Liquid Agency’s New Hub-Centered Work Life

Unlike many, Liquid Agency was uniquely positioned to avoid the worst of the remote work transition because remote working was already part of their DNA. While many were adapting, Liquid Agency was collaborating. With hubs in San Jose, Portland and New York, working via Zoom, et.al. was nothing new for this 21-year old agency known for their “Silicon Valley” thinking.

“We don't have offices now, we have hubs– a place for our staff to go if they need to get out of the house, or want to be around co-workers, or just need to have a space to step out of their day-to-day work environment,” Scott Gardner, Liquid Agency’s Founder/CEO. “It’s a universal space designed to give people a place to gather and for informal collaboration.”

That doesn’t mean that transitioning to the new working normal hasn’t been without its challenges. Founder and CEO of Liquid Agency, Scott Gardner, talks about the future of agency working life from their perspective.

 

Liquid Agency
Werbung/Full Service/ Integriert
San Jose, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika
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Scott Gardner
Founder/CEO Liquid Agency
 

Over the past year, work environments have had to change drastically. How has your agency taken employee feedback, coupled with what’s appropriate for the company to create a work plan going forward?

I think Liquid Agency is fortunate in the fact that our employee base is open and communicative, so there's generally not a lot of secrets in how people are feeling about things going on here. Our belief is people are more inclined to open up and speak when you're talking to them directly, versus putting out a survey or asking via a mass email. Because we're a mid-sized agency, we asked our teams directly: ‘Are you okay? ‘Is there anything we can do for you?’ The direct approach has served us well.

 

How has the changing work landscape affected the way pitches and campaign briefs are approached and conceptualized?

Getting everyone in the same room, whether it’s brainstorming internally or presenting to our clients, has changed in terms of how many folks we can have in a room at one time. So, while we lost that interaction with people, we’re finding the office is about community and a dedicated space to work. Working from home, for many, has become a place for more focused thinking, while the office is a place for collaboration and connecting. But creating remotely comes naturally for us because it was already part of our DNA and using tools like Miro has been a saving grace. The challenge we see is not so much getting people to collaborate effectively remotely, but rather getting them to unplug.

 

In what ways has this impacted the work-life balance of your employees and what steps have been taken to mitigate that?

That is the real challenge in all of this: companies have to put parameters around the workday and when it ends. Worker burnout is real and harmful to the employee and the company. If your home is your office, where are the boundaries? We’re helping staff by giving them parameters around this. Our leadership team was very worried about burnout and we had an idea which was let’s look at our own internal meeting rhythms and see if we are making life easy or more difficult for our people. We quickly learned we were cross matrixing the entire company and that didn’t even include client meetings. Once we went back and made sure certain activities like deparment meetings, 1:1’s and others all happened in designated slots we freed up so much calendar time for our people. It sounds simple and it wasn’t that hard to complete, but the outcome has been amazing!

 

Given that each work environment can look a bit differently, what has helped in creating a cohesive working relationship with clients?

It's definitely different and not as easy to be in the same room and read the energy. The solution has been a combination of using the technology we have, finding opportunities for face-to-face interactions whenever possible. Like every agency we are trying to make up for that in-person interaction as much as we can. Internally, we’ve instituted some fun efforts to maintain a sense of community such as virtual happy hours, online talent shows and started Slack channels devoted to recipe exchange and photos of pets. We even created our own Liquid Variety Show taking everyone into people’s homes meeting family members, pets and learning more about personal hobbies and interests. We learned very unique things about our staff such as one of our senior Art Directors collects Count Chocula boxes. Who knew? With clients it remains a challenge, but despite the lack of much live client interaction, we had a record year for growth in 2021.

 

What changes that have been made over the past year do you see sticking around for years to come?

The biggest move we made was to officially move to a WFA or Work from Away model. We originally toyed with the idea of Work from Anywhere, but quickly learned we had to draw clear lines of what “away” meant and due to back-end employee related taxes, filings etc we confirmed “away” means working anywhere in the United States. Once we made Work from Away official and delivered clear policy, we began hiring outside of our traditional hubs, recently adding full time staff from states like Florida and North Carolina. I think it is so great for us to tap into talent from all over the country and I definitely see that continuing. It has also really helped further diversify our staff in many ways. We will still operate regional office hubs, but we’ll never have assigned desks again, and we’ll never tell people they need to be in the office five days a week. It will always be optional. Overall, Covid has forced us to trust our employees to be their own manager, and I think we’ll continue to embrace that.