Millennials don’t stick to conventional work hours, work habits and workspaces, but that is old news.
What’s comparatively new, is that millennial working spaces — which were earlier restricted to home offices, cafés or the occasional hipster co-working space — have now become a major competitive industry of their own, with both local and global players.
Chennai has seen a spurt in such co-working spaces in the past year or two, with independent venues like Backyard in Adyar and The Grid in RA Puram providing a combination of a laid-back, quiet working environment; spots to brainstorm and collaborate; platforms to perform, exhibit, and network; and, of course, kitchens to supply unlimited coffee.
The latest — and largest — entrant in this scene, however, is SPACES, a multi-national corporation that takes workspace design and support systems very seriously.
Originally a Dutch initiative — and acquired by London Stock Exchange-listed IWG recently — SPACES offers everything from a single couch in a common space to rented office space for 20 people, designed and operated with synergy across all their 26 global outlets.
In Chennai, SPACES just launched its three-floor, 420 workstation-strong co-working space at Express Avenue.
This is SPACES’ second outlet in India, after Gurugram. According to country manager Harsh Lambah, the plan is to open offices in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata and the NCR region within the next year.
Ambitious as it looks, Lambah insists that their competition in this space is not just individual co-working spaces or cafés. “Our competition is traditional real estate,” he states, “We provide an alternative to long-term leases that start-up founders and others end up being tied to, regardless of fluctuations in business. We can be anything you want us to be — a project office, a branch office or headquarters — and you can renew or change your requirements every few months.”
The model is simple: the company acquires office space on lease, rent or partnership, refurbishes it and divides it into workstations of different capacities, then rents each one out. The nitty-gritties, in lieu of being flexible, are more complex.
“Our packages range from one month to up to two years,” explains Priya Rathod, Area Head in charge of Chennai, Bengaluru and Coimbatore, “In Chennai, depending on the amount of space you want, you pay anything between ₹10,000 and ₹20,000 per month.”
Lambah explains the concept further, “Say, for instance, you start off with six people. A few months down the line, you realise you’ve grown and need office space for more people, or vice versa. You can change your package accordingly, and take up a larger or smaller space.”
Thus, the premises will effectively house multiple offices, who may or may not want to collaborate. Rathod gives the example of an e-commerce giant that has shown interest in the Chennai premises; the news triggered the interest of the said firm’s vendors, who have now taken up office space on the same floor.
Having said that, Lambah also stresses that SPACES has not set a target demographic. “We aren’t looking only at start-ups, or commercial firms. Everyone is a potential client,” he says, as Rathod adds that a lot of their clientèle in Chennai are artists.
With their joint offering of space, Internet and access to collaborative events, SPACES is bullish on its expansion plans not just in India, but across the globe.
Whether it’s a viable alternative to the friendly neighbourhood space, however, is yet to be seen.