Cosy coworking – a year in review…

The days are getting shorter, snow arrived… and the time between blog posts is far too long!! This is our new website and it has been up for a while now. But maybe that exemplifies what this post will be about, the website is not Ware to Work, it is somewhere to land if you find us, you can see a bit of what we are about. And what we are is a great place to get out and work alongside others, a growing community of people who live in or near Ware who all have their own businesses, jobs, projects and don’t have a permanent office they can (or want) to commute to every day. We want to connect with others, disconnect from working from home, find focus and find inspiration. Meet new people and have good WiFi. At the end of 2021 we were working – in a very spaced out manner – just four desks in Fireside office and the Oak office as a private office. There was still uncertainty over when or how we should be working with all the covid restrictions in place. We’ve grown slowly and now have 6 regulars, yet over the last 18 months have had over 30 different people use the space, some ad-hoc, some longer term. In Jan 2022 we introduced a fifth desk into Fireside and in September a sixth. It is actually a better vibe with a few more desks and there is still plenty of space. We have a real mix of people working here, some employees, some freelancers or small business owners, a small cohort of people working here live on boats on our beautiful river. We host East Herts Toastmasters two evenings a month and a local primary school tutor – Additions Tutoring uses the Oak office for an after school tutor group. Because we’re the only place in Ware you can book a desk for the day, we’ve had a couple of people who were just passing through, going to a meeting in the area and needing a place to work for the day. In one of our spontaneous room chats we were talking about what it is about Ware to Work we liked, and Paul came up with ‘cosy’ and that’s kind of the vibe we have, cosy because it feels a comfortable place to work, physically – the desks are big, the kitchen is a proper kitchen with a table we can sit around, but also comfortable people. And it’s not because we’re all the same, in fact we’re quite a mixed bag, all coming for slightly different reasons, but finding a place we can get the work done we need to, connect with others – there have been some good music collaborations (Sam, Paul) and support. You know coworking gives you a set of coworkers who aren’t your work colleagues – so if you need a moan, or bounce some random ideas about, you can do it all outside the vagaries of ‘office politics’. My vision is to have a local, friendly place to work, and that our High Street can be the ‘coworking space’. I do 2-3 days per week paid work – public health research on various projects, so I’ve created a place I love to work too. I want to ‘scale deep’ (as opposed to scaling-up ventures whose local impact can be explosive yet short-lived). I like the idea of growing organically and seeing what happens, it may end up being a social enterprise, or maybe just an example of how “coworking AND” can work as a decent second-income business in a small-town context.