboration. If you need some help doing these things with your team, check out our Community Manager University program."
00:29:11,"It is one way to ensure your community managers have the tools they need to excel in their roles. And I just want to mention we are this month celebrating five years of Community Manager University. Is that totally nuts? It's nuts to me. I had to literally keep counting. Is it really five? It's really five. So it's been incredible. We've had five years of every single month creating new training, new playbooks, new resources, new best practices."
00:29:42,"So we have this tremendous library of resources and in 2025 we're really focused on making that library really easy to tap into to accomplish your specific goals. So things like increasing tour close rates, getting more leads, member retention. So we're doing more Q and A calls, more coaching on goal setting, and we are adjusting our price structure. In January 1, 2025, we have not increased our price in five years."
00:30:15,"So it's time to do a little restructuring. If you're already in the program, you will be totally locked in to our $97 a month price. If you join before December 31, 2024, you, you will also get locked in. We have a bonus for those who join for the full year, which is our 62 page coworking operations Handbook template. This bad boy took a long time to produce."
00:30:41,"It's really detailed. It is. You could use it and run with it. You probably want to customize some of the sections to how you do business, but it's really plug and play. I mean it's really designed for you to just adjust some of the text so there's placeholder text that is real text written by real people who run coworking spaces. It's gold. So that for our annual bonus so you can learn more about that program at everything coworking.com"
00:31:17,"forward/community manager. Certainly reach out if you have any questions at all about whether the program is right for you. It's just a month to month commitment unless you do the annual plan. So pretty low risk and a big value to your team. Okay, Happy Holidays. Best wishes with your planning and celebrating a great 2024 and getting ready for a healthy and happy 2025. Thank you for listening to today's episode."
00:31:48,"If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everything coworking.com we'll see you next week."
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