It has now been more than a year since our agency started working 100% from home, and while we have always been a flextime and remote work friendly agency, this pandemic has thrust us all into a massive human experiment in tenacity and team grit. Many of our team members have never met in person, but we have had an intimate view of each other’s daily lives, struggles, heartbreak and successes over the past year, carried out mostly on Zoom. And we have found strength in our vulnerabilities. We no longer feel embarrassed by children coming into the room to interrupt a Zoom call or make excuses for our dogs barking in the background. We have shared each other’s fears when a family member got sick, joy when they recovered and heartbreak when others didn’t.

While the pandemic is far from over, this unwanted experiment has ultimately made us grow closer as a team, and we have managed to thrive as an agency despite the pandemic. Looking to the future and with all this talk about what the ‘new normal’ in the workplace will look like and our own clients defining their post-pandemic work plans, we consulted with our team on how they envision our agency’s ideal future workplace. After conducting a survey, we’ve identified four points which we will be utilizing in our post-pandemic work plan:

1) Remote work is here to stay and provides many benefits such as time and costs savings when commuting is out of the equation, increased quality of life to care for children or pets while working, and more time to exercise and cook/eat healthy.

2) In-person is still important: collaboration days in office space for brainstorming and strategic planning sessions, approximately once per week or biweekly.

3) Extra-curricular gatherings hosted by the agency to combat a year of anxiety/loneliness and to ultimately foment team building.

4) Training sessions to increase knowledge and capabilities during these disruptive times, including training on how to set boundaries vis-à-vis challenges faced when personal space and workspace are one and the same.

In the end, we will be permanently bidding adieu to the daily grind of commuting and cubicles. According to a PR Week Twitter poll carried out last year, more than 60% of agencies are in agreement with WFH (work from home) forever, 30% said no and nearly 10% say it’s already happening for them. Concern was mostly centered around young talent and the need for in-person mentoring, a valid point and one to take into consideration when designing any post-pandemic work plan. Indeed, our own survey resulted in more than 61% agreeing that there are still benefits to collaborating physically in person (18% not sure), and 100% in agreement to either WFH full-time or a hybrid model.

As we venture into the ‘new norm’, we may not get it right the first time, but we will most certainly rely on our greatest asset, our team, for insights on how to optimize our working environment that will help each one of us and our agency continue to thrive despite the odds.