Coworking and Serviced Offices: 7 Duties That Stay With You
The pitch for a serviced office is that everything is handled. Desks, cleaning, wifi, reception, fire alarm testing, the coffee. You sign a membership agreement, your team moves in, and the building is somebody else's problem.
That is largely true of the building. It is not true of your duties as an employer, and the gap between those two things is where a scaling technology or professional firm quietly accumulates exposure. Fifteen people in a managed workspace feels like a solved problem in a way that fifteen people in a leased office does not, and the feeling is not matched by the law.
Seven duties do not transfer, whatever the membership agreement says.
First, why this is not a lease question
Worth establishing, because it changes how you read the paperwork.
In a conventional tenancy you hold an interest in premises and the lease allocates responsibility for the fabric, the systems and the common parts. In a coworking or serviced arrangement you typically hold a licence to occupy rather than a lease, and the operator retains control of essentially everything physical.
That looks like less responsibility and in one sense it is. The operator will generally fall within the duty in section 4 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which applies to those in control of premises made available as a place of work for people who are not their employees. But your own duty to your employees under section 2 is unaffected by where they sit. It is not delegable, it does not attach to the building, and it follows your people into somebody else's space.
The result is concurrent duties rather than transferred ones, which is the same structure that applies to secondments and client-site working.
1. Assessing the risk to your own people
Your risk assessment obligation continues. It does not become the operator's because they own the fire extinguishers.
What changes is the object. You are not assessing the building's electrical installation. You are assessing your people's work in that setting: what they do, the hours they do it, what the space actually provides, and anything about the arrangement that creates exposure a conventional office would not. Hot desking, no fixed storage, shared meeting rooms and unpredictable occupancy all belong in that assessment.
Ask the operator for their assessments covering the premises, form a view on whether they address your people's actual activity, and record that view. The document is short. Its absence is what gets noticed.
2. Display screen equipment, despite the hot desk
The duty that most obviously survives the move and is most often assumed not to.
DSE requirements attach to users, not to workstations. A team on unassigned desks, moving between them daily, using laptops in soft seating and on benches designed for aesthetics rather than posture, is a DSE population with worse conditions than a fixed office would provide, not better. HSE's guidance on display screen equipment sets out what the assessment covers.
The practical answer in flexible space is usually assessment plus provision: docking stations, separate keyboards, monitor risers or laptop stands issued to the person rather than fixed to a desk. A DSE assessment that assumes an assigned workstation will not describe how your team actually works.
3. First aid for your employees
The one people are most surprised by.
The building has first aiders. They are provided by the operator, in numbers proportionate to the operator's assessment of the whole site. Your duty is to make adequate provision for your own employees, and whether the operator's arrangements satisfy it is a question you have to answer rather than assume. HSE's first aid guidance sets out how the assessment works.
Two questions settle it. Are trained first aiders reliably present during the hours your team works, including early, late and weekend working. And does the arrangement cover any specific needs within your team. If the honest answer to either is no, the provision is the operator's and the gap is yours.
4. Fire, and the fact that there may be several responsible persons
The operator will hold the fire risk assessment for the premises, and will run the alarm testing and the drills. That is their duty and they are usually good at it.
Two things remain yours. Under the fire safety framework it is possible for more than one person to have obligations in respect of the same premises, and where that happens the law requires them to co-operate and co-ordinate. More practically, the operator does not know your people. If someone in your team would need assistance to evacuate, a personal plan is required, and the operator cannot write it for an individual whose circumstances they are unaware of.
Your team also needs to know the procedure for the specific floor they are on, which in a multi-floor flexible building is not always the one they were told about at induction. Our fire risk assessment guidance covers the wider framework.
5. Co-operating with everyone else in the building
Where employers share a workplace, regulation 11 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires them to co-operate and co-ordinate their arrangements.
A coworking floor is a shared workplace in the fullest sense: a dozen employers, none of whom controls the space, all of whose people are affected by each other's activity. In practice the operator sits in the middle of this and is the sensible route for most of it. The obligation is nonetheless yours as well as theirs, and the practical version is simply that you tell the operator what they need to know about your team, and act on what they tell you.
6. Incident reporting
Reportability follows the employment relationship, not the address.
Where one of your employees suffers a reportable injury, you are the responsible person for the report even though the incident happened in premises you do not control. The operator may not tell you an incident occurred, and your people may assume that reporting it to reception was sufficient. HSE sets out the reportable categories and the timeframes are short.
Agree the mechanism in advance: how incidents involving your team reach you, and how you report yours to the operator. Doing this once, on arrival, is far easier than doing it while a clock runs. The same applies to your own RIDDOR arrangements more generally.
7. Multiple locations, multiplied
The duty that catches groups rather than individuals.
Flexible workspace is attractive precisely because it scales without commitment, so a growing organisation ends up with people in four cities and three countries within eighteen months, each under a different operator with different arrangements and different standards. A German location sits under German requirements, a French one under French, and the operator's compliance with local law says nothing about whether yours is evidenced.
Nobody plans this. It accumulates one membership agreement at a time, usually signed by whoever needed the space, and it is invisible until somebody asks for a consolidated answer. Keeping one register across every location is what makes it answerable, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
Who owes what
| Item | Operator | You | |---|---|---| | Building fabric, systems, common parts | Yes | No | | Premises fire risk assessment, alarms, drills | Yes | Co-operate | | Evacuation plan for a specific individual | Cannot write it | Yes | | Risk assessment for your people's work | No | Yes | | DSE assessment and equipment for your team | No | Yes | | First aid adequate for your employees | Provides site cover | Yes, verify it suffices | | Reporting your employee's injury | No | Yes | | Co-operation with other occupiers | Co-ordinates | Yes | | Consolidated view across locations | No | Yes |
Read the right-hand column. None of it is expensive and all of it is invisible until asked for, which is the combination that produces problems at renewal, in a client questionnaire, or during diligence.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with organisations whose people sit in space they do not control, which now describes a large share of scaling technology and professional businesses. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software, finance and banking and professional services firms, and we are used to arrangements that have to work without control of the premises.
Where locations span several countries, our global health and safety consultants confirm what each jurisdiction requires of you as employer rather than of the operator as occupier, and our international health and safety consultants keep that picture current as you add space. Periodic health and safety audits then verify that the split has been addressed rather than assumed.
If your team has moved into flexible space and nobody has written down which duties stayed with you, a free gap analysis will establish it quickly.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
