How France is making coworking spaces its own

Hybrid spaces, offering desks for individuals and startups, as well as private offices for small and medium-sized companies, are a key driver of the wider coworking scene, which is rapidly expanding across the country.

In Paris, Morning Coworking operates over a dozen hybrid spaces in high-design buildings where open-plan workspace, private offices and services such as kitchens, showers and common lounges combine the collaborative elements of coworking with the benefits of business centers. NextDoor, which has six locations in Paris and Lyon with two more in the pipeline, similarly offers private offices and desk space, designed around amenities such as telephone boxes, a library, cafes and bars.

“Hybrid spaces are in favor with corporates, regardless of size,” says Virginie Houzé, Head of Research at JLL France. “Changes in how people work are driving these companies to offer alternative, high-quality office environment to their employees.”

For larger companies, the ready-to-work designer office space offered by operators like NextDoor and Morning Coworking is a flexible means to add to their office real estate as needed, whether to house special project teams or remote-working employees. Equally, the simplicity of leasing coworking space is attractive for startups and micro-businesses without the resources for real estate management.

A new way of working

Among the firms opting for hybrid space, two-thirds had already made the decision at the start of their real-estate search, according to a JLL report Coworking: New flexible offices. “It shows that this solution is not a secondary choice dictated by shortage in available space,” says Houzé.

Yet there are now more hybrid spaces in France for companies to consider. JLL research found that the number of leases signed by hybrid-space operators alone is now five to seven times higher than three years ago, while in 2017, the total amount of space leased by flexible-space providers nearly doubled to 90,000 square meters.

Yet for all its substantial growth, coworking only accounted for 3 percent of office space take-up in Paris last year – and over 5 percent in Paris CBD, lower than other comparable European.