Advertising
Age published a perspective from Said
Differently CEO Rachel Barek, who advocated for White advertising agencies
to go fully remote. On the one hand, Barek’s viewpoint is surely fueled by her
company’s position as a consultancy that “curates experts, creating team
alchemy”—which sounds like a fuzzy twist on crowdsourcing freelance services à
la the defunct Victors
& Spoils. On the flip side, the way that Adland has evolved into a project-based
business calls for a different approach. Although Barek missed the opportunity
to call out how RTO mandates may adversely affect racial and ethnic diversity,
as Black and Brown people are not
eager to come back to enterprises built on systemic racism.
Why Agencies
Should Go Fully Remote—And How Return-To-Office Mandates And Hybrid Schedules
Are A Risky Bet
When creatives
are forced into an inefficient work model, they can easily bring their talents
elsewhere
By Rachel Barek
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a renewed push
from companies to get employees back to the office. Some are threatening
potential financial repercussions to those who refuse. In perhaps the strangest
irony, even Zoom, the company that powered the remote work revolution during
the pandemic, called on its workforce to return to the office at least two days
a week.
When Zoom announced its “structured hybrid
approach,” it led to headlines such as “The remote work revolution is
officially dead.” That makes for provocative clickbait, but it isn’t true.
Average office occupancy in major cities remains below 50%, and the vast majority
of employees continue to believe they are more productive working from home.
In my experience, they are right. I expect
this latest wave of return-to-office pressure to fail just as the previous ones
have, especially in the creative industry. Top talent has never had more career
options. Even in a softer economy, employees—not companies—still have the
leverage. And clients are starting to catch on that they’re ultimately the ones
paying for all that fancy office space. That’s why our industry should realize
that the way we work has fundamentally changed and lead the charge toward a
distributed work model future.
While I disagree with agencies that believe
their teams need to be physically together at all times, I can at least respect
that perspective. What makes even less sense is the hybrid model that so many
agencies are trying to adopt. According to EY’s Future Workplace Index, 59% of
companies are operating in a hybrid model.
The idea is that requiring people to come to
the office will strengthen company culture and foster idea-sharing that can’t
happen online. In reality, a two- or three-office-days model creates cultural
rifts and scheduling chaos. And while the public argument for returning to the
office is usually about culture and collaboration, it is more often driven by a
dated idea that time in a seat is time better spent. If this is how a company
is measuring employee productivity, it either has the wrong employees or hasn’t
invested in a real understanding of impact and output.
A hybrid approach usually means that people
are coming in on different days, meaning that in-office employees spend their
time in Zoom meetings they could have easily taken from home. And have you ever
been in a meeting where some participants are together in-person and others
have dialed in? That is not a level playing field or an environment conducive
to collaboration and creativity.
Even more specific to the creative industry
is the self-inflicted wound in-office requirements have on an agency’s ability
to recruit the best talent. If a company mandates three office days per week,
employees need to live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office.
All of a sudden, instead of recruiting from an ocean of global talent, agencies
are reduced to a puddle that’s local to a company’s physical locations.
Flexible startups built on a distributed work model can exploit this arbitrage
opportunity to recruit talent who don’t happen to live in a major metropolitan
area.
Allowing just those employees who live beyond
a reasonable distance from an office to continue to work remotely creates
problems, too. These fully remote employees miss out on career-advancing
opportunities and feel overlooked, while colleagues who are not exempt from
hybrid work can feel resentful. None of this is good for company culture.
In-office requirements are also a financial
loser for our industry. As all legacy agencies and holding companies know, real
estate is one of the biggest fixed costs. The companies that reduced these
costs during the pandemic saw huge gains on their balance sheets. The smart
ones passed at least some of these savings on to their clients and talent. Once
upon a time, legacy agencies and holdcos were expected to spend big on trophy
office space, but that time is long past. Today, clients value value, and that
means getting the best work product at the most competitive price. The overhead
of a multifloor trophy office compound in New York doesn’t really provide extra
value to clients, yet clients end up footing the bill for it.
If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic
years, it is that every company needs to be intentional about building culture.
I get it—as the world returns to normal, there’s a strong desire by many to get
back to the good old days. But I predict we’ll look back at this as an
inflection point. We all know the cautionary tales of companies such as Kodak
that found themselves in the dustbins of history because they believed that
what worked yesterday would keep working tomorrow. Those who try to force a
return to in-office work in our industry will find themselves on the wrong side
of history.
When creatives are forced to retrofit their
lives back into an old, inefficient work model, they can easily bring their
talents elsewhere. In an age when every creative can be a free agent, this is a
risky bet.
