By Amanda Drum
Hybrid is the word on everyone’s tongue as we begin to reopen following a year-long pandemic shutdown. The pandemic experience, fueled by tech advances, has led many to live out some of the pros of modern day remote work…as well as the cons. Many are seeking to pull the best from both experiences into a new kind of work experience: the hybrid workplace.
For the advertising and production industries, how would hybrid play out? And is it the best choice for the industry–better than either fully remote or fully in-office?
The Backstory
Rewinding to March 2020 (as much as you don’t want to), many industries, advertising included, strove to keep working while everyone sheltered at home. Tackling the “how” meant navigating logistical issues, giving way to the rise of Zoom and other video meeting platforms.
Granted, no one thought they would be working remotely a full year later. As companies gave themselves jobs intended to tide them over for a few weeks or months’ wait, agencies became busy. On the production side, producers fielded questions asked of other agencies: what is your COVID-19 prevention plan for your sets? What protocols do you have in place? As the world devised their own plan, so too did the production industry under agencies’ watchful eyes.
Remote Work Pros
Surprisingly, the shift for previously conservative industries like advertising worked better than expected. From the agency standpoint, as digitized as they already were, the biggest hurdles were ensuring security protocols while employees worked remotely. The digitized nature of sharing information with more partners than ever raised understandable security concerns, and made encryption software and services even more popular.
Video conferences, emails, Slack–those became second-nature, allowing for partnerships beyond borders that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible or considered in the past. Talent emerged in corners of the globe outside of major cities, and companies were able to connect more easily with offices across time zones, now that the physical barriers of an office and office schedule disappeared.
What’s more, leadership across companies ranging from agencies to production, post, VFX and more, all realized they were no longer limited by office space to accommodate their many teams ‘in the Cloud.’ For companies were seeing sharp growth during the pandemic, Zoom provided a neat solution to paying costly rent in coastal industry hubs. Growing pains came in the form of the turnaround time on replies, shifting from standing meetings at desks to waiting 5-30 minutes for an email, text or Slack reply.
In this sense, the pandemic forced efficient workspace evolution. Once all meetings became video calls and emails, personnel really learned what “could have been an email” as opposed to an all-hands. Time became more valuable, and tech solutions were utilized further to streamline work, creating more off-the-clock hours. Some companies continued to pay for commercial real estate they weren’t using, but that was considered ‘the cost of doing business’ during the pandemic.
Remote Work Cons
Where agencies and tech-heavy companies fell into routine, creatives themselves felt the impact of a lack of togetherness and in-person collaboration. Many cited the need for automatic visual response, or the typical rhythm of bouncing ideas off a colleague or client that comes along with in-person settings to truly feel productive. As busy as many advertisers became in 2020, this proved a challenge for creatives and ‘suits’ alike. The ability to read social cues from clients was lost or more difficult to read on a video call, and even then, the warmth of in-person connection via Zoom some found more difficult to achieve.
Overnight, many employees suffered from lack of work-life balance, brought on by a few factors: the stress of a global pandemic, and other socio-cultural issues faced in 2020, but also the difficulty of being only two steps from your workspace at any given time. The impact hit women and working mothers particularly hard: in December 2020, women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs lost that month, and the pandemic overall has exposed a lack of equality in the household when it comes to dividing child-rearing responsibilities, for example.
For companies hoping to hold their teams together with a positive culture, achieving said culture with the same methods of a traditional office proved impossible. Beyond the lack of retreats, events and meetings thanks to the pandemic, the small things that constitute a company culture–pleasantries exchanged in hallways, going out to lunch or dinner, the sense of going to a tangible office and being part of an institution– fell away.
Cue “Hybrid”
In an effort to shed the cons and make use of the pros, many companies are considering a hybrid workplace–whatever that means to each business and industry. While the pandemic wasn’t the eye-opening revelation anyone wanted, companies who had hesitated to make use of remote work technology in the past now had incorporated these viable tools. The pandemic became the driving force for modernization some systems found they needed.
Hybrid to some means creating a schedule as simple as dividing a week between in-office and out-of-office work days. Others may take hybrid to mean the choice is up to the employee, or that working remotely can occur on more spontaneous terms, like while waiting for repair people and deliveries, or around doctors visits. Will there be a definitive definition of “hybrid” and a set protocol for all to follow? Probably not, but advertising also doesn’t know yet. As vaccinations become widely available, leadership feels more comfortable addressing this long-term question, faced with worried employees and their fair share of fears.
While many look forward to seeing colleagues, some are adapting to this next phase of the pandemic more slowly than others and some are still paralyzed by fear. Every hybrid plan will need to attempt to take the pros of remote work–including fewer administrative costs, and employees more content with managing their own schedules–and implement them, without their matching cons. As with remote work itself, hybrid plans will take more than just a top-down set of instructions: they will require teamwork, and a certain level of empowerment and trust in entire companies, and within entire industries, to build them that way.