The Problem with Coworking Space Management Software

You want to streamline as many manual, time-intensive tasks in your coworking space as possible so you can have more time to connect with your community and get ahead in your business.

So you sign up for coworking space management software in hopes that it will help you do just that.

After a few months, you realize that managing your software is taking up a lot of time and energy. It revolves around performing manual tasks, it’s difficult to use, and it’s time consuming for you and your team.

You wanted technology to help you get ahead, but now you’re caught in a web of manual work and falling behind.

Does this story sound familiar?

In this article, we’ll present you with three problems with coworking space management software that we hear time and time again in the flex industry.

Problem #1: It revolves around performing redundant manual tasks

Despite the promise of increased efficiency, coworking space management software revolves around performing redundant manual tasks.

If your operations manager needs to follow-up on an invoice, they need to email them manually. If your community manager wants to welcome a new member in your online community, they have to go into the software and manually reach out every time someone joins. 

These are just two examples, but the list of manual tasks that you and your team are doing each day is virtually endless (just ask your team).

Over reliance on manual tasks presents a problem when it comes time to scale your business. As we heard from one operator, “I cannot scale my business with the system as it is right now.” It’s a common problem we hear far too often.

Problem #2: It’s difficult to use

Chances are, the first time you got into your space management software, you had a tough time figuring out how it worked. Maybe the interface was difficult to navigate or the system felt clunky. The actions weren’t intuitive, and you thought to yourself once or twice, there must be a better way to do this.

This is the story we often hear from operators using legacy space management systems. It’s difficult to use, it’s overly complicated, and it doesn’t help them move their business forward in the way they want. 

The harder their system is to use, the more time they spend on trying to learn it – valuable time that could be reinvested elsewhere. This brings us to our next point.

Problem #3: It’s time consuming

No community builder got into coworking because they wanted to spend all of their time in technology.

But because coworking space management software is difficult to use, many operators find themselves spending a lot more time in it than they’d like.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Optix team, coworking operators are spending on average 53% of their time performing manual tasks with technology tools each day. This translates to more than 20 hours a week or 4 hours a day with technology per admin. 

Every minute you spend with your technology tools is a minute lost from the community. And given how important community building is to sustainable coworking businesses, this is a critical shortcoming.

Operators are spending too much time fiddling with software, and it’s not contributing to their overall goals as community builders. Every operator knows their operations are taking up too much time.

Surely there must be a better way.

So what’s the solution?

Coworking space automation software is designed to help operators create an autonomous flex business, one where the technology can reliably run all of the operations so you don’t have to.

It represents the next era of running a flex space business, one where your daily tasks are taken care of, your space runs without you having to think about it, and your team finally has time to get ahead.

The vision of coworking space automation software is that your team can spend less time with technology tools and more time with people, doing the things that only a human can do.

To learn more about how automation can transform your coworking and flex space, watch the replay of our live event where we reveal the next era of running a flex space business.