Creating community through a human-centric approach
Community is part of our philosophy at Neighbourgood and it ultimately benefits the wellbeing of all people.
Space is a powerful tool to foster engagement, inspire innovation, and drive productivity.
But what exactly does an optimal living or working space look like? A sense of community is endemic to our humanity: It’s the feeling of identity, of belonging—the feeling that we matter and share a commitment to meeting one another’s needs. Because of this, many people (and businesses) have discovered the value in providing their customers with a community around their brand.
Providing a platform for people to connect with one another is important to our general well-being as human beings. Increasing access and exposure to authentic, shared experiences helps decrease isolation and rally people around thing’s that matter most.
At Neighbourgood we believe strongly that community is the active ingredient that brings both living and working spaces to life. We see how the “vibe” and sense of community in a home or office shapes peoples experience and their engagement in a way that tangibly impacts quality of life.
Relationships between people are critical to life satisfaction and fulfilment.
But how is community created? We see it as an interconnected ecosystem of design and people.
Creating community starts with design. Neighbourgood’s DNA was built on creating inspirational living and working spaces for our members. Our space need to be welcoming, informal, flexible, and convenient.
We’ve made bold choices to prioritize and reinforce community throughout the end-to-end living and working space journey. The Neighbourgood community team is positioned—literally and metaphorically—as the connective tissue of our spaces.
Our community managers are the stewards of our community philosophy. They are responsible for developing a strategy to bring the member experience to life. How? By bringing intentionality to the intangible: weaving together experience design, event management, and facilities operation, all with a human-centric touch.
Neighbourgood’s community managers listen to members needs and ideas, then connect them to someone who can help. This person is not a concierge—they are a facilitator. They need to be full-time, personally invested people who can build trust with members.
In both our living and working spaces, community managers actively sense what members want and need. They use these insights to enhance the member experience—and, at times, share learnings with their senior leaders so that they can better understand their member’s needs. With a finger on the pulse on the living and working experience, community managers can adjust and tune big events and micro-moments to create a sense of belonging within our community.
Take the use of food and drink to facilitate connections for example. Rituals around food form the basis of important human events and can help build interpersonal relationships and strengthen solidarity. However, a study of eating patterns in working adults found that 72 percent of respondents rarely eat with others. Making time at the table together during a lunchbreak can be rare unless those moments are encouraged. Eating together may even influence collaboration among people who would not otherwise have had contact with one another. In this way, we consider sharing food an intentional means of creating community. Rather than leaving snacks and food out all day, our community managers design pop-ups and micro-moments that act as a nudging mechanism to bring people together for longer amounts of shared time. Micro-moments matter. These little interactions form the basis of deeper interpersonal relationships.
There’s no innovation without community. The sharing of knowledge and advice is critical to our own wellbeing and it is at the core of why we as a company exist.
