We originally launched Hubble in 2014, as an online marketplace to rent flexible office space. We did so from a windowless basement in Southwark.
By 2020, we had grown to be London’s largest flexible office rental platform, and were placing a business in a new office every 3 hours. By this point, we’d graduated to a stunning 6th floor HQ in the middle of the City.
Today, as seen in Sifted, we announce our evolution into being the world’s first Hybrid Workplace Platform. And we do this as a semi-distributed team—working from a combination of our homes, company HQ, and on-demand third spaces around the world.
As a company, Hubble has transformed into a hybrid organisation. And just as we’ve evolved ourselves, we’re evolving our product to help our customers do the same thing, too.
Because we know that solving the hybrid workplace puzzle is hard.
We’re here to make it easy.
What does Hubble do?
For the past five years, HubbleHQ has been London’s largest online marketplace for renting flexible office space, with over 5,000 offices live on our platform.
But in light of the recent changes in the world of work, we’re now launching as the world’s first hybrid workplace platform—helping every business find the right balance of office and remote working, so that their team can thrive.
Flexing the fixed office budget
Office rent is the second largest fixed cost for most businesses, with the average cost per employee at £500 per month in London. Split across a 5-day week, this equates to £100 per day spent in the office. So, what happens when our team spends less time there?
We evolved Hubble to ensure that the office budget can be transformed from a fixed cost into a variable one. Our new platform enables the office budget to be reduced or adapted in line with where your team actually spends their time.
For example: if your employees typically spend 2 days in the company HQ, 2 days in on-demand workspaces and 1 day at home, Hubble allows you to re-allocate your budget accordingly. This would mean roughly £200 spent on HQ space, £200 on access to on-demand workspace, and £100 in remote work support and perks.
For employers, this means that their budget is used efficiently and effectively to ensure their team can thrive. For employees, this means they don’t miss out on a great work experience, regardless of whether or not they spend all their time in the company HQ.
Our four flagship products
To do this, we’ve built four products that empower businesses to configure a workplace setup tailored to both their company and employees’ needs—whether that be via HQ space, home working solutions, or access to a global network of on-demand workspace.
Our customers typically use a combination of our products, but can also use each of them in isolation, depending on their workplace needs.
Here’s how they work:
- Workplace Strategy Tool: Understand how your team wants to work
Our custom-built tool helps your business get deep, actionable insights into how and where your employees want to work in the future. Survey your team members using a 5-minute curated questionnaire, and access the data immediately via your personalised results dashboard.
- Hubble HQ: Find the perfect office for your business
Hubble has been London’s largest online marketplace for renting flexible office space for the past 5 years. Through a combination of tech, data, and property expertise, we can help you find a new HQ on a flexible contract.
- Hubble Pass: Get on-demand access to the best workspaces in the world
Via our flexible Pass membership, you can unleash your team’s ability to work anywhere—by giving them on-demand access to high-quality workspaces around the world, that they can book and use whenever they need it. Different spaces, for different people, for different tasks.
- Hubble Perks (beta): Export your office culture home
Our Perks product helps teams export their company culture to employees’ homes, through everything from virtual experiences to better workplace equipment—ensuring that remote teams have productive and happy workspaces.
And we aim to make taking a hybrid approach—whatever that entails for your business—as simple and stress-free as possible, by allowing you to manage all of your workspace needs in one simple platform.
How does “new Hubble” work?
In three easy steps, we make finding, setting up, and managing your hybrid workplace a breeze:
1. Configure
Using our Strategy Tool and in-house expertise, we’ll work with you to find the right balance of office and remote working for your team.
2. Deliver
We’ll then help you find workplace solutions to meet those needs—whether that’s an HQ, access to on-demand workspace, remote perks, or a combination of all three.
3. Manage
You’ll then be able to use your company dashboard to manage all your workspace in one place—and adapt your plan as things change.
Enabling completely new ways of working
It’s crazy to think that “hybrid working” wasn’t even a phrase eighteen months ago. Now it dominates newspaper headlines everyday. Organisations big and small are now working in completely different ways, to suit their varying business priorities and team preferences.
Hubble is here to make it easy for each to work the way they want:
- Office-first companies can find a full-time office with us, but also give flexibility to their employees.
- Hybrid companies can find their unique blend of working from the HQ, on-demand workspaces, and at home.
- Remote-first companies can ensure that even without a fixed HQ, their team can access the best workspaces in the world whenever they need to—and have a great home working experience, too.
Why the big change?
We know that the changes we’re making to our product are big. Huge, really.
But that’s because we believe the events of the past 12 months have radically transformed the world of work forever. And this affects every organisation, team and individual. There’s no going back.
Pre-Covid, the office was one-size-fits-all, and it didn’t work.
During-Covid, WFH was one-size-fits-all, and it didn’t work.
Post-Covid, the future of where we work will be personalised to each individual, team, and organisation.
Flexibility, autonomy, and choice in where we work is now the #1 demand from workers all around the world. We believe that the organisations that respond to this will have happy and productive teams—and will ultimately win the war for the world’s best talent.
What the pandemic has highlighted to us is this: the “workplace” is no longer a singular space, but a network of environments and experiences that are flexible, frictionless, and fulfilling. This could be the company HQ, a coworking space near where we live, an inspiring space for a creative brainstorm with our colleagues, or a unique space, in a new city, for our remote colleagues.
As such, we believe that the workplace should be fluid, not fixed. We are humans after all, not machinery in a factory. We need different spaces, for different activities, for different people at different times.
So our mission is to improve the working lives of one million people by 2025, and our hybrid workplace platform is how we plan to achieve it.
Our vision
We believe that—just as cloud computing transformed fixed and limited server space into something that was flexible, unlimited, and adaptable on demand—the workplace will undergo the same revolution.
Just as AWS and Google Cloud built the infrastructure to make this happen, Hubble will be able to do the same for the workplace.
We want every organisation, team and individual to be able to configure their ideal blend of working from the HQ, home, and on-demand.
And then manage, adapt, and optimise their workplace in a human-centric and data-driven way.
Working with our office providers
We understand that a workplace revolution happened almost overnight. So, for the past 15 months, we have been working tirelessly with our office providers to ensure that they’re getting the market and customer insights they need to adapt their propositions as things change.
Many flexible office providers have reacted extremely quickly, making their spaces Covid-safe, and working with us to evolve their own business models so they can benefit from hybrid work and give businesses what they need.
We’ve been very impressed with the flexibility, dexterity, and innovation from many of them and will continue to work with them very closely. There are others who will find it difficult to adapt, and we want to ensure we can give them the right tools and insight to be able to make the shift.
Our commitment to “making hybrid working easy” is just as relevant for our office providers as it is to our business customers.
What’s next for Hubble?
We are in the first-innings of a once-in-a-generation transformation in how and where we work.
As we have done over the past 6 years, we will continue to evolve Hubble to ensure it is at the bleeding edge of innovation and at the forefront of the workplace revolution.
