How Agency VIA Is Restructuring the Office to Allow More Personal Space

Early in the Covid-19 lockdowns, questions of returning to the office typically revolved around proposed dates and mask protocols. But as the pandemic continued into its second year, it has become a highly complex—and potentially volatile—topic at companies around the world. For many organizations, it’s no longer about a return to normalcy; it’s about defining a new normal and finding the sometimes elusive balance between productivity and your team’s emotional well-being. That’s why Adweek has launched a regular interview series called Open Plan. In each Q&A, we’ll ask company leaders how they’ve changed the way they think about offices, remote work and the many transitions ahead. Serviceplan Group's Global CCO on the Continued Need for Creative Spaces How has the pandemic changed how you view workplaces? The obvious answer is that workplaces now need to be focused on collaboration and group work for which they are best. No one needs to be sitting at a desk in an office doing work they could be doing from anywhere. But the reality goes deeper than that. Workplaces are to be valued for the other things that they bring to our lives—separation of work life and home life, socialization with peers who may or may not be friends and spontaneous idea generation, to name a few. The workplace rounds out our lives and exercises the brain differently from the work itself and that has tremendous value. So, we have adjusted our space to favor collaboration and we have adopted a hybrid model, but we believe the workplace is good for our people as much as it is good for our business. How have you changed the office environment since the pandemic started? Over the year plus of working remotely, VIA took time to rethink our office space. We are lucky because we own our building and are the sole tenant, so we have lots of flexibility. (Side note: It is a beautiful old 1888 library in Portland, Maine). We work in cross disciplinary pods around client groups, so proximity to team members is crucial, but once the pandemic hit, so was personal space. We restaged areas in the building and spread our pods out. Now, pod teams are in the same wing of the building, but every individual has well over six feet of personal space. We have done all the basics (air filtration, automated bathrooms) and brought in new technology to help us manage remote workers better, but the single biggest thing we have done is invested in our space as a place of joy and support of our people. When we brought people back to the office in early July, we kicked it off with a six-week workshop (made up of learning and joy). What benefits has the agency experienced from remote working? Not a new answer, but the ability to hire talent remotely. We were already well versed in remote talent, but this last year has allowed us to double down. Three years ago, in an effort to attract more diverse talent, we created an initiative called VIAlocity. It’s a collective of talent (mostly planners and creatives) who live all over the world but are on retainer to VIA. They are assigned to client pods and when activated on a project, receive an incremental project fee. This collective has been extremely successful for us and so when the pandemic hit and in this era of The Great Resignation, we have been able to pick up more talent for the collective and we have expanded VIAlocity to include full-time employees across disciplines. All VIAlocity members are required to be in-person for at least 10 days per quarter so that they can seamlessly integrate into the agency community. That’s worked well for us because relationships built remotely are reinforced in person. The other thing we have gained from remote work is, of course, some efficiency with reduced business travel. While many meetings are still best in person, when we don’t have to travel for half a day just to attend a two-hour meeting, we all win. If you could change one thing only about how the industry works—whether about the office, working patterns or anything—what would it be and why? The next big thing I would like to change is the issues we have around equity, diversity and inclusion. We have very intentionally shifted from DEI to EDI—it seems small on the surface, but it is crucial that we define and establish an equitable environment in which to expand diversity or there will be no systemic change to support new talent and thinking. So, yes, we are hiring more diverse talent, but much more than that, we are changing the system from within and creating new pathways for talent to flourish within VIA and across the industry. How do you plan to do this? One of the first things we are doing is a joint venture with Beyond Racial Equity, a firm that provides the framework to dismantle systemic racism and build racial equity into a business at its core. More than just hiring a head of DEI, we have taken steps to restructure the inner workings of our business completely to be more equitable. It starts with a curriculum that the entire leadership team is participating in wherein we define equity and establish our mutual expectations for success. Then, yes, we are hiring a director of equity and engagement and we have changed our recruitment approach so that we are able to hire on the basis of potential as well as experience, and our EDI team is constantly challenging us all, but we have a framework in place to support those moves long term. Our BRE partnership puts all of this at the center of what we do and helps us to make some fundamental and systemic shifts to how we work together, how we work with clients, and the work that we create. It's not perfect and it's not enough change for sure, but it is a first thoughtful step we can take to make meaningful and lasting change. How The&Partnership Uses the Office to Create a Competitive Advantage