Marketing Briefing: ‘There is no over’: Pandemic forces agencies, marketers to make permanent changes to office culture

By Kristina Monllos

Like many marketing organizations and agencies, the team at Rain the Growth Agency was planning for employees to start to return to working at its offices in September. That’s no longer the case due to the delta variant.

Uncertainties surrounding school and daycare openings have made it difficult to stick to a return to offices for parents. That’s a stress the Portland-based agency didn’t want to add on for staffers — about a third of the performance marketing agency’s employees are parents. “When people can’t even plan for [childcare in] September it becomes very disruptive,” said Jane Crisan, COO and president of Rain the Growth Agency.

Instead the agency is now targeting November, pending the state of the pandemic, for a return of in-office working. That said, while the agency is aiming to sort out a return to office, it’s not requiring people to work at the office once more people return to it. The agency is one of a number of shops and marketing organizations taking a much more flexible approach to requiring people to work in offices now as some organizations are rethinking what offices mean to them.

“We’ve created a more permanent model,” said Todd Lombardo, managing director at The Many, adding that while the agency had a soft opening of its office in July to allow a third of employees to work there should they choose to do so, the shop will not require people to work at its offices. Instead, with the new plan factoring in remote work, “everyone is equal in the room regardless of location. There’s always a Zoom. We’re not going to mandate when people have to physically be in an office,” he said

Instead of snapping back to the old ways of working, some agencies and marketing execs are rethinking what it means to be in an office and how important that may be. Maintaining flexibility can help attract talent to agencies and marketing organizations that allow for that, according to agency execs.

“If we’ve learned anything, flexibility is a way of life now as it relates to how we work, where we work,” said Barb Rozman-Stokes, chief talent officer at Campbell Ewald. “Many are saying hybrid is the way of the future, I’d argue it’s now the way we work. It’s our job to support our talent and their needs. We were waiting for this to be over, but there is no over. It’s just different now. We are learning to value the benefits of flexibility and hybrid work.”

That’s not to say all marketing organizations and agencies are planning for work-from-home to be permanent, but that whatever the return to office is will likely be different than what working at an office had been prior to the pandemic.

For example, once Innocean is able to “bring employees safely back to the office, we’ll be implementing a structured hybrid model — Monday and Friday will be work-from-anywhere, with a focus on thinking and doing vs. sitting on video meetings. Tuesday, Wednesday, …read more

Source:: Digiday