What you need to know:

• Agencies need to define back to work policies. They want to rebuild culture and connections, but don't want to dictate.
• Kaimera is in ongoing "beta mode" while OMD is largely delegating responsibility to team or departmental heads.
• GroupM accepts "we're not going back" to pre-Covid rigidity.
• Half Dome has gone fully flex – telling staff they can work where and when they like. 
• Howatson + Company took the same approach, after spending $1m fitting out offices during Covid. Now it is 80 per cent full.
• Hatched let younger staff write the back to work policy – and changed its three-day in position as a result.

GroupM: No going back

“Every client I speak to is saying I don’t know how I manage my work force into the future,” said GroupM CEO Aimee Buchanan via this Mi3 podcast.

“I sat in a room with 25 CEOs two weeks ago, big business and all of them are trying to figure this out. Everyone is trying to get the equilibrium right to give people the flexibility and freedom they potentially enjoyed over the last two years, but bring people together to connect the team and build culture.”

She said GroupM’s four agency CEOs have launched ‘Strive’, its future of work programme, which sets out with staff that the policy will be reviewed on a quarterly basis to see how it’s working.

“We’ve said to the teams ‘this is not static, it’s going to change and we need your input’. When pitches come up and client presentations come up, we need you in.

“But there's got to be the reflection that we're not going back [to rigid pre-pandemic office regimes] and we don't want to,” said Buchanan. “It's how do you take the good parts forward and go back to the bits that you liked from before?”

OMD: Avoiding hard mandates

OMD’s new joint CEOs are mulling the same challenge, with doors re-opening formally on 28 February. 

They want to blend hybrid flexibility while rebuilding cultural connections and giving teams the licence to create models that best fit. 

“What flexibility means for one team versus another will vary, it depends on the client set-up or combination of clients, so we need to find the right rhythm for the teams,” said co-CEO Laura Nice.  

“But we've been very open that this is about the team, the group head, or the business directors defining the flexibility within a framework that recognises we would love to have people back in our business,” said Nice.  

“We are a creative industry, and it is hard to be creative when you're stuck behind a screen all day. So where can we be both flexible but also outline those key moments where people come together?” 

Co-CEO Sian Whitnall said feedback from that approach will inform how the agency balances physical and virtual working from here on in.  

“We've benefited, because everybody's become used to having technology as part of their lives to enable us to work really well together. But I'm not sure anyone has yet become used to a completely hybrid world,” said Whitnall 

She added that employers also have to recognise that people will become comfortable with life post-Covid at different times. 

“We have been spent the last two years being taught that you have to avoid people and reduce contact. So you can't suddenly come up with hard and fast mandates, because flexibility is knowing that everybody thinks differently.” 

Kaimera: Beta mode

“If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that rigidity is a banana skin, and adaptability is a much better way to fly,” said Nick Behr, CEO of Sydney-based independent media agency Kaimera.

As such, he says the firm keeps its flexibility policies in constant "beta mode". But he agrees that culture is the kicker: “You can't create it if you aren’t together as a team.”

As such, the company has “flexible policies for individuals based on their needs,” which he said goes beyond where they work and when. But he agrees with Pedestrian TV boss Matt Rowley’s view that young people are most at risk from missing out on professionally formative years, and with other agency bosses that “human interaction sparks innovation” for client brands.

“The importance of that creative spark can’t be undersold,” said Behr, “and it just doesn’t happen over interminable Zoom meetings or a barrage of Slack messages.” 

Half Dome: Anywhere, anytime

Melbourne media agency Half Dome decided last year “that work was something that our people did, not a place they go to – work anywhere, anytime,” said GM & Managing Partner, Tom Frazer. “That said, it is naïve to think it is that simple.”

Frazer cites data from Accenture’s 2021 Future of Work study, which found:

• Onsite workers are more likely to be disgruntled.
• 83 per cent of workers prefer a hybrid model.
• 63 per cent of high growth organisations have already adopted a flexible approach to work.

But he pointed out that the study found safety to be the primary driver behind work from home preferences – which will likely fade away as the world learns to live with Covid.

“As it recedes, will we still be willing to sacrifice the massive benefits of the workplace – connection being most the valuable – in pursuit of a flexible workplace? The answers are complex. Is it tempting to get everyone back in the office? Yes. Is collaborative working easier and arguably better when you are physically together? Yes. Are the negative impacts of remote working unevenly impacting junior staff more? Yes.”

But Frazer still thinks that ‘flexible flexibility’ is worth pursuing, because it counters years of inflexibility that have caused problems for people for whom standard office hours are a challenge, “for example preventing parents, particularly mothers, from re-entering the workforce after having a child”.

Ultimately, he thinks over the next 12 months people will naturally want to return to the office.

“That said, it would be naïve not to harness the learnings of the Covid period”, so the firm will continue with a “flexible flexibility” policy.

Either way, employers keen to get workers back into the office need to concentrate on making an office space “commute worthy”, said Frazer.

“Give people the option to work whenever, wherever. But make the office and workplace so bloody good, that they want to come in.”

Howatson + Company: No permission required

Making an office too good to refuse sums up the approach taken by Howatson + Company, according to CEO Chris Howatson. He said the company spent around $1million on fitting out its Sydney and Melbourne offices during Covid restrictions – and then told staff they could work where and when they liked.

Pretty soon, said Howatson, the office was 80 per cent full on any given day – and that’s how it has stayed.

He said the firm operates a “no permission culture”.

“Advertising is a team sport. It attracts the best and brightest, and advertising alone is not as attractive as done together,” said Howatson. “We are an output culture. So frame the benefits and people come in – and that is where creativity flourishes.”

Howatson said the firm’s tech specialists tend to make up the 20 per cent that mostly work remotely.

“Services that require collaboration – creative, account service, planning functions – are here more. Functions that are self-directed – tech, data analytics, they tend to come in more deliberately around team collaboration moments and then largely work from home.”

Howatson said the agency had also been independently audited and certified as a carbon neutral office, factoring in staff commutes, “so coming into work is not a negative from that perspective”.

Hatched: Handing over power

Melbourne-based indie Hatched took a different approach: It let younger staff write the back to work policy for the broader agency.

Hatched doubled its headcount over Covid, growing to circa 60 staff. But rapid growth and intake of clients – while losing very few since inception nine years ago – led to growing pains, said People and Culture Director, Virginia Scully.

So it resigned some “legacy” clients, handed staff an extra five days annual “wellbeing leave” and gave managers access to its HR system data so they “could make decisions about which staff were working over time for an extended period and needed more days in lieu”, said Scully. It also “put the brakes on new business for a three month period”.

Meanwhile, it asked staff to write their own job descriptions with managers “and set their own goals, including a mandatory ‘wellbeing goal’,” she added, such as blocking out lunch hours to go to the gym.

Many of those decisions were based on data presented to top management from the agency’s ‘shadow board’, a six-strong team of “aspiring future leaders” given access to ‘cultural engagement data’ housed within the Culture Amp HR platform Hatched uses, Scully added.

Following Melbourne’s first major lockdown, the shadow board used the platform to shape back to work policy and surveyed staff, initially stating that management wanted three days in the office to be the norm.

“That was kind of the industry standard approach back then,” said Scully. “But staff pushed back, they said ‘we have loads of introverts, so let’s make it two days back in’. And we canned it. So the shadow board absolutely drove the back to work policy. They co-wrote it with me and it was a very inclusive process.”

Scully said there have been “no repercussions” from a two-day in, three days out approach – and says younger staff tend to come in most of the time anyway, with Hatched “personalising” arrangements for those that want more flex.

“There has been no loss of productivity or clients,” said Scully. “People being happy is key – autonomy, trust, letting them work at their own pace delivers best results. Dictating days in the office is pretty meaningless."