KAYLA FARRELL

WeWork: MEMBER events

In addition to offering world-class office space and amenities, WeWork offers “community”; a benefit that sets it apart from other co-working spaces. An important channel from which WeWork fosters community is events.

These events, available to all members, are curated and hosted by the building’s Community teams using allocated building event budget funds for any food, beverage, equipment or swag supplies and Community teams spend hours daily planning, organizing and hosting (even after work hours) these events.

CHALLENGE & Goals

Events are offered as a means to engage with WeWork; but with no feedback loop, WeWork did not know how engaged members were or if the cost and Community team hours spent were being used effectively.

High level goals of this project were to assess the event experience from both a Community team and member perspective, uncover opportunities to improve events and, ultimately, increase member engagement and event satisfaction while optimizing operational costs.

Role & timeline

I led research at all phases (discovery through validation) and worked alongside several contributors including: a service design lead, community team members (event leads) and several stakeholder teams including Partnerships and Events, Member Engagement and Community Operations.

Exploration and experimentation were conducted November 2016 - April 2017. A prototype “event library” and several event standards were created and rolled out company-wide on April 2017.

High level research questions:

• What is working / not working in terms of the event experience?

• How are events selected within buildings?

• What does “success” for an event mean?

• What are the touch points involved in events?
  

Secondary research

To get a sense of current landscape, I reviewed existing internal Community team training materials, event-related content within the WeWork app (visible to members), and communication about events on the external-facing website. This review helped uncover the story of how Community team members understood and were trained on events (in terms of process and goals) and how members were introduced to events.

To get more color on the member’s experience, 308 interviews from exiting members were reviewed for mentions of events (via keywords such as “event”, “community”, “happy hour” among others) to assess how members felt about events. These mentions were analyzed and codified into several feedback buckets (i.e. including at a high level: “positive” / “pain point” and then subcategorized within to point to specific topics).

PrimARY RESEARCH

In addition to reviewing exit interviews, 6 “active” members (current WeWork members) and 15 Community team members were interviewed in 30-54minute one-on-ones to probe deeper on the process and experiences.

The most striking observation was the disconnect between how internal staff evaluated the success of an event and how WeWork measured event success. Internal staff members were evaluated on the amount of events hosted in their respective building (quantity over quality); However, when asked how Community staff would define success it was unanimously focused on participation and attendance of an event - quality over quantity. This was a belief shared with members who felt that the volume of events led to ones that lacked depth and care from Community teams.

Refined insights

• High event frequency does not produce high quality events.
  Members feel overwhelmed by the volume of events and notice that the quality and care suffers because of the volume. But Community teams are given quota goals for events and as a result put less effort towards making an event higher quality in favor of throwing events to reach the goal (for example, stretching their budget across a lot of events and opting for cheaper or no event supplies for some events). Community feels this “watering down” of events helps them reach what WeWork defines as success.

• Events are not measured in a way that informs future event success.
  While both Community team and members feel that attendance rate are indicators of success, RSVPs through event pages do not accurately reflect attendance. Additionally, Community evaluates events by other dimensions (i.e. budget, effort to organize and promote, etc) but these aspects are not recorded or tracked anywhere to help decide if the event should be repeated in the future - for their own building as well as for other buildings who may be thinking of hosting that particular event.

• There are dimensions to member event interest.
  Members don’t attend events that they don’t feel are relevant to them. While the Community team regularly interacts with their members and anecdotally knows their interests, there is no designated place for these interests to be referenced and used as inspiration.

Prototype testing

Insights were shared with key stakeholders and together we ideated on solutions to these interesting challenges with events. Some low hanging fruit included removing the weekly event quota; however there still remained larger issues and questions such as how will we measure events in a way that informs future event success?

In response to this question, an “event library” prototype was created. It was housed within Airtable because it was a tool that could be easily accessibly and centralized for Community team members and had the features we needed to collect and visualize event data. Additionally, it could be embedded in the internal company-wide wiki which housed our Community standards (references that the Community team could use to complete day-to-day tasks).

The event library was was a collection of global events from Community teams in every building. All a Community team member had to do was, during an event, take a photo of the event at the height of it and then, after an event, fill out a form that included all the important details and submit.

Event Library Roll out