Neo-Nomade is a French company working with corporates and medium size businesses to create customised packages they can use to let their employees roam between coworking spaces in France. As the percentage of employees working from home is sky-rocketing due to the Covid-19 crisis, we have interviewed Baptiste Broughton, one of Neo-Nomade‘s co-founders, to learn more about this phase companies and workers are going through while asking ourselves: is working from home a solutions with its own limitations?

Main takeaways

Neo-Nomade operates with corporates in the banking, insurance, telecom or consulting industries. Jobs in this fields are by definition more digitilized; let’s see what Baptiste Broughton has to say according to his work experience and the Covid-19 situation:

• 15% of the remotely working employees in France would prefer to work from coworking spaces which are located nearby: “Although this is still a minority of the staff, it represents a potentially huge number”, affirms Baptiste.
• Depending on the industry you work on, 50 to 70% of employees can work just by using a computer: “It means they can apply to work remotely”. Baptiste mentions that consulting firms they work for, have 30% remote work adoption rate, for instance.
• So far, sales people and what he calls road warriors (workers moving around the country due to their function) have been obviously the easiest to bring into third workplaces like coworkings: “They work a couple of hours or host meetings with colleagues or prospects in the region”.
• The success of coworking for companies is related to the own culture the employer cultivates: “Coworking isn’t or wouldn’t be very popular within a company such as Google. They invested a lot in their facilities and they are keen to keep people within their walls”.
• Some employees still pay for their coworking membership with their own money as their employer isn’t seeing the value, yet. “We had started to observe a plateau with respect to the growth”, Baptiste observes. “The Covid-19 crisis will likely change the spirit dramatically”.

Find below the podcast version of the interview to find out more.

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