CoSpace – Communication Done Right In A Co-Working Community

We sat down with Petter Larsen. He is the founder and runs CoSpace, a co-working office in Porvoo, Finland. We discussed what benefits he has seen with Hailer and how CoSpace uses it.

What was the main reason you start looking at software like Hailer?

We needed a tool for communication between our coworking-company and our customers working in different organizations. We have a lot of things going on. The most recent update is that we are expanding the coworking idea to schools around Porvoo. And we have opened up tech Hub in the Simolin House next to Cospace office building. Tech Hub is designed for startups, students and small companies. Managing all this requires structure and involving numerous stakeholders. So the requirements for any software was that it should make life easier, not more complicated.  

What struggles did you have with information sharing that Hailer fixed?

One thing for certain is we got rid of unnecessary e-mails being sent around, and the dreaded “reply-to-all”. Also, we used Facebook and WhatsApp, etc. Now Hailer is our only tool for internal communication. 

What benefits are you seeing?

We began with using Hailer calendars to book rooms here at CoSpace. But currently we use it for much more; our internal project planning and CRM. And additionally, we’ve created new Hailer networks for some of our bigger projects. That we can then invite people to work with us in. Hailer of grows with your organization.

Leading and supervising an organization of any kind is easier with a tool like Hailer. For instance, before all the maintenance needs were reported to someone of our staff directly, now our clients can report them in Hailer and we can get the maintenance supplier involved. It was good for us to have a look at how we do our work and to get everything set up as processes and keep it organized. We can keep track of the Cospace Events and share also other information easily on one channel. It keeps things organized and easy-to-manage. Sometimes we struggle a bit with how to explain what Hailer actually is to ‘outsiders’ as I’m not a very technical guy.  

The new collaboration with Haaga Helia University of Applied Sciences and Careeria vocational school opened up a new use case for Hailer. We have created a “recruitment”  channel between Cospace member companies and educational institutes. So Cospace members can create an open position for student projects or internships or the other way around.

What kind of organization would you recommend Hailer to, established, growing, etc.?

Pretty much any size organization can see benefits in using Hailer. For smaller companies like us, it can work for all our processes. Some bigger companies might only use part of Hailer for a specific need. An important bit is to understand your processes, and Hailer helps with that.

Check out CoSpace Porvoo's website for more information on what Petter is up to: www.cospace.fi