Redesigning co-working for impact
Archive Date: May 16, 2019
Two years after Root Impact began working to support Changemakers, a pattern of barriers had emerged. By 2014, they began collaboratively designing a co-working space with its potential tenants, and launched HEYGROUND in 2017 with over 90% occupancy. The 6000-square metre space has attracted the attention of mainstream media, companies like Patagonia, and South Korea’s sitting President Moon Jae-in. In 2018, we sat down with HKelly Shin from Root Impact to talk about HEYGROUND’s development and ongoing evolution.
If we’re going to pay for a membership, the least we can do is shop around for the right co-working space. As we walk through a space, we check out the furniture, offices, wall usage, the coffee bar, amenities like a climbing wall or bike racks, maybe the lighting, and definitely the people occupying seats. The specific components of these spaces gives us a reading on the crucial, invisible ingredient to a great workspace — the vibe. HKelly, Root Impact’s Global Partnership Director tell us that visitors at HEYGROUND say that they “can feel some changemaker vibe inside HEYGROUND”. Root Impact is the Korean non-profit behind the 6000-square metre free-standing co-working building dedicated to Changemakers and social entrepreneurs in the heart of Seoul’s Seongsu area. By the time it opened in 2017, it had 99% occupancy.
HEYGROUND’s departure from other co-working spaces lies somewhere deeper, beyond the building’s foundations first laid in 2016. HEYGROUNDs foundations lie further back, before there was a space to fill, when people working to create positive impact in South Korea might not even have had a term, let alone a space to call their own.
Co-designing solutions with users
HKelly points out, “In South Korea, university graduates are expected to become a civil servant, doctor, a lawyer or work in Samsung, Hyundai, and LG.” People who want to make money off of commercial startups are already taking too big a risk for their parents, let alone social entrepreneurs trying to navigate making a living and making a difference.
Root Impact was founded in 2012 as a non-profit that aimed to support what the team calls the “unsung heroes” and Changemakers in South Korea. For the first two years, the Root Impact team focused on providing support through professional services, events, programs for women, and even co-living housing. Eventually, they realised there were deeper issues programming and services alone could not address:
- Financial instability
- Emotional vulnerability
- Lack of network and community
Though social enterprises can be for-profit, they are not profit maximising and often targeting niche markets that cannot attract traditional startup funding. As a result, their tight finances means they often cannot sign traditional office leases. In addition, most work in isolation on their specific issues, without access to networks that tech startup founders usually have. The Root Impact team began to ask, “What if we can gather together, work together, support and inspire each other, share knowledge and experience?” Taking it a step further, what if the Root Impact team could “provide a good facility, good space, at a more reasonable price to allow them to focus on their work?”
However, rather than diving straight in to finding a space, the team went back to the Changemaker community, their would-be customers, first. During what HKelly calls the “ground building process”, they invited 24 potential tenants who are CEOs and founders of non-profits and social ventures to monthly discussions for the type of work environment they needed and what type of community they wanted to build together. The Root Impact team took it further and asked what type of services and support these teams needed to grow sustainably.
After the community discussions and 1.5 years of construction, HEYGROUND opened in the summer of 2017 with most of the initial community moved in.
Prototyping value
HEYGROUND’s eight-storey building not only reflects the demands of tenants, but the principles that the Root Impact team and the Changemaker community have developed throughout their years of collaboration.
On a basic level, HEYGROUND offers the usual co-working space hotdesks, private offices, common spaces and meeting rooms, a cafe and restaurant on the lower floors, and a rooftop event space. In addition, it offers the professional support requested during the design phase, such as access to free legal, accounting, and financial consulting.
However, HEYGROUND’s 500+ members, employed by 70+ non-profits and social ventures are not merely tenants. One of the questions asked during HEYGROUND’s design and planning stages was, “If there is a community, what kind of community do [the members] want to build together?”
Some of this contribution can be facilitated by HEYGROUND’s approaches to membership. Individual memberships were a minimum of three months and office contracts two years to encourage members to stay longer. In addition, while HEYGROUND members with over 80 people, one understanding is that no company may occupy an entire floor, which cuts off interactions with other community members. This means that when a company grows to 100 people, it should move out, making space for new members to benefit from the ecosystem.
Though HEYGROUND screens members, it is focused on one specific social issue. It has non-profits such as the Ashoka Foundation and hardware companies like Lineable because, as HKelly puts it, “We wanted to see how members collaborate with each other when they get together.” Members have built websites for each other, pitched in to social media campaigns for each other, and collaborated on projects for specific groups, such as homeless women.
Collaboration is so central to HEYGROUND’s approach it is baked into the team’s reporting KPIs. In order to continually iterate a conducive, collaborative environment, the 10-person team (at the time of the 2018 interview) has a remit to regularly track members. Standards they have developed within one year of operation include:
- Continued membership
- Member team’s growth
- Collaborations between members
The mix of qualitative and quantitative data paints a nuanced picture. For example, over 80% of members are social ventures and their growing team size means that they are likely succeeding in their businesses. Qualitative data includes feedback on services, the facilities, and comparison of HEYGROUND to previous office spaces. Member collaboration is perhaps the metric that is most demonstrative of HEYGROUND’s value, as not only a physical space, but a place that facilitates increased positive impact.
Growth through integrity
When we interviewed HKelly in late 2018, we immediately asked her about replicating their success model. She responded, “It’s not about opening a lot of spaces. We’re impact-focused and we want to have a high quality of impact.” Fast forward half a year, and HEYGROUND is about to launch a second location, HEYGROUND SEOUL FOREST. This is in response to domestic demand, which in July 2018, had already reached over 700 individuals comprising 229 company applications. Additional locations outside Korea are being explored.
The waitlist as a proven market demand is a growth scenario businesses would kill for, but they would have missed the point. HEYGROUND, and its parent Root Impact, had never set out to engineer its own growth. Instead, it has remained laser focused on its mission. HKelly says, “Our top priority is to enhance the quality of the Changemaker community.” She quickly adds, “Compared to startups, I think, it’s harder because the social market is limited…and the global market is more limited.” The true scalability of impact does not end with increasing locations, but decreasing barriers to the spread ideas, products, and solutions. HKelly wonders what can translate across societies, given that many social entrepreneurs are passionate about solving local problems within their communities.
Co-working beyond a space
Yet, this skepticism and humility can be harnessed as driving forces to continue observing and experimenting. The only way to do that is to have a HEYGROUND presence overseas. Presence does not necessarily mean a space, though that seems an inevitable next step. As the Global Partnerships Director, HKelly travels regularly to build ties with communities abroad, in places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Berlin, and Singapore. But again, global co-working visas are not unique to HEYGROUND. What is unique is how HKelly approaches global ground building. She does this by storytelling, often including companies that are not HEYGROUND members in presentations. “We have a broad definition of community,” she says casually. As long as a company is trying to create a positive impact, she sees them as a member of the Changemaker movement and connects them to resources.
Key in “social enterprise” on Naver Search, Korea’s Google, and you will find over 600 articles about HEYGROUND. Such a building is not only a landmark accomplishment, but has become a landmark location that gathers emerging startups, opinionated companies like Patagonia, and even dignitaries such as South Korean sitting President Moon Jae-in and the King of Belgium.
A building is easy to spot. Its physicality anchors people’s mental understanding of Changemaking culture, housing passion, optimism, and business practicality under one roof. But HEYGROUND is not successful because of its beautifully designed space, nor even because there was a proven need. (The businesses, social or otherwise, will always need office space.)
Co-working spaces, as a subset of real estate, are tough businesses with thin margins. All co-working space operators know that community is the only thing that can keep members and invest heavily in programming to nurture said “community”. As businesses most co-working spaces build a “space” that needs to be filled. The “unique” community they try to foster becomes the product sold to new members. In contrast, HEYGROUND started with the idea of “co-working” and only arrived at “a space” for people to do that more effectively by pooling resources. They succeeded in the alchemy of community building precisely because they remain focused on all the things that “co-working” means: connecting, collaborating, and contributing.
When she arrived in Hong Kong, the first thing she handed me a toothpaste packaged to belong on the shelf beside department store brands. “WithMy isn’t in HEYGROUND, but the founder is a solo founder. She worked as a dentist in the US for years before coming to Korea. This is her line of sustainable, vegan toothpaste that doesn’t use animal testing and good for pregnant women. I just love it.”
No matter how celebrated HEYGROUND becomes, it will never be about HEYGROUND, or even the team that runs it. Near the end of our chat, HKelly returns to a point already made, “We exist for our members. Without them, there’s no reason that HEYGROUND exists.” Root Impact built HEYGROUND’s four walls as a safe haven for unreasonable optimists, but ultimately the Changemaker movement is about taking down barriers. Sometimes, the barrier is just that our own mindset is that doing good, creating and sharing good, isn’t the natural way to live a life, and make a living