Business Analysis

With Layoffs Looming, WeWork's Designers Are in Professional Purgatory

The coworking company ushered in a new era of data-driven design. Now its interior designers are wondering what's next
WeWork designers
Photo: Keith Bedford/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The profile of a typical WeWork designer might go something like this: recruited from the hospitality or retail industry, or right out of school; proficient in computational design; smart about prefabrication; well versed in the full life cycle of an office, from the real-estate acquisition to the placement of the last potted plant; efficient; deadline-oriented; exhausted.

One interior designer who worked there for four years (the designers AD PRO spoke with declined to go on the record for this story, citing a strict NDA) described the approach as engaging with the future of design. But staying ahead of the curve meant maintaining a ruthless pace: Since it launched in 2010, WeWork has opened more than 850 new offices, plus spin-off entities. (Earlier this year WeWork birthed its own parent company, The We Company. For clarity’s sake, this article still refers to the whole company as WeWork.)

Right around the time WeWork intended to go public, the coworking-turned-life-services company had a dizzying array of ambitious design projects in play. There was Dock 72, the shiny Brooklyn Navy Yard building codeveloped by WeWork, built to withstand floods, and ready to open. There was the $850 million purchase of the shuttered Lord & Taylor Building on Fifth Avenue. There was WeGrow, the Montessori-on-steroids elementary school designed by Bjarke Ingels. The Powered by We design consultancy service had just finished offices for Oscar health insurance and Arianna Huffington’s Thrive, with UBS’s Weehawken, New Jersey, headquarters coming next. And that’s not to mention the constant stream of new WeWork offices, perennially slated for more cities and more countries.

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That was in September. What has happened since has been labeled almost exclusively in the news media as an “implosion”: The IPO bottomed out and the company’s valuation dropped from $47 billion to $8 billion; the bombastic Adam Neumann left his post as CEO (receiving an alleged $1.7 billion farewell payout from SoftBank, the Japanese holding company that now owns a majority of WeWork); and the new CEO announced an impending, inevitable round of layoffs. WeWork’s staff does not yet have details on the layoffs, but news outlets like Bloomberg and Recode report that of the company’s 15,000 employees, between 2,000 and 4,000 will lose their jobs.

It remains to be seen how that will affect the aforementioned portfolio of design projects. Dock 72 opened, but The New York Times reports that WeWork’s 220,000 square feet there are “pretty empty.” WeGrow announced that it will not reopen for the 2020–2021 school year. Regarding the Midtown Lord & Taylor building, WeWork’s spokesperson carefully points out that it only leases the building and that the fund ARK actually owns it, even though ARK is the real-estate acquisition arm of the We Company—WeWork’s parent company.

And yet, according to a spokesperson from the Bjarke Ingels Group, Ingels is still WeWork’s chief architect, and the WeWork spokesperson says that Powered by We has projects—including the UBS headquarters—under way. Rise by We, the company’s gym, is still open. (WeLive, the company’s stab at co-living, is technically still operating, but with two locations and a reliance on hotel stays, it never really took off in the first place.) The spokesperson also says that WeWork has several new building openings in the pipeline, including inaugural offices in Milan, Cape Town, Oslo, and Cologne, plus more in California and Canada. The former employee we spoke to says that at WeWork, design and real estate go hand in hand. It stands to reason that if company-wide layoffs don’t occur, the 800 or so designers—or 2,000 employees, if you tally up both the designers and the real-estate team—will have plenty of work to do.

But according to sources familiar with the situation, designers (and almost all WeWork employees) find themselves in professional purgatory, anxiously waiting to see whether they still have a job or if they’ll at least get a severance package. In a letter sent to management on November 5, a group of more than 150 employees also asked for health benefits and compensation for devalued stock options. Those who stay are asking for a seat at the table in corporate decision-making. “We’ve seen what can happen when leadership makes decisions while employees have no voice,” the letter reads. “We will need to see more transparency and more accountability.”

For the designers who do leave, by choice or not, it might not be obvious where to go next. “You’ll have talent flooding the market, but I don’t know if the market is ready for them,” says the former employee, pointing out that unlike employees at traditional design service firms, WeWork’s designers are party to virtually every step of the development process again and again and again.

That growth-oriented approach began in 2015 when WeWork bought Case, a New York architecture company known for its innovative use of software in drawing up building plans. Under the leadership of Case’s Dave Fano, who became WeWork’s chief growth officer (and announced his departure in late October), designers used building information modeling to calculate things like the amount of sunlight that might reach a certain desk, or the exact cadence of conference room occupancy over the course of a single workday. “[Case] enabled WeWork to create this amazing space for designers,” says the interior designer. “There really are very few companies that think like this. Katerra”—the construction company—“comes to mind.”

Unlike traditional design firms, WeWork doesn’t bill its client by the hour, because it was its own client. It has to be ruthlessly efficient. “It’s a very specific experience,” says a former VP. “It's a high-pressure environment; there are a lot of prefab components for designers to pull from to abbreviate the design time; designers are exposed to a lot of fresh design concepts.” This has allowed a school of thought to develop in which one person’s subjectivity doesn’t lead projects—the models and the math do. WeWork designers certainly could work at traditional design firms, but after “breaking the mold of an antiquated industry,” per the interior designer, would they want to?

The New Yorker describes a sort of “graduating class” of WeWorkers who will eventually leave and then bond over the chaos they endured. But beyond camaraderie, that class of designers shares another defining trait: a new lens on a traditional field. They have the chance to shape the future of other businesses and industries. Those who can afford it and can navigate around WeWork’s noncompete contracts will likely start new companies. Sources were reluctant to share details about new companies just yet.

WeWork changed the model for how design and buildings can scale, the former VP says. Those designers can be expected to keep pursuing new methods and technology—whether within WeWork or not.