The rise of the "third space"

While the concept isn’t new, its post-pandemic popularity is. 

The world before saw the “third space” as a stop-gap. Now it's a crucial part of so many more lives, with the number of permanent remote workers expected to double this year.

Only a few years ago, the “third space” was seen as a stop-gap.

It was, at best, what the Ace Hotel lobby (RIP) has always been to freelancers. At worst, it was a noisy coffee shop where the Wi-Fi was patchy, and you couldn’t find a plug socket for your laptop. 

The concept itself isn’t new. The term has long been used by urban planners to describe community hubs and is also the name of a London luxury gym positioning itself as a mecca where you can stop and work on yourself. 

Yet what has changed since the pandemic is the way in which we’ve come to embrace this third space.

Earlier this year, a global Accenture survey of almost ten thousand people showed that 79% of them wanted a third space to work outside of their homes and the traditional office.

This isn’t surprising. In the initial days of the pandemic, we had a couple of our Hubble customer success agents doing live chat and phone calls from their bathrooms. Densely packed in a house share, like many other young people in the capital, they just didn’t have that much space to operate from at home and found that their bathrooms tended to be quiet spaces. 

They weren’t the only ones facing this battle. For various reasons, plenty of people feel that they cannot get work done in the right way at home. And in a post-Covid world, we have proven that “remote work” means “working from anywhere”. 

One of the biggest misunderstandings is that "remote-working" = "home-working"—that's simply not true. At Hubble, just over the past 6 months, we've seen 60% of our customers request access to third-spaces on demand, and a 15x rise in usage. 

And the market is responding.

Traditional office providers are responding and evolving their offering from a 1-year lease to a 1-day office booking. Hotels such as Marriot are starting to offer workspace on-demand across their portfolio. Pubs and restaurants are trying to monetise spare capacity during the day. And we're seeing the rise of brands such as Patch building beautiful spaces near where people live.

As the pull of the HQ weakens and more people embrace hybrid work, the “third space” is rising not as a “stop-gap” but as a highly desirable place where people want to work.

People are now seeing third spaces as chances to optimise their environment for a specific objective. More people want to work from a third space because it gives them a particular outcome.

At Hubble, we help thousands of business leaders who are navigating this new future of hybrid work. Recently, we're starting to see the rise of the third space in several ‘location buckets’:

1. Local (to where we live)
2. Central (for meeting)
3. Global (when not at home)

The first category of locations is “local” (to where we live).

This set of third spaces is for people who can’t or don't want to work from home, or maybe not every day. Perhaps it’s because they have a long commute. Earlier this year, we did an extensive survey and found a direct correlation between commute time and appetite for going back into the office. In short, those with longer commute times wanted to work remotely the most often. 

For this group, operators such as Spacemade are opening high-quality workspaces in London suburbs such as Queen’s Park and London Fields. There are many other different operators taking over retail space on the local high streets and building coworking spaces. What matters in this category: not having a long commute, having a space outside of your home where you can get work done, and being in touch with your local community.

The second collection is “central” (for meeting). 

This is the number one use case that we see at Hubble. "Collaboration" is now a key use case of the company office. We're now seeing businesses replace their offices completely with the ability to meet their team, customers and investors, in a wider variety of locations across London and other major CBDs.

The last collection is “global” (when not at home). 

This is obviously also huge for businesses employing distributed and semi-distributed teams— which since Covid, has increased significantly. 72% of the total global workforce is currently working remotely according to hundreds of chief information officers from around the world across different industries. 

If you're a London business hiring someone who lives more than 90mins commuting distance away—either in the UK or anywhere abroad—it's not good enough to expect those workers to work at home 100% of the time. We're seeing huge demand from businesses wanting to give their remote workers access to third spaces across the world too.

Now, third spaces are seen as places that can enable or foster something that can’t happen at home or HQ. 

So the new way to think about when exploring and selecting third spaces is to ask: what are you trying to achieve? 

• When you want to inspire the team’s creativity: say, you need to do a crazy brainstorm about a new project or new initiative. It really helps to get out of your office and into an environment that can foster that creativity.
• To get solo, deep work done: we're seeing the revival of libraries and even university campuses where people go to have some quiet time to think, uninterrupted. 
• If your work is part of a global team: you can go into a Zoom room to have a really effective hybrid meeting. I’m starting to see a lot of Zoom rooms: high-tech spaces with cutting edge audiovisual technology. 
• For working parents: co-working spaces have started to add rooms for mothers and on-site crèches for parents. But soon, I predict people will start calling out for crèches to add desks, wifi (and soundproofing!).
• If looking to meet or win a client: sure, you can go to their office, but what's even better is taking them to a stunning high-end 5* space and winning the deal there instead.

The future of where we work is personalised to the individual's personality and the outcome they're trying to achieve.

Personally, I spend about half my time working from third spaces because I’ve always believed that each place can serve a unique purpose:

1. For creative thinking: I go for a stroll in the Tate Modern or the Design Museum before then landing in a funky space.

2. When the weather is great: I’ll seek out a great rooftop to work from and invite colleagues and clients to meet me there too.

3. Solo deep work: I seek out spaces with leafy green library-like silent environments.

4. Bonding with the team: in our HQ itself, or in bars, restaurants, doing interesting activities together.

5. Webinars and Zoom calls: I've set up my own Zoom room with full-lighting, professional microphone and high-quality camera.

All in all, what constitutes an effective third space is highly personal and unique to each team and situation.

And we’re not necessarily meant to have the same third spaces for years on end: they naturally evolve as we (and our team) do. If you’ve got a specific space you use for a specific purpose, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.