When it comes to selecting the right workspace for your employees, business owners are faced with a lot of hard decisions. In today’s modern work environment, the biggest debate (for individuals and companies alike) often centers on coworking vs. traditional office space. Both options have their merits, but which is right for your company, and how do you find the perfect place for your needs and people?
Benefits of a Coworking Space
The Trouble With Traditional Office Space
Office work space is plentiful—perhaps too abundant these days. With the massive move to remote work driven by COVID-19 in the last few years, many large companies and corporations have decided to keep work out of the office. As a cost-saving measure, this has paid off immensely for big businesses, but it’s left a lot of vacant traditional office spaces. As landlords and property owners adapted, many began to downsize their offerings, hastily putting up thin walls and installing new facilities in an effort to attract a higher volume of smaller clients. So, while many traditional office spaces now provide rentals for small businesses, the quality of the properties has taken a hit. This puts small business owners in a difficult position as they explore expanding their existing office or a return to the collaborative, in-person workspace.
Renting traditional office space used to be the only option for small and large businesses. Renting office space in 2024 is not all that different than in the past: you’ll sign a lease agreement with a landlord and commit to the space for a year or more in most situations. This setup worked in an era where startups and small businesses were few and far between. Now we have a lot of vacant office space across the country with companies that need space, but not as much as a traditional office often provides.
The Benefits of a Coworking Space for Your Business
So, what exactly is a coworking space? A coworking space is a versatile business that supports a variety of different clients, with needs that can depend on their size or industry. Coworking is the practice of working alongside others in a common area, either at traditional desks or at drifter desks. Small businesses and startups usually depend on networking and word of mouth, and a coworking space gives you the perfect community launchpad for making local connections with other business owners. If you have a small team, getting them into a coworking space can help spark creativity and collaboration. In Nashville, Center 615 is able to provide a few coworking options for you and your employees.
Drifter desks are a cheaper option for dipping your toe into coworking, and they mean you never have to work in the same place two days in a row. Designated desks in a coworking space give you that office feel, but you’re still surrounded by people doing all kinds of work. That sort of diversity has been proven to spark creativity and improve productivity in people. At Center 615, clients who rent a designated desk in our coworking spaces receive three hours of conference room usage per month (and free after-hour usage), with a 50% discount during business hours after that. These rooms give you and your team a private meeting place for refreshers or brainstorming sessions. The best coworking spaces are large enough to have great infrastructure but still focused on their clients on a personal level.
A coworking space is an excellent place to get work done in the modern work landscape. When you’re considering a coworking space vs. traditional office space, you’re likely navigating a lot of opinions and articles, each with its own take on which is better. In the end, both options work for different companies. Traditional office leases serve larger clients quite well, especially when their presence is so big that the pressure to keep them as clients motivates a property manager to work to maintain a good relationship. But the truth is that many smaller businesses get the short end of the stick when leasing traditional office space. In a coworking space like Center 615, nobody is overlooked, whether they’re just one individual doing freelance work or a large company. Things are much more tight-knit in a coworking space, and not just because everyone’s working in proximity to one another. A coworking space will most likely be the better fit for your company since most businesses aren’t employing thousands of people in one city.
Renting Private Offices From a Coworking Space
We’ve explored a lot of reasons why your business can benefit from coworking, but what is the disadvantage of coworking? The biggest hurdles you may face by having your staff work in a coworking environment come down to space and timing. While coworking spaces are sprawling, things can sometimes get noisy or active, which can distract you and your people if the work you do is very complex. People tend to come and go in a coworking environment, so there’s no telling when such a space will be filled to the brim or eerily quiet. If you want consistency, control, and privacy, an office setting may be more your speed. Traditional offices work well for people who do coding jobs or need to make a lot of phone calls, for example.
If a coworking space doesn’t sound like the first choice for your business, don’t panic! A coworking space as a business generally provides more than one type of space to get work done. You can get the best of both worlds in a coworking space rather than a traditional office environment. At Center 615, we offer coworking space in addition to private office space, but these offices (all 92 of them) are anything but traditional. We’re well aware of the difficulty people have dealing with landlords and property managers who are spread so thin that many of their clients’ needs go unheard. At Center 615, we all have a stake in this place working and reaching its full potential, making your experience far more personal than in a traditional office lease scenario. If you’re not sold on a workplace where everyone is working for different companies or freelancing, you’re in luck with Center 615. At C615, rates for small office rentals start at $975 a month for teams of 1-3 people. Midsize offices and large offices go for higher rates but can accommodate large teams of 54+ people. We’re confident that we can find something that works for you and your team, no matter your needs.
Ready to learn more about how a coworking space in the heart of Nashville can be the perfect place for your small business? Schedule a tour of one of our spaces today at Center 615.
