Career, culture and creativity: the lost opportunities of the office
Key moments of human interaction are lost when working from home, writes Havas Media Group head of integrated strategy and planning Nick Kavanagh.
I’ve just started to emerge from my Covid-enforced work hibernation. Although there’s a smattering of people on our floor at the Havas Village HQ, the view from my desk is mainly of blank screens, empty chairs, and scribbles on whiteboards for campaigns and pitches long-gone. Ghosts of a more collaborative past.
As a management team we’re now trying to encourage our people back to the office. It’s February already and like every agency in town, we have targets to meet and clients to service. We need to get going.
But a lot of our people are reticent to return and the reasons for this are as broad as they are understandable.
I’m glad the 5 days-a-week, 9-6pm (on a good day) thing is over. Finally, we have accepted that work needs to work for us. That people have lives, families, responsibilities and passions outside of work that demand greater flexibility from our employers. We’ve also collectively endured a once in a century event whose impact on our emotional and physical wellbeing is yet to be fully understood. Expecting people to spring back to how we worked at the start of 2020 is at best unrealistic, at worst unfair.
However, it’s also important to tell the other side of the story. To reflect on the benefits of being in the office. Considering everything we’ve been through it’s easy to forget this. But I’m not going to preach, no one needs that. Rather, this is a reflection on my own experience. Of how being around others in a shared physical environment benefitted me and my career, from starting as a media buying assistant in 2002 through to head of strategy today.
The first benefit is just how much I learnt, and continue to learn, via osmosis. Be it my more experienced peers negotiating the trading of airtime, hearing how my business directors handled difficult client conversations, to how the most adept agency leaders work the agency floor and subtly impart their vision, I learnt/learn so much just by being around people more experienced than me. My fear is that, by being at home, we miss out on so much of this informal training.
Physically being around people helped me shape my career choices. Media buying was fun but a) I wasn’t wired for hardcore negotiations and b) I was rubbish at Excel. However, I quickly realised that there were lots of other jobs that take place in an agency that I was perhaps more suited to. By being around people, listening to conversations and participating in meetings I was exposed to planners and planning, and consequently shifted roles into this area. A course correction that put me on a trajectory to head of department.
This pivot happened the best part of 20 years ago. The diversity of roles in an agency has grown exponentially since then. What you do now may well not be what you’ll be doing in three years’ time, and the chances are you may want to do something different right now. Contact and interaction with others will help guide what you really want to do.
What I enjoy about working in an agency the most – is agency culture. Yes, the lunches and the invites to events are great, but it’s the rituals specific to each workplace, the micro-interactions that take place every day and the sense of collective endeavour that I’ve really missed. Agency culture creates bonds, and bonds lead to friendships that last well beyond your tenure at a particular organisation. Working remotely makes it extremely difficult to build and maintain agency culture and consequently these bonds weaken.
Agency culture improves the work, especially creativity. The latter being something we must protect and nurture, regardless of the flavour of agency you work in. Having people together in one place has a direct influence on the quality of the work. That’s not to say you can’t do it remotely, but it is a lot harder and, arguably, less fun.
But if you take anything from this, it’s that final point – that work is more fun when we’re together.
We now need to make sure work works for us; that we can fulfill our responsibilities as seamlessly from our bedroom as we can the boardroom. Of course, the job can be challenging at times, but these challenges feel less overwhelming, and the highs more gratifying, when we’re together. Actually, together.
So however you want to return and at what pace, remember that being in the office can be a good thing. For you, for your career, for your team. Who knows, you may even end up creating something truly revolutionary.
Nick Kavanagh is the head of integrated strategy and planning at Havas Media Group.
Missing the office dog lifestyle as well, been barking up the wrong tree having my human work from home for so long, its been pretty *ruff*. Looking forward to the next Havas dog day and paw-sible see you there Nick
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I firmly believe most agency staff, especially those in the early stage so of their careers, have many more opportunities to learn, gain wider experience, be promoted, be paid more and develop the skills needed to become one of the ‘management class’ if they work at the office and not at home. [And if you’re worried about ‘surveillance’, it’s worth remembering if you WFH that most companies have the right to access your work computer/online activity to confirm proof of work done and the time spent doing it]. So, if one day, you hope to enjoy ‘the prestige of being surrounded physically by your underlings’ and all the extra income and benefits that come with your elevation to the ‘management class’, I suggest working from the office might well one of the best and fastest ways of achieving it.
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Great article, Nick. Concur with much of the sentiment. Solid points well made. Clearly WFH works at a day-in, day-out level for many of us. But pan out and consider how this impacts our ability to connect, collaborate and be part of something bigger than ourselves…there’s lots for us to figure out. Cheers, Nick
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Funny how all these “Work is better in an office environment” articles are always penned by the management class who benefit from the surveillance and prestige of being surrounded physically by their underlings.
Thanks but no thanks.
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@Michael – If that was your takeout from this article, I would suggest you’re not the type of person any leader would want in a team, WFH or not.
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The comments on this post illustrate the best reason why physical presence is an important ingredient to any group, culture, organisation, club etc…
– Greater context in everyday interactions
– Clear (er) communication and nuanced comprehension
– There is a greater tendency for increased ownership, thoughtfulness and accountability within individuals when it comes to displaying anti-social, aggressive or negative behaviours, actions and most importantly, reactions, towards others who may disagree, challenge, dismiss or otherwise somehow threaten our own belief and value systems.
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Isn’t “learning by osmosis” indicative of the lack of a (useful and actually followed) structured learning or mentorship program common to all agencies? I was a “Director” in two of the global agency groups and can say I was never taught how to mangage or develop anyone. In agencies, I believe it’s fair to say “management” is a title, not a skill. We do create close friendships in-office of course, but I’ve also cultivated friendships with my equivalents in London and the US whilst working on shared global accounts. We haven’t met in person yet, but plan to as soon as we can. Work is often more fun together, but only when you like who you sit with. Sometimes you just don’t. I don’t believe a future-focused organisation can chance their culture and creativity on (literally) chance micro-interactions in a noisy, open plan room. Is the organisation’s creativity and cuture being led by a narrow selection of the loudest and most senior voices, or the organisation’s best? As an industry group we have to get better at leading people remotely. When my fellow 10-year vets are complaining about city cost of living and commuting, remember we earn 3-5x what our juniors do and it is serious for them. They and next wave of talent will be voting with their feet.
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As of right now, for all multi-office organisitons, if you don’t know how to lead and develop remote teams then you don’t really know how to lead. Horse has bolted.
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