RIP RTO.
Bid farewell to the office as command central. And say hello to the messy uncertainty that is remote work.
Little did I know when I wrote my job description for the Creative Entrepreneur in Residence how much the remote work piece would dominate.
It infuses every conversation, call and meeting in some way. So much so that I had a moment of reflection about how lucky I am to be in this think-y role at a time when so much rethinking is happening.
I cannot overstate that what we are living through at this moment is historic. There are no experts. There is no precedent. Everyone is figuring it out as they go and it will never get fully figured, only revisited over and over.
While there have been people asking for remote work, in chorus, for decades, it wasn’t within a context of that being the primary state of working for the close to 50% of people who can do their work remotely. Enter COVID. And Omicron. And variants yet to be named.
We live in a world where leaders take comfort in policy and certainty, making this is a major grenade. Comfort with ambiguity is a 21st Century leadership attribute and it’s never been more needed than now.
Here at Eleven, they’ve formally bid adieu to RTO. They’re taking a “remote-first” approach, pre-supposing that people will work, at least for the time being, from the safety and comfort of their homes. For those who wish to come in, there’s a protocol that includes checking in via an app that asks questions about vaccination status and health. And should you pass that hurdle, here is what the office will look like when you get there.
Kinda sad.
Despite the ghost-town atmosphere, I still love my Wednesdays at 500 Sansome St. And that surprises me. An introvert who loves nothing more than working in a library carol, I am soaking up the eye contact and small talk like Vitamin D during a gloomy winter.
If I’m feeling this, how are the extroverts faring? Not well, I imagine.
I spent the better part of my one-on-one call with Courtney (Eleven’s CEO) on Tuesday discussing this. And telling him that he needs to “honor the weirdness of the moment.” Just naming it and acknowledging that these are strange times where we aren’t sure what we need, day to day, and how those needs might change multiple times in the course of a month.
I’ve also done outreach to the creatives, some of whom have never visited the office nor met the leadership team, with invitations to talk. I have no formal training for this. But I know that just acknowledging that isolation + uncertainty isn’t a great recipe for creativity (nor happiness) is a necessary first step to breaking the ice.
A quote from this week’s Allyship and Action conference haunts me:
“You don’t know the kind of grief that goes on behind people’s screens.”
Thank you, Mita Mallick for raising the G word.
Grief.
One of the most misunderstood words in our language. Grief is not only mourning a loved one’s death. It’s a vast umbrella that holds any feeling of loss or deviation from a belief about how things should be, no matter how big or small.
I heard the term “Injustice Grief” for the first time this week and it stopped me cold.
YES.
The grief of living in a world that isn’t holding up its end of the bargain on so many fronts. Racial injustices. Abortion rights. Pay equity. LGBTQ and Trans rights protections. Climate instability. Gun control. The list is endless and the headlines tear the scab off daily.
If you are leading a team right now, your team is hurting. I don’t know them, nor your company’s goals or financial realities. But I know that your people are scared, tired and at times hopeless. The good news is you don’t need to fix it. You just need to acknowledge it. That is the single most healing thing you can do.
Courtney’s words during this week’s all-hands were the salve the moment called for. He reiterated that Eleven is pursuing a hybrid-centric versus office-centric model. And that he sees this not as a disruption, but as an unlock. Suddenly the freedom to better meet how and where people want to work is upon us. This multimodal work strategy offers a plural solution, not a binary. We don’t have to be one thing or another, but all the many things we need, moment to moment.
The expanded geographic model opens up hiring options and gives Eleven newfound leadership anchors in several corners of the country, all of which have advantages. The potential rent savings get reattributed to travel, encouraging people to visit their teams/colleagues/clients as often as they feel is needed, not by some prescribed cadence.
Courtney also acknowledged the heavy lift this places on folks in operational roles, ensuring the support is in place to uphold this new model. This complicated mathematical equation of individual needs versus team needs versus agency requirements won’t get figured overnight. But at least the equation is up on the company chalkboard in Courtney’s handwriting.
I miss you
In talking with Courtney specifically about the pull people may be feeling to want to see one another more often, I used a form of reference from another vastly changing HR landscape: paternity leave. Once the exception and now the expectation, PatLeave still falls largely on the new father to activate. My belief is that any company with paid paternity leave should be presumptive and set a return-to-work date for the new father at the end of the covered leave. Instead of putting the onus on the employee to inquire about leave (and possibly feel there will be a penalty for doing so), the HR lead should set the leave to include the offered benefit in its entirety.
The analogous thing now is not time off, but time in. Meaning in the office. If your people are feeling the pull for more time in person, make it frictionless for them to do so. Walk yourself through the process of purchasing plane tickets and reserving local hotels. Is it hard? Confusing? Think back to the meal plan of college days and make it “swipe your card” simple. Reward your team’s desire to share time together by enabling it. And funding it in the budget.
Reading up
This book just arrived at my doorstep after hearing the author interviewed on NPR a couple of days ago. Stay tuned for my takeaways in the next CEIR newsletter. Again, we are all just figuring this out in real time and need to read up/listen up to whatever we can on the topic around us.
Random thoughts
Remote work is the star of this show. But there are many supporting parts that are enriching the cast and tugging on my thoughts. Below is a random list of takeaways, each of which could fill its own newsletter, but which I distill here to acknowledge its presence in my CEIR landscape:
Load balancing: A fancy term for making sure everyone gets some break over the holidays, even those who have to work on a client whose business can’t honor the mid-December break. Seeing this handled in real time at Eleven reminds me of the importance of balancing 24/7 client realities with protecting the downtime of creatives who are expected to be always on.
IT: Shoutout to the tech pros who oversee our hybrid model realities and walk us through new log-ins and firewall complexities. I’m looking at you, Michael, for helping me with some GCal and Slack weirdness.
Goodbyes: How you say goodbye to parting employees (and they to you) speaks volumes about a company. Pay attention to the respect and well wishes conveyed in both directions.
Belonging: I’ve been working on a book called “The Future Belongs to Belonging” for a while. Yet a new form of belonging announced itself to me this week. I met with an Eleven staffer suffering from that nebulous place of having a vacancy of leadership at the top of her department coupled with the fact that most agency folks don’t know exactly what it is she does. Belonging boils down to feeling seen and known. And when your colleagues don’t completely understand what it is that you contribute, that can be a mighty lonely place. I offered some remedies which all amounted to her drawing dotted lines between departments that may not be immediately apparent, revealing her relevancy. Yet I don’t like that the misunderstood person had to initiate the PR campaign for her worth. Will keep noodling on this, but want to plant the seed that as department structures and job descriptions morph to honor the times, we need to do internal PR for our own people and their contributions.
Spirit of Giving
Gifts: Unexpected gifts that are personal are catnip for belonging. Thank you to the executive team at Eleven for hearing that I was closing on a new home and presenting me with a truly useful and beautiful gift. (You’ll all just have to wonder what’s in the box.)
Purpose, purpose, purpose
A core part of my CEIR job description was ensuring that Eleven is centering Corporate Social Responsibility in its dealings with clients. The world is awake to how brands are just very wealthy groups of citizens and, as such, can make a dent on causes that matter to its consumers, employees and shareholders. My belief is that the messaging crafters — AD PEOPLE — need to upskill quickly at convening discussions about this and ensuring that brand message center values and philanthropy.
In order to round out my own thinking, I had meetings this month with Libby DeLana, an executive creative director who recently helmed a major purpose campaign, and Shilpa Tiwari, EVP of Social Impact, Sustainabiltiy and DEI at Citizen Relations. Both of these calls expanded my own understanding of how to optimize the moment of heightened purpose awareness on behalf of Eleven’s clients. Shilpa validated that purpose now shows up “in pinstripes” and is not only for non-profits. Libby shared her latest thinking about purpose not being “the last page of the deck.” More to come on this front, but wanted to reassure my readers that this is still a core part of my role at Eleven.
That sums things up for now. I wish you a restful holiday with lots of baked goods.
Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.