The winner of the Workplace Awards: The sustainable Tinder of empty workspaces

The winner of the Workplace Awards competition’s Sustainability category is the cooperation between the work space network Mushrooming and property manager Monoma. With the expertise of these two very different operators, it is possible to make empty office premises available in the post-pandemic working culture.

In summary, this cooperation is all about finding a suitable workspace that would, otherwise, be empty for all employees around Finland. The service offers workspaces intended for private working as well as for organising large meetings and events. The spaces support all kinds of work – in addition to computer work, for example, spaces for nursing, exercise or professional music making are available. In the service, people can report their empty workspaces as well as their need to rent a workspace.

The service could also be called the Tinder of empty workspaces: it matches people and communities with workspaces for different needs. The cooperation parties come from very different backgrounds, which means that Monoma, which manages empty workspaces, can find users for the spaces through widely-networked Mushrooming. The Mushrooming networks cover people searching for new communities as well as communities searching for new people.

The ethical core of the cooperation between Mushrooming and Monoma consists of low rent level and communality, which encourage people to launch different experiments creating new kind of entrepreneurship, workplaces and innovations. The cooperation is an ideal way to improve the vacancy rate of office premises. At the same time, professionals get to meet each other and share their expertise from completely different areas.

The services of Mushrooming and Monoma represent circular economy: finding new ways of utilising the current built environment more efficiently will, at best, reduce the pressure to use resources for building new premises.