On-site work doesn’t work…until it does.

Clearly, most back-to-work mandates are driven by the need to control and by fear. Control that upper management falsely believes will drive profits and fear that employees working remotely can’t be trusted. Um, why then did they hire them in the first place if they can’t trust them?

That being said, there are times, at least for creative teams, when in-person meetings drive successful outcomes. Maybe if we acknowledge that and are clear about the scenarios that would benefit from in-person meetings, the paranoid C-suite will calm down a bit.

What are those scenarios? Well, they include:

• Brainstorming sessions on higher-tier projects. The energy generated by being in the same space as our fellow creatives is undeniable. There’s nothing more exciting than when a team achieves flow and begins to improvise like a tight Jazz ensemble.
• High-level client presentations. The opportunity to connect emotionally with a client when presenting a high-concept proposal is helpful. Add to that the fluid give-and-take dialog that occurs when addressing client concerns and exploring opportunities beyond the proposed deliverable and you have some strong justification for an in-person meeting.
• Team building events just don’t have the same impact on a Zoom that in-person events do. They don’t need to be weekly, but making the effort to hold them quarterly if possible helps boost morale and establish a strong sense of belonging and connection that drives loyalty in ways a virtual happy hour can’t.
• Continuous improvement workshops. The complexity of some big hairy operational and organizational challenges really necessitate the need for a level of focus and collaboration that are difficult to achieve virtually and benefit from sitting in the same room with a big whiteboard and lots of sticky notes.

Also, there are some functions that benefit from continuous in-person contact. Obviously, talent supporting live events such as videographers, photographers and live event techs need to be on site. I’d say that account managers, with the need to establish strong working relationships with clients, should be on site as well. Creative team leadership, with their need to gain the trust of upper management so they can successfully sell in their operational and organizational plans and ideas, should be on site more often that their reports to better connect with those higher-level stakeholders.

Remote work works and pushing for continuation of those policies is critical to the engagement, retention, and performance of our teams. But acknowledging that there are critical exceptions not only drives agency performance, it short circuits upper management’s blind belief that their employees need to be consistently on site when there is no strong rationale to support that position.