[Manager] My coworking journal: a chat with Vishal Jodhani, Experience Designer Director at Impact Hub Berlin
On Wednesday, March 29, I completed my last interview for the six week internship during which I explore different coworking spaces and chat with the people who work there.
I have been working mainly out of Impact Hub, and while I interviewed one coworker who works there, I had not yet had the chance to talk with one of the people who curates the space. So, this week, I sat down with Vishal Jodhani, the Experience Design Director at the Hub, and asked him some questions about the inner workings of Impact Hub and the space’s philosophy. I felt like I had become fairly familiar with Impact Hub Berlin by this point, but I wanted to put that familiarity to the test and dive into the specifics of how it functions and learn more about the place that has been my home base for the past six weeks.
How long have you worked at Impact Hub Berlin?
Two-and-a-half years, but I was at other Impact Hubs first, like in Adelaide, Brussels, and Mumbai.
Can you describe what your main duties here entail?
I am the Impact Hub experience lead. I deal with all the different stakeholders and how they interact with Impact Hub. This includes community, looking after membership, and events that happen. “Inspire, enable, and connect” are three hashtags that we have. I also handle visits. Lots of people come to visit. Be it guest, visitor, client, or member, I design their whole experience from start to finish. I don’t do it alone though, I have a team.
I have been here for several weeks now and have really noticed a sense of community. What do you think the importance of community events and fostering a sense of togetherness are to a coworking space?
We never, ever talk about us as a coworking space, but instead, a supportive ecosystem. We provide space to work together, and coworking is element of that, but we are trying to create a broader supportive ecosystem. There are so many other spaces in Berlin that you could go to, but idea here is you can do innovation through collaboration.
For example, in the room behind us, two people working on a sustainability project booked it. The third guy sitting with them is a designer. I don’t know how they met, but they met through the Hub. We focus on creating curated community. Everyone has something to offer. Everyone has a different skill set and different life experiences. We have a member who is 18, and think of what he can contribute! If everyone was from the same background, this would be a space for techies or designers, so this diversity is so important for us.
We do events to create a greater sense of community. For example, when you look at the roots of community lunch, you see it’s about everyone coming to lunch with one ingredient, and then what we create is amazing. That lunch to me is almost a metaphor for what we’re doing with our community: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People will find each other automatically, but if you create opportunities for that to happen it’s even better.
It’s a mix of community connecting on its own and us saying “what you’re doing is so amazing, you have to talk to this other person.” We believe in community first and coworking second. When you join you get a space to work from, a community, and events to participate in.
We measure success by how many new ideas were launched at the Hub, how we give small teams an environment where they can grow their ideas, and how much more innovation there can be to grow collaboration.
What do you think makes Impact Hub Berlin unique?
Referring to what I already said, we’re not into coworking, we’re into creating the right ecosystem for ideas to be launched.
We often send people to other spaces, because it has to be more than a table and chair. A big one is that we have a strong focus on impact driven businesses over profit businesses. Ethical impact is the thing we look for, we never just accept someone without having coffee with them first. Everyone is here with something in common: impact.
How has Impact Hub Berlin evolved over the course of your time here?
In 2014, we were in the phase of being a proto-Hub. We had a coworking space in Neukölln because instead of trying to find the perfect space, we said let’s prototype it and see what happens. This space was very ugly at first, but we co-designed it with our community. We all came on weekends and built the Hub ourselves. All the members came and painted, which makes their ownership so much higher. We treat people as community, not as clients. We also do a lot of events outside of the space and we started realizing Impact Hub is an office but that that’s not all we should be. Work shouldn’t be restricted.
If you could add an expansion or feature to Impact Hub Berlin, what would that be?
It would be having programs not limited to space or location. I’m not keen on expanding this space itself, but maybe having multiple locations or bigger spaces in the city. We’re also a global community, we have 90 locations, so growing our global organization is a priority. That is a direct value add to people who work here because they get a global passport, they can join and visit any other Hub.
What do you think is the most pressing social problem of the modern age?
I would say it is the need for stronger and more ethical leadership, and my hope is that we and other organizations can shift from looking to others to fix things to stepping up and doing it ourselves. We need to create active citizenship, meaning people stepping up to change things they care about. The issue is failing leadership.
How do you think coworking spaces will shape the traditional workplace in the years to come?
I think the nature of work is changing, and coworking is just one mode of where things are heading. People want more flexibility. People are working across borders and there are more digital nomads. If coworking stays flexible, it can address the work needs of the future. There is a need for more collaboration. It’s shifting from cubicles to coworking. There’s so much to learn from each other and that’s also what will be needed. The idea of a sharing economy, that is also what coworking is. I’m part of a community that has all these services, and maybe coworking could evolve to what Coworkies is trying to do: connecting spaces across locations. We can have even more collaboration.
Thank you for your time, Vishal, and for providing such an inviting workplace over the course of my project!
I ended this interview feeling far more knowledgeable about Impact Hub than I had when I began. I appreciated hearing about the philosophy that drives the Hub, and the unique way that they view coworking.
If you enjoyed this interview, you can read about my coworking experiment:
I am exploring coworking from my own perspective as a 20-year-old American college student who only learned what coworking is about a month ago. My project is a part of Coworkies, an online platform that connects people between coworking spaces globally (www.coworkies.com ).
