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.
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