Supporting New Ways of Working

In 2022, you launched Work & Go, a workspace offer for businesses and communities in small and medium-sized towns. What motivated this initiative?

We have been involved in coworking for years: I founded Anticafé, the largest network of café-coworking spaces in Europe, ten years ago, and Jean-Briac was the COO for the last five years. We have always worked very nomadically. When we leave the major city centers, we are always surprised by the lack of good alternatives for working; the hardest part is finding a place for a video call. In fact, 90% of coworking space is concentrated in the six largest French cities, even though there is now demand throughout France thanks to remote work. With Work & Go, our ambition is to support new ways of working across France. We aim to develop coworking where it is lacking.

Why target places that are not typically meant for work?

To set up in small towns and villages, we had to adapt the traditional coworking economic model to reduce costs and ease operations.

Our solution integrates directly into existing businesses, utilizing under-exploited spaces. Access to the space is entirely autonomous thanks to our app, which digitizes the entire customer journey. Our added value for the business, besides the generated revenue, is the additional traffic attracted by coworking. We target places along workers’ daily routes where the need for a good workspace is frequent but unmet:

• Transit locations, such as the first Work & Go installed in a TotalEnergies electric car charging station.
• Large commercial areas, such as supermarkets and shopping malls.
• Community premises, particularly La Poste and town halls.

How do these workspaces facilitate a new work-life balance?

Firstly, our spaces make hybrid life easier for employees alternating between a big city and a small town. For example, an employee who spends 2-3 days a week in Paris and the rest of the time in Brittany will soon have access to a professional coworking space for remote work near their home.

Secondly, we cater to nomadic workers who settle for a few weeks or months in attractive towns and villages, often by the sea or in the mountains. Besides offering them a productive workplace, Work & Go becomes an attraction for the towns we set up in.

Finally, we target employees whose jobs are inherently itinerant. We want them to be productive during their travels. For example, when a salesperson stops to recharge their car (as more professional vehicles become electric), we help them use that time productively.

What are your projects and challenges for the future?

Today, we are opening the first spaces with our partners to test the concept in different configurations and understand the key success factors based on the locations.

Our main challenge is to consider all feedback from our customers and partners to further optimize the concept. After this testing phase, our goal will be to scale the model across France, aiming for 100 spaces by 2026.

Our dream is that you can find a Work & Go in every corner of France!