International Women’s Day: Empowering women in business in Landmark Space

International Women’s Day (IWD) is today, 8 March. To #InspireInclusion, the theme of this day of collective global activism, we explore and celebrate the achievements of three women with different roles in Landmark Space.

Our insights come from Anna, our marketing manager; Koju, digital marketing operations manager; and Rose, executive assistant to the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and internal communications and events manager.

International Women’s Day: Empowering women in business in Landmark Space

The flexible workspace sector is not a man’s world. At Landmark Space, we employ many women, and more female-led businesses use our offices, coworking, and meeting rooms, especially since hybrid working has become widespread.[1]

To mark IWD, we explore how our sector and others helped to shape our interviewees’ career paths and celebrate their memorable milestones.

Rose began her career in flexible workspaces. However, Anna started in leisure and then moved to residential, commercial, and build-to-rent properties before joining us. Koju started her career in the food sector, followed by tech.

IWD prompts memories of inspirational mentors

Like Rose, Anna has always had female managers: “I had an extremely kind and nurturing marketing manager in my first job in the leisure sector. She pulled me into projects I wouldn’t necessarily have done. I was there briefly before moving to the build-to-rent sector where my manager was flamboyant – she’d say, ‘Just do it, and we’ll ask for forgiveness later if we need it!’”

Following a design and technology management degree at university where Koju had a chance to study several marketing courses she began her career in recruitment. She then joined a food company making the switch to marketing, before going on to specialise in digital marketing.

Koju said: “I’ve had two mentors in my career. The one in recruitment was willing to give me a lot of responsibility, especially coming from university into my first job. He gave me confidence in my ability.”

Her second mentor, the head of digital, gave Koju full ownership of launching a new website and put her forward for a European-wide internal project.

Koju said: “She supported training and my future goals, allowing me to gain the necessary skills. I appreciate managers like her who respect you and can see that you might not work for that company in the future, but you still have goals to achieve and are willing to support you through training and projects.”

Mastering gender-related challenges

We asked our team whether they’d encountered any specific challenges as women and what they did to meet them. Interestingly, only one had an explicit problem with a male colleague. However, it wasn’t necessarily gender related, nor was it recent.

That is why Anna believes the only way through any obstacle is to face it and ask for help. And, she said: “Practise, practise, practise. The more you face obstacles, the better your understanding gets, and the next one will be easier.”

There are many women in the flexi-space world, especially on the frontline, like Rose who joined the sector with a university degree in architecture five years ago. She began in the front-of-house team at The Space before becoming building manager. She progressed to her current role two years ago when Landmark and The Space joined to become Landmark Space.

Rose said: “I’ve only been managed by women, so I’ve never had to overcome gender challenges, but I have experienced age-related challenges. People may not think I have the experience. They’ll speak to me by phone and be shocked when they meet me. They’ll say, ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so…’ and I know they mean to say ‘young’!”

Celebrating our women’s achievements on IWD

What are the proudest moments in our four women’s careers?

Rose achieved engagement and understanding in a recent project

Rose said: “Our charity partner is CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably – and I work with them closely. Their work is incredible, but it’s hard to get across, so I organised a meeting with key people within the business. Two of the CALM team members came and did a presentation, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

“Afterwards, people were talking about mental health struggles or how they were affected by suicides in their families. Encouraging people not to shy away from difficult conversations is the most inspirational thing I’ve ever done within the business.”

Completing a supersized project was memorable for Anna

Anna’s proudest moments are long projects involving hard work and logistics. One recent example was launching our Piccadilly workspace – the first project since The Space and Landmark had joined forces.

She said: “It was a huge project with a large team of people from different departments. I was involved in the early stages and marketed and advertised the building. There were many challenges but we, all worked together as a team and started to understand things better and think outside of the box.”

Koju cites a website migration and launch as her most memorable success

Over six weeks, Koju helped to launch a content management system migration at her previous job. It involved automation, setup, marketing and sales onboarding to a new platform and a new website design and build.

As Koju explained: “It was the best example of teamwork that I or the B2B marketing manager or the sales ops manager had seen. It was the craziest thing ever. Everyone just came together to deliver what was needed.”

Keep an eye out for two more blogs in the following weeks to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024. We’ll be talking about how to overcome imposter syndrome, and leading with kindness – tips from 2 of our senior leaders.

[1] Between 2019 and 2023, more women worked full-time in sectors that embrace hybrid work%, according to one survey. In other professional services, which flex-space comes under, the numbers increased from 68% to 71%. https://workinmind.org/2023/09/19/hybrid-working-spurs-growth-women-uk-study/