2021 Year-End Updates

It’s one of our favorite times of the year! Not just because we’re feeling festive, but because we get to look back on all the things we achieved over the past twelve months. Read on to discover the product updates, events, and initiatives that we offered in 2021.

This year’s most important product updates for your coworking space

Over the course of 2021, we managed to add, improve, and streamline nearly every aspect of our product. But during this time, one of the most important goals for us was making sure that everyone using Cobot felt supported by our team amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic.

We introduced new ways to keep Cobot-powered spaces well-supported—including our new Premium Support and reinvented Help Center—plus we found a meaningful way to thank our customers for their confidence in us by overhauling our Affiliate Program.

Our renewed Help Center makes it easy to learn the ins and outs of Cobot.

We’re especially proud of the ways we responded quickly to keep admins and members safe as the pandemic continues to affect the entire coworking industry. Throughout the year we listened closely to your needs and released even more safety features as they were requested, like the Vaccination Status Add-on.

We also made fundamental changes to our app navigation based on user feedback to make our dashboard interface more efficient.

Resources now have a front-row seat in the primary navigation, and are no longer nestled under the calendar.

Hearing the challenges our spaces faced this year also gave us the opportunity to find new ways to express our values, and how they inform everything we do.

Every flexible workspace should have the flexibility to express themselves! That’s why we developed additional features with big impacts like the new pronoun field, meaning admins and members can now share theirs directly in Cobot.

Pronouns are small words that go a long way in expressing who we are. Now you can present them to your coworkers through Cobot.

Naturally, we made sure that beloved parts of the app—like invoices—saw regular improvements that keep them at the cutting edge of workspace management. A fresh coat of paint, more detailed line items, improved grouping, XLSX export... yes please! As well as delivering in-demand safety features, classic Cobot functions continued to receive dedicated attention, ensuring admins can spend more time doing what they love.

Download your invoice data in XLSX in addition to CSV.

Our top conferences and events

In June, members of our team kicked off a busy summer with the German Coworking Federation’s (GCF) conference #cowork2021. In their second remote edition, we greeted folks from across the DACH region and learned how trends in this unique market are shaping up. The lowdown? The future of work has arrived in Germany.

In addition to attending coworking events close to home, we supported one of our favorite global initiatives: The COLATAM Summit! Each year the conference brings the Latin American coworking world closer together, and we were a proud sponsor of 2021’s virtual edition.

We were also lucky enough to sponsor and attend the Coworking Canada Unconference. And we did it alongside inspiring coworkers! The Workaround’s Amanda Munday and Spark Coworking’s Shervonne Cherry were just some of the great people we heard from.

But 2021 wasn’t all virtual. GCUC North America declared that in-person events were back, and you can bet we didn’t miss it. Cobot’s own Sam Bender packed his bags to mingle in Manhattan and cover the conference’s key insights for our blog.

Cobot’s Sam Bender was lucky enough to hear from The Cult of We co-author Maureen Farrell in New York City during this year’s GCUC NA conference.

Climate Strikes are a fixture on our calendar. Members of team Cobot strapped on their bike helmets and pedaled down to Berlin’s Bundestag to demonstrate their commitment to—and demand for—a sustainable future. Read our article on this year’s Climate Strike to learn how we took the occasion to reevaluate our own impact.

Some of the Cobot team making their presence known outside Berlin’s houses of parliament during the Climate Strike this September.

We’ve worked for years with Coworkies, a platform for coworking spaces and the people who work from them. In 2021, they released their first book, a collection of stories from around the world featuring coworking spaces that are making their mark on the global industry. We were lucky enough to see them at their launch party in Berlin where we could meet with many of the operators featured in the book. It was great to see so many people in person and celebrate the successes of our industry together. And it’s not too late to grab yourselves a copy of the book if this sounds interesting!

And last but not least, the Coworking IDEA Project (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility) has been working hard to make our industry do better—and we’ve been proud to support them and learn from them as they’ve expanded their mission over the course of 2021.

Webinars and On-Demand Sessions

We don’t often sit in on webinars, but when we do, we relish the opportunity to share our expertise and connect with people who use our software. Especially because we get the chance to work with such amazing integration partners. Some of our favorites from this past year were Ezeep’s 360 Overview on-demand session and Sensorberg’s webinar on Future-Proofing Work spaces. So much fun and a great way to answer your integration questions directly.

Our top blog articles

Can you guess how many articles we added to our blog? Across all languages, we published a whopping 86 articles this year! That’s nearly one article every four days—including weekends.

We went through our archives to discover which of the English language posts from the past year you most adored. In order, here they are:

We also added two new segments to the blog this year. Our Tool Spotlight tag collects all the feature deep-dives to not only acquaint you with some of Cobot’s core abilities, but with inspiration on how to take advantage of those abilities. Thinking about Scaling Your Space this year? We collected insights from our community that can help you do just that.

If you’re looking ways—both in and out of Cobot—to gear your coworking space for growth, we’ve created just the spot for you on our blog.

But bringing you new ideas and best practices isn’t something we only do on our own blog: we also join industry thought leaders to make sure there’s no shortage of ideas out there to animate fresh developments in coworking. In January, Sam Bender joined Bernie Mitchell to reveal insights into Simple and Effective Marketingfor your business. Give it a listen if you haven’t already.

Thanks to our collaborators

Every day, in ways big and small, we try to demonstrate our appreciation for the coworking community. Global coworking is made up of small communities and big changemakers who in their own way are building value ecosystems over value chains.

There are countless people we want to thank for their work. An incomplete list in no particular order:

Long-time contributor and friend Marc Navarro; founder of Creative Blueprint & Coworking Canada, and organizer of the coworking IDEA project Ashley Proctor; Coworkies’ founders and coworking writers and travelers Pauline Roussel and Dimitar Inchev; Chief Creative Officer at Velvet Collab and COO of PayPugs’ Bernie Mitchell; the German Coworking Federation’s board member and IDEA Project organizer Johanna Voll; Dina Sierralta, also from the German Coworking Federation, for virtual meetings and workshops; and Syncaroo and included.co co-founder Hector Kolonas who curates the newsletter This Week in Coworking.

To everyone who uses Cobot—thank you for your boundless ingenuity and constant creativity. How you use our software is a daily inspiration to us, and we couldn’t wish to be in better company as we build tools for the new world of work.

Last but not least: Thank you for reading! Having such a strong and engaged readership is what inspires us to keep heading out for the latest coworking stories, news, and interviews. We’re thankful to everyone who reached out to us this year. And if communication@cobot.me didn’t find its way into your sent box in 2021, we’re looking forward to hearing from you in 2022.

Happy Coworking and Happy New Year!

If you aren’t already using Cobot as your coworking management software, give it a go! You’ll find that our features can help you run your coworking space more effectively and grow your community. Just sign up for a free trial or a live demo session. And if you have questions, our support team is all ears!

Happy Coworking!