Experimenting at WeWork during COVID-19

I love working from home. I have found myself to be extremely productive, significantly more productive than when I work in an office.

I can schedule a meeting at a click of a button and don’t need to waste precious time walking to a meeting room or trying to find it. I don’t need to make small-talk with coworkers in the breakroom and waste additional time. I don’t need to sit in traffic to and from work every day.

But after almost a year of not being in a physical office setting, I woke up one February 2021 morning craving the office atmosphere. Really, I just wanted a temporary change of pace.

Pre-COVID, I never thought I’d actually ever experience a WeWork. I worked for major corporations that had their own offices. WeWork was a space for tech startups, digital nomads, entrepreneurs, and the like. I didn’t work for a startup, nor was I a digital nomad or entrepreneur.

As a business school graduate with an MBA, I was intrigued by the WeWork business model of coworking. I also thought WeWork was rapidly expanding — a bit TOO much — and found it a bit excessive to see so many of them popping up in less than a one-mile radius in Atlanta. But being a naturally curious person who loves conducting qualitative research, I had always been curious about what working in a WeWork was like.

My “itch” to spend at least one day in an office setting during the pandemic area led me to realize that WeWork launched an “On Demand” option in response to the…