Amazon’s corporate workforce has banded together with a petition and a 14,000-staffer strong Slack channel to push back internally against a return-to-office requirement of at least three days a week starting May 1.
CEO Andy Jassy announced the mandate in an employee memo last week. It reverses guidance Amazon made in October 2021 to “intentionally not” prescribe office days, instead leaving working arrangements up to senior leaders and teams.
The work from home (WFH) vs. return to office (RTO) debate has turned into an employee-versus-employer tug of war. How are PR agencies handling the issue?
Some have landed on a hybrid model while others have continued to embrace operating almost fully hybrid. Industry insiders say that, behind closed doors, large agency CEOs want to draw a definitive line in the sand just as Amazon has. Meanwhile, a few agencies have permanently adopted four-day workweeks following a pandemic that put work-life priorities into stark focus.
The big agency conundrum
Many of the world’s largest PR agencies are reluctant to mandate that employees work three days or more a week in the office, even if this is exactly what top executives want.
“The large agencies have been fearful about any kind of mandate,” says PR Council president Kim Sample. “Instead, they have made it a suggestion — ‘We suggest you come to the office three days a week’ — but then when no one shows up, they get disappointed. But they really shouldn’t be disappointed if it is a suggestion.”
They fear the very pushback Amazon is getting from its workforce if they do mandate, explains Sample.
Jim Delulio, president of recruitment firm PR Talent, agrees the agency holding companies and a lot of large firms have been treading carefully.
“Because it has been an evolving policy and moving target, they’re not ready to make a long-term commitment, and then potentially be forced to make major fixes when there’s an employee uprising,” he explains. “It’s a challenge for them to balance the needs of so many disparate factions as they often have opposing opinions…The calculus is so challenging because whatever the decision, there will be many people unhappy with the policy.”
Delulio adds that agencies within the same holding company often have different policies, and firms even apply disparate sets of rules to select employees.
PRWeek reached out to the world’s largest PR firm, Edelman, in addition to its sister agency Zeno Group; Omnicon-owned shops FleishmanHillard and Ketchum; WPP agencies BCW and Hill+Knowlton Strategies; and Interpublic’s Weber Shandwick. None offered an executive to comment on in-office and remote work policies.
It is, of course, understandable why large firms would want staff in the office on a regular basis given expensive real-estate leases and owned property.
In addition, Sample also says “there is a huge miss happening in terms of the learning that happens around the edges of office work, especially for junior staff.”
The challenge isn’t just getting young people to work more in the office. The bigger ask, she contends, is to get more senior talent in with them to mentor and model behavior and best practices.
“It is going to be really hard for more senior talent, especially those with caregiving responsibilities, to give up the time they have had with their families over the past few years to commuting,” says Sample. “But a part of their job as senior leaders is teaching and mentoring.”
So who is ultimately going to win the tug of war? Delulio is betting on the employees.
“In the communications world, talent typically wins these tug of wars, since that is the differentiating factor in the industry,” he says. “Agencies who are not flexible will lose talent. And those that are able to offer worker-pleasing solutions will win the talent battle.”
Others go hybrid
MSL has “fully embraced hybrid work,” says Mark Zangrilli, executive director for talent and operations at the Publicis Groupe-owned agency in the U.S.
In fact, he says MSL U.S. is looking at a return to office for employees “on a monthly basis versus weekly basis,” or about four to eight days each month, as opposed to having a plan based on a minimum number of days per week.
“This is organized so our teams are coming into the office with intention and for connectivity around moments where being in-person is important,” Zangrilli explains. “So we are viewing the office as a destination for collaboration.”
It is also looking to support other moments of in-person team connection. “For example, to support learning and foster more connection at our early career levels, we gathered our account executives and assistant account executives together in New York late in 2022 for two days of learning and career development,” he says.
Allison+Partners has also adopted a hybrid model it calls “2+,” meaning two days in the office and the “plus” signifying an expectation that staffers spend additional time making in-person connections, whether through additional days in the office, attending professional development or network events or meeting with clients.
“We take a lot of cues from our clients,” says Jonathan Heit, global CCO and cofounder of Allison+Partners. “We’re seeing clients more and more require face-to-face connection.”
Heit understands firsthand the productive moments that come from an unexpected conversation with a colleague in the hallway.
“Nobody is questioning whether people can get their job done from home, that a commute can be difficult for people and being in the office can be less productive than home in certain ways,” he says. “But if you’re only at home, you miss those serendipitous moments of human contact.”
Yet others remain unmandated
Golin has not mandated nor has any plans to mandate a RTO policy.
“We shied away from certain number of days in the office, because we felt it would be picked out of thin air and based on past history of people saying, ‘Well, when I was in the business, we were in everyday,’” says Gary Rudnick, president and COO at the Interpublic agency. “The measure of our success is about the work and experience of employees, not the impression we’re making by how many days we’re in the office.”
Rather, Golin has introduced an “occasion-based policy” as it relates to office work, which means bringing employees in, for instance, when it’s a brainstorming session, training or subject-matter professional development days, or fun social or team-bonding events.
“Our teams have gravitated to Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays for those days or meetings, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people in on Mondays and Fridays,” he adds. “But we want people in when there is a business need, not because we have a psychological need to see people walking around doing stuff.”
He notes that 25% of Golin’s workforce lives in markets where the firm doesn’t have offices, so RTO couldn’t be broad-based anyway. The agency is also in the midst of right-sizing its office space as leases come up to create a “buzz or mood.”
“If we have a cavernous 100,000 square feet of space, but only have 40 people a day coming in, then that feels like no one is coming in, which is not the case,” points out Rudnick. “We are adjusting our office space to meet the demands of our workforce and deliver the product and service our clients are expecting.”
While he admits he worries about cultivating corporate culture when employees are not together as much — “It’s like dating rather than being married,” he quips — the onus is on agencies to make sure an office meets its purpose when people do come in. It is also working through how to give the 25% of employees who are fully remote the same cultural experiences as those who can sometimes be in the office.
Given ICR has a focus on business comms like IPOs, IR and corporate governance, CEO and cofounder Tom Ryan sees no need for staff to be in the office with any regularity.
“The more creative and marketing-driven the PR is, the more need for in-person ideation and collaboration is my sense,” he explains. “So we haven’t forced people to come back to the office.”
It would be hard to make the case for them to do so, given how ICR performed during two years of remote work. The firm increased year-over-year revenues by 20% in 2020 and by more than 80% in 2021. “We really didn’t skip a beat,” says Ryan.
The firm is encouraging staffers to come in at least once a month, “more for social reasons and some training and professional development than business,” adds Ryan. “If we have a client situation that requires in-person collaboration, we would require people to come in, but the five-day workweek in the office is long gone, in my opinion.”
In fact, he says ICR “would opportunistically look to downsize” real estate, if teams are “geographically dispersed, performing well remotely and the landlord was open to negotiation. We might take half the space, for example.”
Embracing the four-day work week
The results of the largest trial of a four-day workweek in the U.K. were released this week and showed significant health benefits for employees and that participating companies’ revenues were unchanged by it.
A year ago, PRWeek reported on the agencies experimenting with a four-day workweek in the U.S. They included Praytell, which has offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and is owned by independent agency network Project Worldwide.
“We have removed ‘pilot’ from ‘four-day workweek,’” says Andy Pray, CEO and founder of Praytell. “We have adopted it as the way we work, to the point that we alert clients to it in the first 10 slides of new-business pitches.”
The agency’s staff work Monday through Thursday, though a staffer may work the occasional Friday based on client need, and in addition there is no expectation that this work take place in an office. In fact, he says such a mandate makes little sense under a four-day workweek.
He points to Praytell staff in New York, some of whom have commutes of an hour to and from the agency’s office in Chelsea. “If you cut off Friday, are you really going to ask them to donate eight hours of commuting time, because the reality is there is only so much time in a week,” asks Pray.
He admits the no-work Fridays has had “a nominal drag on profit,” because there are fewer billable hours when a workday is eliminated. However, Pray says that has been neutralized by the cost-savings that have come from reduced employee and client churn.
In a 2021 survey, the percentage of Praytell staff who said they could manage their workload in a healthy way was in the low 60s. This year, that figure jumped by 25%, the highest result in this measure of any agency within Project Worldwide.
“On the surface, it doesn’t really make sense, because the workload in many cases has increased,” says Pray. “But the psychology of the work has changed in a very profound way.”
Praytell has closed its San Francisco and Los Angeles offices and is looking at ways to stimulate mentorship between seasoned employees with junior talent in non-office formats. However, it is keeping its Chelsea and Chicago offices, the latter of which will serve as a kind of “office lab since things can change very quickly,” says Pray. “The mindset of employees after a long winter might not be the mindset of a hopeful spring, and new patterns could emerge.”
LaunchSquad has also made a biweekly four-day workweek permanent following a well-received trial last spring. Half the staff are on, half-off every Friday.
The technology PR firm is also “virtual first,” says partner Brett Weiner, meaning most of the time the majority of employees are working remotely. Some of that is because there is no office to go into; 46 of its 121 employees, or 38% of its staff, work in cities without a physical LaunchSquad presence.
The 75 who reside where it does have offices, in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, “have zero requirement to work in the office and we don’t anticipate changing that,” says Weiner. “On any given week only a third of employees come into the office.”
He cites a few reasons for this position. Staff turnover is the lowest it has ever been. While a tightened economy may be a factor, an employee survey from last September also showed overwhelming support for “Flex Fridays.”
The other benefit of a four-day, remote-first workweek? The agency is freed from the shackles of a long-term lease or real estate holdings. It has shifted to shared working spaces in its key markets except New York, having, for example, closed the doors on its 11,000-square-foot office in San Francisco.
“It gives us more flexibility, as we can more easily add and move office space as needed,” he says.
This article originally appeared on PRWeek US.
