Our Profile of U.S. Coworkers on Deskmag

Skye Leist
January 29, 2011

Emergent Research’s Deskmag article, Profiling Coworkers in the United States, provides an overview of who is using U.S. coworking facilities.

The quick summary: the average U.S. coworker is young, male, well educated, works in tech, lives close to the coworking facility and is quite satisfied with coworking.

Deskmag is a German magazine focused on how and where we work. The recently sponsored the 1st Global Coworking Survey and graciously shared the survey data with us. Deskmag is available online in English and German.

Two very interesting trends emerged from the U.S. coworking survey data:

1. Over half of the U.S. survey respondents work for a company or run a company with employees. This surprising finding fits with what we’ve been seeing in our field work and interviews. Coworking facilities are increasingly being used to start, incubate and house small businesses.

2. 8% of the respondents worked for companies with more than 100 employees. This again fits with what we’re seeing in the field. Larger companies are starting to discover and experiment with coworking facilities to support distributed and mobile employees.

Notes on the Survey, Methodology and Results

Due to the newness of coworking, a lack of an established U.S. coworking population estimate, the number of U.S. survey respondents (115) and other technical issues, the potential statistical error rates associated with the survey results are high.

Using Emergent Research’s estimate of the current U.S. coworking population (15,000), the results indicate a 95% confidence level with a 9% margin for error, which is higher than the generally accepted 5% error margin.

However, we find these results acceptable and valid because: (1) they are in line with the results from our coworking fieldwork and interviews; and (2), adjusting for high error margins doesn’t change the key results.

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