Delivering on the promise of the creative workspace?

What innovative organisations and cities can learn from the case of Second Home

In this critical article, Tuukka Toivonen examines how Second Home, a celebrated London-based workspace company that now has a global presence, seeks to stimulate creative work communities, with important lessons for work organisations and city governments around the world.

*Tuukka Toivonen (PhD Oxon.) is a UCL STEaPP Honorary Senior Lecturer and member of the Urban Innovation and Policy Lab at STEaPP. He also directs the MA in Innovation Management at Central Saint Martins (UAL) and works as the Lead Strategist at Creative Friction.

Since the opening of its first workspace in Spitalfields in 2014, Second Home has been celebrated for its many seductive, unusual design features. Its curved transparent walls, abundant potted plants, unique vintage furniture pieces and statement-making facades have inspired observers from around the world to re-imagine the future of the office and the creative city.

However, flourishing work communities and urban creative environments are hardly created through design alone. What is Second Home’ actual strategy, one needs to ask, for turning groups of innovative people who occupy its quirkily designed spaces into genuinely innovative, inclusive collectives? What can other work organisations and cities learn from the ways it tries to stimulate connections and interactions that support members’ progress towards valued goals?

Spending two months (April-May 2019) as a full-time member at Second Home London Fields  – the company’s newest UK base – gave me a perfect opportunity to explore these questions as a participant, building on prior research. I discovered three community-producing tactics as well as critical weaknesses in Second Home’s community strategy. These offer important lessons for the future of the innovative urban workspace, at a time when dominant industry models (such as WeWork’s) are coming under much scrutiny.

Manufacturing pre-launch buzz to attract new community members

Second Home sought to create a sense of buzz well ahead of the launch of its new London Fields site in February 2019 (following a frustrating two-year delay). It broadcast its promise to offer “world-class architecture, curated community and enriching cultural programme as well as a solution to modern parenthood in the city”, the final point referring to an affiliated creche. Demonstrating more audacity than most, the company organised tours for prospective members when its new base was essentially still a construction site, asking visitors to don high-viz coats and yellow helmets (!). As the space finally opened its doors, a week of events “celebrating social change, creativity and entrepreneurship” were held to create further exposure (with staff doing their best to hype up a community that did not yet quite exist in practice).

Combining linear and emergent approaches to community-building

After the first sales-focused weeks, staff at Second Home London Fields began to combine what I’d call “linear” (simple, top-down) tactics as well as “emergent” (complex, responsive) strategies to catalyse community. (See this Harvard Business Review for more on these distinctions).

Falling under the linear category, occasional breakfast gatherings and Friday evening parties were organised to facilitate member socialising, in addition to a steady flow of cultural and business-focused talk events. Smaller groups were also pulled together for well-being activities, including regular trips to a nearby pool and mindfulness sessions. This programming qualifies as “linear” in the sense of being designed in a top-down manner with clear assumptions regarding outcomes (essentially, helping members get to know each other better, improving their well-being and be exposing them to new knowledge).

As for emergent tactics, about two months into the life of Second Home London Fields, its operations manager started to take note of an unexpected cluster of people linked to the music industry as well as a group of people involved in publishing. In response, he began to explore how synergies could be triggered through bespoke gatherings and activities. He also found himself puzzling over how to engage individuals who worked out of designated offices and rarely engaged with the broader membership. The manager sought to respond (out of personal initiative and not necessarily based on any pre-formulated community strategy) creatively and rapidly to unexpected opportunities and challenges as they came into view.

Symbolising community

Much has already been written about Second Home’s design prowess (or quirkiness). In London Fields, it has sought to replicate the community symbolism – in the form of an open café-bar space, hundreds of potted plants and curated bookshelves – that became the trademark of its Spitalfields space. It uses such symbolic design elements to prefigure a new community before one exists in an empirical sense.

Critical weaknesses

Along with undeniable strengths – including the allure of its brand and its founders’ powerful business networks – I found several critical weaknesses in Second Home’s community-creation strategy.

Absence of responsive hosting and business support

Second Home consistently fails to train its staff to inquire into and respond to member needs. Although adept at surface-level socialising, staff virtually never pose questions such as “what challenges are you facing at the moment?” or “how could we make this space better for you?”. One highly entrepreneurial member who joined the Spitalfields site in early 2019 said that it took threatening to leave and an entire month of wrangling to get Second Home’s “innovation managers” to discuss how she could receive actual business support. The average member – unlikely to be as persistent – should expect no bespoke business or skills support from Second Home’s staff as things stand, contradicting the company’s public messaging.

Limited matching and innovation management capabilities

Second Home on the whole lacks adequate capabilities, digital tools and strategic frameworks for efficiently and effectively making connections between members, or to help members self-identify connections (beyond a member directory and the kinds of gatherings mentioned above). It furthermore has limited capacity for stimulating connections between members and surrounding (pre-existing) communities and neighbourhoods, which is likely to be problematic from the perspective of local policy-makers.

Failure to cultivate a sense of participation, ownership and trust

On the flipside of Second Home’s aggressive community symbolism and curation one finds a thorough lack of enthusiasm for getting members personally invested in the space, e.g. through regularly inviting member-run events and environmental tweaks. I learned of episodes where entire hotdesking areas were shut down without prior member consultation – an all but ideal way to undermine trust between a space and its members.

Lack of commitment to facilitating serendipity

For all their visibility and prestige, Second Home’s events and workshops have a distinctly cosmetic (PR-oriented) feel and curators rarely go the extra mile to facilitate genuine idea generation, feedback conversations or the formation of lasting relationships between members in connection with such events.

Conclusions

While Second Home effectively uses its brand and design allure to attract innovative individuals and companies, it would be hard to argue that is possesses a coherent, convincing strategy for enacting genuinely creative collectives. It has erred on the side of what might be called workspace design and brand fetishism. For the time being, this may have served it (but not its members) moderately well. However, in the future providers – as well as the managers of in-house creative workspaces – can scarcely count on a similarly cosmetic strategy. Why? In part because cultivating a genuine sense of community, participation, creativity and learning translate into vital motivational and commitment mechanisms. Such mechanisms will only grow in importance as workers search for the perfect space that not only stimulates the visual senses but supports their progress through high-quality interactions – and therefore inspires them to stay instead of disengaging and/or switching to a competitor. From the perspective of governing innovative urban spaces at the city-level, policy-makers will also want to pay more attention to whether workspaces in their city provide effective support to diverse entrepreneurial workers, or whether they mainly exist for the benefit of their founders and investors.