Since the rise of professional coliving operators, we’ve seen a transformation in the coliving industry towards operational excellence.

Operational excellence is what will make coliving companies thrive financially long-term. It is the foundation for any successful and predictable business that wants to scale.

And yet, operational excellence has not yet translated into communal excellence. While operations have focused on smooth check-ins, payment and reservation systems, property management solutions, access control, low HR turnover and clear roles within the company, they have not focused enough on the operational processes behind community building.

I know from my own experience that operating coliving spaces is not the most difficult part. The challenge lies in replicating a unique experience. At the end of the day, coliving is not only a product or service that’s being consumed at certain times. It is a fully immersive experience, which can turn out to be a nightmare, a fine time or the best months of someone’s life.

What will differentiate coliving spaces won’t be the ability to have outstanding operations; it will be the ability to have high quality experience creation, which ultimately relies on the art of community building.

Now, I’m aware of what most people think:

“Community building is not crucial to our business. In fact, we don’t know how to justify investment into the communal experience.”

“We had to stop our communal activities and events due to the pandemic. We can’t be on-site and hence can’t improve the experience.”

“It’s up to the residents to create their own community. We can only give them the space.”

After interviewing 150+ coliving professionals from around the world and running 4 coliving spaces in 3 continents myself, I’ve come to the realisation that community building is neither time nor capital intensive, nor does one have to physically be at the space to create it.

In this article, I’m going to explain the one equation that defines what I call the Art of Coliving methodology. You will learn the key techniques that create unique communal experiences and which will put you into the top 10% of communal excellence globally.
At the end, you will receive actionable items and recommendations on how to further implement these techniques within your coliving company.

The coliving equation behind the art of coliving model

At Art of Co, the coaching school behind the Art of Coliving method, we aim to create simplicity in concepts.

One of the key challenges in coliving is how to be able to scale up the feeling and creation of community, for which we have to define the basic components of community. What community ultimately requires to be built is very simple:

On one side, community can only happen if its members feel safe. This is the part on overcoming differences, which implies avoiding the tragedy of the commons (like that dirty sink) through interior design implementations, preventing conflict through feedback systems or knowing what to do in times of crisis.

On the other side, community can only happen if members commit to each other. This requires finding alignment between residents, such as activating common interests (like hosting a rock party for the rock lovers), creating moments of connection (such as rituals and weekly dinners) and facilitating common decision-making.

If coliving residents can feel safe and have the desire to engage, then your community will form organically. And the best part: there are certain key processes that will help you overcome differences within your community and help residents to find alignment.

The following techniques are the top 3 strategies I give coliving operators to implement the right communal processes and reach the highest level of communal excellence.

These recommendations come from my own experience as a coliving operator, and especially from having exchanged with more than one hundred coliving entrepreneurs, facing their challenges and asking myself: what can we implement to create and predict a better experience?

They are also integral parts of my book Art of Coliving (out in February 2021) and of my upcoming webinar for coliving operators, entrepreneurs and community builders. Mastering these techniques will give you the competitive advantage that will propel your community and coliving business forward.

Strategy #1: Overcome the tragedy of the commons

One of the biggest dangers to communities is the phenomena of the commons: when the kitchen gets messy, when fruits in the fridge start to rot, when the toilet is dirty, etc. The problem is that there often is not one person to blame - it’s a collective phenomena. Someone leaves a fork in the sink, whereby someone else takes the invitation to leave his or her plate in it too, and before you even notice, the sink is full of a bunch of different items that need to be cleaned.

As it is really hard to change people’s behaviour under such circumstances, we need to create systems and processes. In short, we need to solve human problems through design. These are the top recommendations I give coliving operators that will help avoid the majority of these problems:

• Designing fridges: make sure that each resident has their own compartment, so that people are responsible for their own food. There can even be tags for “old food” which residents can label themselves to bring awareness.
• Avoiding messiness in the kitchen: one common rule should be “no dishes in the sink”. On top of making sure that the dishwasher has enough capacity, it is key to have the right signposts, including a sign above (or in) the sink. Certain operators install fake cameras while others include point systems and warnings when the rule is not followed. The key is once such a culture is established, then it’s easier to build on top of it.
• Creating enough storage space: whether for the kitchen, the private space or the shared living room, it is important to have enough storage space. Why? Because letting personal belongings lay around often creates messiness and scarcity of resources and space. Hence the importance of another rule: not leaving personal belongings lying around.
• And designing bathrooms: one trick to keep the bathroom and showers clean from toiletries and toothbrushes is to have a basket for each resident, in which they can store their toiletries. These baskets can be stored in a shelf located inside of the bathroom. This allows the bathroom to remain clean after use, as all personal belongings remain gathered together.

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Strategy #2: Speed up the integration

It is crucial to help people get integrated within the community. At Art of Co, we overcome that challenge by focussing on the onboarding process.

The onboarding process is a key differentiator between strong and weak communities. The question to ask yourself is the following: how do I create resident touch points in the experience journey that will help new residents connect to the current people, culture and activities?

Some of the best practices here include a personal welcome by a company or community representative, personal introductions to other members prior to arrival, integration into the group’s communication channel, welcoming events and surprises and a personal check-in after the first week(s) to understand how to engage the resident.

Which leads to the next point - understand the desire of residents.

Strategy #3: Help residents express desires

The key to community building is that it is built by the active engagement of its members, not external forces. If you want to have community, you want to host activities that help with people’s interests and current life challenges.

At Art of Co, we strongly believe that community can not be managed, only facilitated. The goal of an operator is not to impose a vision of what the community should look like and do. It is instead to listen to desires of the members and help them actualise their needs.

For example, instead of hosting weekly events that you believe will benefit your residents, have them share with you which type of event they would like to organise. It’s possible even during lockdowns and physical distancing; during the first wave of nation- wide lockdowns, the French coliving space Colonies hosted a skill-sharing contest, in which residents with the most votes would host virtual events, teaching others a skill or leading an activity they cared about.

Other ways to understand residents’ desires is to create a safe space to express them. This can be through one-on-one meetings (or even survey forms), but also through community assemblies, in which the operator facilitates a sharing round of desires and ideas around the coliving experience.

‘At Art of Co, we strongly believe that community can not be managed, only facilitated. The goal of an operator is not to impose a vision of what the community should look like and do. It is instead to listen to desires of the members and help them actualise their needs’.

Introducing the art of coliving model

These strategies are part of a larger methodology: the Art of Coliving model. This model tackles the eight main strategies to implement as a coliving operator to achieve communal excellence.

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Among others, it is equally important to help residents express their fears and dislikes of their experience, so that these can be fixed. It is also crucial to prepare for worst-case scenarios and knowing what to do in times of crisis, as well as helping residents to create a common vision of their community.

All these steps are based on one core belief: to fundamentally care about the customer. This is why we always apply our very own CARE approach when it comes to working with coliving operations:

• Be Customer-driven - prioritise the needs and experience of your customer over your own desires and always think “human first”. Thisincludes the notion of fundamentally caring about your residents’ emotional states.
• Be Aware - spread your customer insights/ learnings across your team and business.
• Be Responsive - respond to your customer needs, adapt and iterate.
• Be Enabling - empower your customers to be involved in the solution.

It is only by creating value for coliving residents that coliving spaces will be able to flourish. Those that choose to have a customer-driven CARE approach and focus on the main strategies for community building will be able to lead when it comes to creating true coliving experiences.

Join the forefront of operational excellence

Change cannot happen by yourself. You need to surround yourself with other coliving operators and community builders who face the same challenges, who are able to overcome them through the Art of Coliving method and who represent the state-of-the-art of user community experience.

This is why I’m personally going to invest the majority of my time in 2021 into my activities with Art of Co: building out the coliving community, helping coliving entrepreneurs to succeed in their mission and building state-of-the-art education in the coliving sector. As part of that change, I’m officially announcing my transition out of Coliving Insights, which was an honour to build up until today. This will allow me to have more time to focus on building the future of coliving communities, for which I’m looking forward to being together on that journey.

To get to know more about the methodology, visit the Art of Co website and join our community on Telegram, where we share the latest news, insights and discussions. Art of Co is also going to host a dedicated webinar in February on the topic of communal excellence, for which you can sign up on our website. Last but not least, we recommend you to read.