Coworking Space Survey: How to Collect Member Feedback

TL;DR

• Coworking surveys help operators understand member needs, improve spaces, and strengthen community.
• Best practices include asking short, clear questions at the right time and mixing formats like NPS, ratings, and open text.
• Automation makes surveys easier to send, AI speeds up analysis, and sharing results builds trust with members.

The most successful clients we see all have one thing in common: they are relentless in their pursuit of an excellent member experience. 

One of the easiest ways to deliver an excellent member experience is to set up a system of continuous feedback. That means collecting member feedback and continuing to improve and iterate on what you provide over time to ensure members are happy and engagement is high.

In this article, we’ll walk through how coworking spaces can gather feedback from the community using a coworking-specific survey, and more importantly, how to use this data to make better business decisions.

What is a coworking survey?

A coworking survey is a series of questions, anywhere from one to 10 to 20+, designed to collect information about how your members perceive and participate in your coworking space. These surveys can be an informal question asked during the onboarding process or an incentivized 15 question survey sent out via email.

Why is member feedback important for coworking space owners?

Collecting member feedback helps you design a better experience for your members, increasing member retention, satisfaction, and engagement. 

Let’s say your member retention is low, and you’d like to implement some new perks or amenities to help increase retention and overall member engagement. How do you know if you should outfit the space with an on-site gym, upgrade your complimentary snacks and beverages, or create new partnerships with local businesses with exclusive discounts for members?

Rather than making an expensive (and potentially wrong) guess, member feedback allows you to solicit honest opinions and make a more educated decision.

When should I send a survey to my coworking space members?

The best time to send a survey to your coworking members is after a significant change has taken place in the space, a desired action is taken, or a milestone is reached.

After a significant change

If you’ve made a big change to how your space operates and you want to understand what your members think of it, a survey is a good way to gauge sentiment. 

Example: Send a survey a month after you implement a new access control system

After a desired action is taken

After a member makes a booking 10 times, your team considers them highly engaged. Send out a survey to understand their unique needs and to gauge what they’re liking (and what they could do without).

Example: Send out a survey after someone checks-in to the space 10 times

After a milestone is reached

Once someone has been a member of your coworking space for a week, a month, and a year, send out automated surveys to understand their overall experience and identify opportunities for improvement.

Example: Send out a survey after their first year to understand community involvement

How should I design a survey to collect the best feedback from my coworking space members?

Coworking surveys should be designed with the end goal in mind. That means you should have a good understanding of what it is you want to learn about your members before you design your survey.

1. Consider what it is you want to learn from the survey

When it comes to designing an effective survey, the best thing you can do is start with the end goal, whether that’s to understand event participation or gauge how effective your onboarding process is.

2. Make it short and digestible

The length of your survey will depend on what it is you’re trying to understand about your members. SurveyMonkey recommends keeping surveys under 10 minutes for higher engagement, with shorter surveys typically seeing a higher completion rate.

3. Ensure mobile-friendliness

Everyone is on their phone these days, and your surveys should be, too. Make sure your survey can be completed easily on a phone to fit your members’ busy lifestyles. 

4. Consider an incentive to improve completion rate

If you’re planning a large-scale annual survey or something more time-intensive, consider offering an incentive to complete the survey. This could be as simple as a chance to win a $100 gift card or a $5 gift voucher for the on-site cafe.

Should coworking spaces use NPS surveys?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is a standard survey used commonly in customer experience and customer service. You ask the question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this coworking space to others?”, and the answer is then calculated on a scale of -100 to 100 with anything about a 0 considered a good score. 

Because NPS surveys are standard, they are easy to benchmark and compare against other coworking spaces, making them a good option for understanding how your space compares to others. We recommend using it as a part of other coworking survey questions, but not to rely on it alone for understanding sentiment in your coworking space.

What types of questions should I ask members in a coworking survey?

The types of questions that work best in coworking surveys are open-ended questions, multiple choice questions, likert scale questions, and rating questions.

Open-ended questions leave room for lots of nuance and are an opportunity for your members to really tell you how they think.

• Tell us about your onboarding experience. What did you like and dislike?
• Is there anything you’d like to see change in our coworking space? Be specific.

Multiple choice questions are good for quickly analyzing data and identifying trends. Be aware of biases in multiple choice answers, such as the fact that most people tend to choose the first option when presented with multiple options.

• What type of event would you like to see more of? 
  • A) Happy hours 
  • B) Networking events
  • C) Breakfast meet-and-greets
  • D) Community-led events

Likert scale questions look at how much members agree or disagree with certain statements and are good at measuring sentiment.

• How strongly do you agree with this statement—I feel like I belong at this coworking space.
  • A) Strongly disagree
  • B) Disagree
  • C) Neutral
  • D) Agree
  • E) Strongly agree

Rating questions are an easy way of understanding opinions. They can be a more accessible option by using universally understood emojis.

• Please select the image that best represents how you feel about our monthly happy hour program.
  • 🙁
  • 😐
  • 🙂
  • 😀

Is it better for my coworking survey to be anonymous or should I collect member information?

While anonymous surveys are a good way to get real, honest feedback from members, collecting member information allows you to follow-up with unsatisfied members or identify potential community champions. 

The pros and cons of anonymous surveys vs. member-identified surveys

What tool is best for administering my coworking space’s survey?

Typically, the best format for collecting feedback from members in a coworking space is with a digital survey. They’re easy to administer, easy to track, and easy to pull data from.

We recommend using Typeform, a survey tool used by many of our coworking clients. Survey respondents are more likely to engage with this well-designed tool because it asks one question at a time through an intuitive interface (bonus – it’s also mobile-friendly!).

Other popular free or low-cost survey tools for coworking space operators include:

• SurveyMonkey
• Google Forms
• Microsoft Forms

What is the best way to send surveys to members in my coworking space?

The best way to send surveys to your members is digitally (email, mobile app message, mobile app notification). Here are some ways we commonly see operators send out surveys.

• Email it to members directly or via a push notification
• Publish it on social media
• Publish it on to a private, member-only Community Feed using your coworking software of choice
• Put a link on your website
• Place a QR code in your coworking space that people scan for access

Which way you choose to go will ultimately depend on the level of security and personalization of your survey, along with the behaviors of the person receiving it. Trying to get as many people to fill out your survey as possible? Put it in as many places as you can.

How can I automate coworking surveys in my coworking space?

Of course, one of the easiest ways to send coworking surveys to members is to automate it using Optix Automations.

Automated coworking surveys are great because they get sent without your team having to do anything. They’re most effective when you are trying to collect feedback after a specific time frame or action, such as after their first year, after their 10th booking, or after they make a booking for a unique amenity, like a sauna.

Optix Automations allows you to automatically send a link to your survey via email or in-app message 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it the most convenient way of sending surveys in the coworking industry. Want to see how it all works? We’d love to show you how.

What do I do after I send out my coworking space survey?

Sending out your survey is the easy part. After you send out your survey and collect member feedback, you now have to decide what to do with the information. Here’s a step-by-step guide.

1. Send out a note of gratitude

Before you begin analyzing your results, take a minute to send out a quick thank-you note to your community. Express your gratitude for their participation and let them know what to expect in the coming weeks

2. Anonymize the data and use AI to identify trends

It’s 2025 which means you can use AI for basically everything. One of the best use cases for AI we’ve seen is large data analysis. If you want to analyze your data quickly in ChatGPT, you can:

• Export the data from your survey platform
• Anonymize it by removing any personal identifiers (ie. names, email addresses, locations)
• Put the data into ChatGPT and ask for a thorough analysis of patterns

3. Put together some key takeaways to share with your team

Once you have your data analyzed, put together a list of key takeaways that you can share back with your team. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy—just something that helps to communicate what your team needs to know.

4. Action the feedback accordingly

Finally, it’s time to action the feedback accordingly, whether that means upgrading your amenities, changing your event schedule, or making your meeting room hours more accessible. This doesn’t all have to happen at once, but will want to be on the roadmap before it gets forgotten.

5. Decide whether you will communicate the results of the survey with the community

Depending on your survey’s purpose and the questions you ask, you may want to share the results with your wider community. This is also a great opportunity to explain how you plan to address any concerns that came up. 

You can package everything into an email newsletter and send it to the whole community…it’s a simple but effective way to show that you care and truly value their feedback.

How often should you survey members in your coworking space?

For coworking operators, aim for no more than one resource-intensive survey every three months, with lightweight surveys sent out as needed. 

Survey fatigue is real, and something you need to be mindful of. Qualtrics recommends basing the frequency of your surveys on how often people interact with your business and how resource-intensive your surveys are.

Using Optix to support collecting feedback and administering surveys in coworking spaces

As discussed earlier, Optix coworking software can be super helpful in administering surveys and collecting feedback from your members. With Optix you can:

• Automatically send surveys to members based on actions taken or member attributes you define (it’s the only coworking software that can do this!)
• Send the survey as a push notification to members’ phones
• Post on the Community Feed, encouraging members to complete a survey
• Embed an evergreen survey directly into your White-labeled App, so members always know where to find it

Understanding your customer’s needs is an invaluable skill that will never go out of style. Optix helps make it easy for you by automating the most time-consuming parts of the process.

Want to learn more about how Optix can support you in automating everything from surveys to invoice follow-ups? Get in touch with a member of our team today.