Making Human Connections Is Key to Keeping Remote Employees Engaged

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. For this installment of Open Plan, Andy Berkenfield, CEO at San Francisco-based agency Duncan Channon, talks about the evolving work and office life, hiring outside of the area, supporting employees and their mental health and the importance of making human connections. How Agency VIA Is Restructuring the Office to Allow More Personal Space How has the pandemic changed how you view workplaces? We had previously believed that we needed physical spaces to do our best work. The pandemic challenged the notion that productive, creative output only happens in a place where people gather. The jury is in: great ideas and great creative can be made when people are in disparate places. There’s a decent percentage of our work that gets done as a solo endeavor—whether that’s writing, designing, creating or responding to clients. The idea of people sitting in an office with headphones on answering emails almost seems silly now. At the same time, the pandemic has reinforced the value of spaces where people can socialize, collaborate and feel connected to the whole. Hands down, that’s what we miss the most. How have you changed the office environment since the pandemic started? We de-individualized all the work spaces. This move was driven in part by the reality that it’s now completely optional for staff to come into the office. It’s also driven by the fact that our business and staff grew to the point where we didn’t have individual work spaces for the 90 employees we now have. Are these temporary or permanent changes? Everything is temporary at this point. There’s no question that our offices will change. But, we’re not yet ready to place a big bet on what the office of the future should be. We want our staff to help us determine that. The truth is the pandemic—and the way it’s reorganizing life and work and the experience of personal safety—is still evolving. The emergence of the Delta variant has made this painfully obvious. Attempts to declare the arrival of a new construct for work are overconfident at best, and irresponsible at worst. How has it changed your view on working hours and what will you do to implement that? The industry has been grappling with how to support employees in managing their work hours and their mental health. Advertising has never been a 9-5 business. We’re going out of our way to encourage people to ‘turn off’ because the default is ‘being on.’ We’ve learned and recognized that unless everyone is doing it together, it’s really hard for people to take time off, or even just turn off Slack notifications. That’s why we’ve chosen to close our business one extra day per month. Taking these additional 12 days off per year together reduces the pressure to check in, plus our clients are prepared. In this spirit, we’ve also implemented a ‘meeting free zone’ every Friday afternoon so people have time to think without pressure to be available to teammates. Do you believe in flexible working and if so, how do you define it? The pandemic has proven it pays to be more flexible than we previously thought possible, particularly when it comes to geography. Before the pandemic, we made a few exceptions for existing team members who wanted to WFH once a week, or move to markets outside San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now, 20% of our staff will never come into one of our offices outside of major client visits or intentional gatherings. We have staff in New Zealand, Seattle, Portland, New York, Chicago, Phoenix and Des Moines, to name a few. Flexibility must reflect both time and place to allow for people’s lives and work to thrive. It’s about empowering people to make choices about what’s best for them, including when and where they do their best work. Our offices are currently ‘come and go as you please’ for vaccinated staff. People who are coming into the office are not commuting at traditional times. They might leave at 2:30 pm and then do a meeting from home. Even after more people are ready to return to the office, we recognize that permanent remote work will turn out to be right for some people. And, not right for others based on their personality, and their stage of life. What has been the biggest challenge about remote working? As an agency that’s always prided itself on its sense of culture and camaraderie, it’s much harder to keep people connected to the organization and to each other as a whole. This decentralization presents a major leadership challenge. It was easier to telegraph what this agency is about, to give people a sense of why they work here, when we were all in the same place. Our staff gleaned a lot from seeing the leaders, hearing us talk, from the casual time. People felt known. We’re trying to combat this in a few ways. Whenever a new team member is hired, I do a Zoom meeting with them—just to make a human connection. We also have a Slack channel called the Screen Team that’s exclusively for staff who came on board after the pandemic. We’re also working on some content and a moment to resurface our values and our ‘why’ as an organization. We want to remind people so that they think ‘ah, yes, that’s what I feel too.’ What have you missed most, if anything, about working from the office? The spark that young advertising people bring to the room everyday. The energy. The personalities. The silliness. There’s an electrical charge I get when I’m in the room collaborating with someone. Part of my fountain of youth is to stay connected to people who are bringing fresh eyes and ideas to the work that we’re doing. 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 way in which agencies go about getting hired. It’s completely unrelated to the pandemic. I wish there was a less painful process for finding and hiring an agency. Prospects essentially ask us to do all of the work we will get paid to do, before we are actually hired. As an industry, the unpaid effort we put in is extraordinary. How do you plan to do this? The only way I see this happening is through solidarity among agencies. If every agency said we don’t do free work, clients would learn. I’m glad to see the 4A’s taking on the RFP and pitch process. But, big wins often come by taking big risks—by doing something you’re told not to do, or something beyond what you’re asked. It’s the way we’re wired in this industry. So, the problem isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. How The&Partnership Uses the Office to Create a Competitive Advantage