Iimagine a house where a large family resides, but where the atmosphere is not so good: the parents no longer get along, each child is holed up in his room, and the oldest is on the verge of leaving to move in roommate with friends.
Faced with this disengagement, the parents decide overnight to welcome dynamic young workers who will stay in the house in exchange for services: small dishes, cleaning, organization of video game tournaments. “It’s win-win [« gagnant-gagnant »] »exclaims the mother, signing the contract.
In business, a “corpoworking” space more or less fulfills these specifications, for example by transforming the entire ground floor of a building into a coworking space. Why “corporate”? Because the space is hosted by a specific company (corporation). In corpoworking, a company therefore welcomes alongside its employees, freelancers (possibly its service providers), start-ups or nomadic employees.
Augmented version of the “flex office”
The word is ugly, of course, but the intention is laudable: the project aims at emulation, by bringing together spheres that do not meet or hardly meet. The first examples date from the early 2010s and then concern technology giants in search of renewal.
If a company can finance these open places (or third places) out of pure charity – in Toulouse, Action Logement has financed a network of corpoworking spaces to limit travel between home and work and recreate social ties – the model often seeks to facilitate the realization of certain projects, with partners.
This is the case of the Villa Bonne Nouvelle, in the Sentier district, in Paris: this former building of the PTT switchboard operators has been, since 2014, the “Showcase of HR innovation of the Orange group”. It offers freelancers and start-ups a space of 350 square meters to experiment with new managerial practices. Handpicked, its sixty occupants do not stay more than a year in the Villa, the time to learn to live together as in a high quality reality TV show.
A sort of augmented version of the ” flex office “, which abolishes the individual office, corpoworking wants to stimulate creativity and break the monotonous daily life of executives on permanent contracts… Even if it is obvious that these new relationships alone will not make them hypercommitted in a snap of the fingers. For the management, it will still be an opportunity to present itself as a “big family”, open to all, which the HRDs and real estate directors will describe more soberly as“hybrid ecosystem”.
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