It's time to stop remote work

Since the pandemic lockdown, a lot of founders feel something is missing from their agency.

For some it’s a feeling of togetherness, team spirit. For others it’s a sense of energy, focus and accountability.

Many deeply miss having everyone together in an office everyday. A vibrant space they shape together in the style of their agency culture.

They miss looking around and being able to see the bustle, the ability to just stop by someone’s desk to check in on things, the informal chats around the expensive coffee machine.

But every founder I hear from, even if it’s reluctantly for some, generally thinks that remote or hybrid work is here to stay.

The problem is — when we consider office work, remote work, hybrid work or whatever — what we’re focusing all our attention on is the location.

Yet how important is location in the work that agencies do?

If you’re a surgeon, location matters a lot. You and the patient both need to be in the same place at the same time, along with a lot of expensive equipment and other specialists. The work simply can’t be done otherwise.

But creative knowledge work can be done from anywhere. The last few years has proved that.

Though even that’s not quite the full picture.

The truth is: Different parts of the work we do are best done from different types of places for different people.

So, in my view, we need to reach a new stage of maturity in our agencies where we aren’t so obsessed about location.

We’re no longer office-workers — but we don’t need to be home-workers either.

We definitely don’t want to feel ‘remote’! That’s the worst of all, focusing on the distance between us. We still want to feel close and connected.

And what even is ‘hybrid’? Simply stipulating that a certain number of days per week have to be spent in the office regardless of what you’re working on that day continues the obsession with location, just adding muddy compromise. It also means you pay 100% of the rent on an office that gets used 25% of the time. That just hurts.

So the era of office work is behind us. But remote or hybrid work isn’t what’s ahead of us. It got us through lockdown, but left everyone (even the fans) feeling a little disconnected, a little unfulfilled.

The problem is that the only thing we changed was the ‘where’.

We just started working from different locations and assumed everything else about the way we always worked would stay the same.

It sounds silly if you stop and think: Let’s stop working in the same place, but continue the way we do things as if we were.

That’s where the pain comes from.

Now, to make creative agencies feel great again for everyone, we need to mindfully design a new way of working together.

I call it Free Range Work, and have designed a set of 3 vital freedoms, balanced with 3 important responsibilities.

It’s the balance between the freedoms and responsibilities that is the key to design a better future of agency working life.

Let’s focus on the ‘how’ more than the ‘where’.

I’ll share more about it next week.