The Community Office - What co-working and co-living taught us about the workplace

An interview with Malin Midhed, United Spaces & Sam Gielis, Modo

📅 Wednesday 9 September 2026 at 09.00 | Zoom | English

81% of organisations globally have made increased office utilisation their top real estate priority. Yet the most common strategy — policies, mandates, occupancy targets — keeps missing something. People don't come back to a place because they have to. They come back because it gives them something they can't get anywhere else. So what does it take to design a space people genuinely want to return to?

The answer, it turns out, has been quietly developing in co-working and co-living spaces for years.

In this episode of The Workplace Shift, we bring together two practitioners who have spent their careers building spaces where strangers become communities. Malin Midhed, Head of Marketing at United Spaces, one of Scandinavia's leading co-working operators, and Sam Gielis, co-founder of Nordic co-living operator Allihoop and founder of Modo — a hotel concept built on converting vacant offices — join us to explore what the office can learn from spaces people choose to be in.

We discuss the difference between designing for collaboration and designing for community, how neurodesign shapes behaviour, what the data actually tells you about whether your space is working, and why the question most organisations are asking about office utilisation is the wrong one. This episode is essential viewing for workplace, HR, facility and real estate leaders. You will:

• Understand the difference between designing for collaboration and designing for community — and why it matters for your office strategy
• Learn how co-living operators measure community impact and what it reveals
• Discover how United Spaces uses neurodesign to shape behaviour and engagement across its locations
• Explore what events actually work in shared spaces — and what reliably flops
• Get a practical framework for using your office as a test lab, iterating space design based on real usage data
• Leave with one concrete piece of advice for closing the gap between office investment and actual utilisation

The workplace is shifting. This is your front row seat.

Meet the guests

Malin Midhed leads marketing at United Spaces, one of Scandinavia's most recognised co-working brands with locations across Sweden. With a background spanning brand, community and workspace experience, Malin works at the intersection of space design and the human behaviours that make shared environments thrive. United Spaces is known for its approach to neurodesign and creating environments enabling people to do their best work.

Sam Gielis is a hospitality entrepreneur who has spent years optimising shared spaces for human experience. As co-founder of Allihoop, one of the Nordic region's leading co-living operators, Sam built communities from scratch — measuring everything from kitchen traffic flow to the number of meaningful friendships residents formed. His current venture, Modo, is a direct product of those learnings: a hotel concept that converts vacant office buildings into carbon-negative micro-room stays.

Secure your front row seat

📅 9 September 2026 at 09.00 | Zoom | English