Last week, Rand Fishkin and I released the first round of results from the Digital Agency Survey 2024 over on the SparkToro blog which covered some of the top-level insights from over 600 agency founders and solo consultants.
This week, I want to take a deep dive into one area that I found particularly interesting: the state of play with remote work practices and agency company culture.
In this section of the survey, we asked folks for their views on the topic of remote, hybrid and office-based working, along with how these ways of working may have impacted things such as client relationships and their culture.
In particular, we wanted to find out:
- Is there going to be a return to the office full-time for agencies?
- How happy are agency owners and consultants with their current working setup?
- Are client relationships as strong as they used to be now that many agencies are remote first?
- What about company culture? Has that changed at all due to remote working?
- How often do agency owners expect their team to be in the office each month?
We answer these questions and a bunch more below.
If you’d like more information on who took the survey, along with the methodology, be sure to check out this post on SparkToro.
Now, let’s get into it.
Can we stick a fork in full-time office working?
It seems that way. Just under 5% of agencies said that they are currently working full-time in the office. Over half said that they are fully remote, whilst a little over a quarter said that they are hybrid*.
*Scroll down to the question on the number of days per month that hybrid agencies require their team to be in the office – hybrid may be a little more office-based than you’d expect.
But what about the future? Are we still in a weird, post-pandemic era where agencies are still figuring things out with their ways of working?
Spoiler: their minds seem to be pretty made up.
And remote working is probably here to stay
We also asked agency owners whether they were happy with their current setup and the vast majority of them said yes:
Only 1.6% are actively looking to change their policies on remote, office and hybrid working.
As a result, it’s probably fairly safe to say that most agency owners are comfortable with their current setup. Things may change in the future and it’s good to see a decent number of owners who are open to change, but I suspect at this point that we’ll see very few do a complete u-turn on whatever their current situation is.
No matter what, a return to the office seems very unlikely
What about the long-term? Is there a possibility that agencies will return to the office once some more time has passed?
It doesn’t seem very likely:
I won’t lie, I was very, very surprised by this one.
64% of respondents disagreed that agencies will return to the office, with only 16% agreeing.
Whilst I’m very supportive of remote (and hybrid) working, this surprised me because we’re still seeing lots and lots of larger companies forcing a return to the office in some form or another. Amazon is one of the most recent, forcing employees back into the office five days a week from January 2025.
It also goes counter to what I’m hearing said privately by lots of agency owners across the US and UK, with many growing frustrated at remote or hybrid working.
Nearly a third of agency cultures have been damaged by remote working
As a huge advocate and fan of putting a strong culture at the heart of your agency, this is a little sad to see but also, in my opinion, fully expected.
In fact, 29% of agency owners said that they felt that the move to remote and hybrid working has damaged their company culture:
We’re now a few years into remote and hybrid working and many staff will be in situations where they’ve never ever met their colleagues in person or have met them perhaps a handful of times.
Personally, similar to client relationships (more on that below), I think that stronger relationships are formed between people when they spend time together in the same location.
I think that this is particularly true for those team members who are less experienced and less than a few years into their careers. Having face time with their more senior colleagues and their manager can help in so many ways and have a hugely positive impact on relationships once remote communication takes over again.
I have to admit – I’d say that as a founder of an agency that was famous for having a strong culture and supportive working environment, we didn’t adapt quickly enough to remote working and it almost certainly led to the culture being damaged at least a little.
That’s on me and maybe I’ll write about my perspective on this one day. But for now, I can certainly look back and see where remote and hybrid working enabled some cracks to form in an otherwise very strong team culture.
Most agencies have a compulsory minimum number of days in the office
When it comes to asking their team to come into the office, just under 53% of respondents said that they required them to come into the office
Note: this question was only asked to agencies who declared themselves to be either fully office-based or hybrid. It wasn’t asked to respondents who said that they were fully remote.
Is hybrid working really hybrid? I’m not so sure
Following on from this, we asked respondents who said that they had a compulsory minimum just what that minimum was.
88% said that the compulsory minimum per month was four days which works out to around a day a week. Breaking this down further, 33% expect their team to be in the office between 5-9 days per month and 41% said 10+ days per month which was also the most popular answer.
I think that this relatively high number of days per month puts a different spin on hybrid working. The most popular answer is over 10 days per month, which is basically more than half of the working month – this is quite a high proportion of time that agencies expect their team to be in the office.
If we also remember that this is compulsory, then “hybrid” suddenly feels like it’s a lot less flexible than many may believe.
Client relationships remain strong in a remote first world
When asked whether the move to hybrid and remote working has damaged client relationships, the answer was a pretty firm no:
66% of respondents disagreed with this statement and felt that client relationships have not been damaged by the move to remote and hybrid working. Only 18% agreed. Although arguably, that’s still a fairly high number of client relationships with agencies that may well have been damaged.
With that said, I wonder if the strong disagreement here comes down to a wide acceptance from most clients that they also prefer remote/video conferencing catchups and no longer want to meet in person themselves?
My own experience as my agency came out of the pandemic was very much this. Most clients, even those within traveling distance were happy with video catchups. The only notable exception was usually new business meetings where potential clients would prefer final pitches to be carried out in person.
Most client meetings are fully remote
To build further on this, we also found from our research that the vast majority of agencies and solo consultants (77%) will host client meetings remotely via video:
23% overall said that they hosted client meetings in locations that allowed for face to face conversations.
I am a little sad about this if I’m being honest.
I’m supportive of remote working and whilst remote meetings can work perfectly fine. I can’t help but feel that client and agency/consultant relationships can be so much stronger when they’re supported by time spent in the same room.
For me, you just can’t beat sitting around the same table and then taking the chance to grab a coffee together or even better, eat lunch together.
Sure, remote meetings and relationship building is fine. But I think that agencies and consultants should be proactively making the effort to see their clients face to face on a regular basis where possible.
Bad news for four-day-week fans
Given recent trials of the four-day-week in the UK and more agencies moving to this new way of working, we were keen to find out if this could be part of a bigger shift across the industry.
As it turns out, opinion is a bit more divided than I was expecting. But it appears that for most agencies, the four-day-week isn’t likely to become the norm anytime soon. Overall, 43% of agency owners disagreed that the four-day-week would become the norm in the foreseeable future. 31% agreed with this statement whilst around 25% had no strong opinion.
For me, that 25% with no strong opinion is what makes me think that a huge move to this way of working for agencies is pretty unlikely. I think that for agencies to make this big move, the founders/owners need to be fairly heavily invested into the idea – simply because it’s not an easy one to make or to roll back if things go wrong.
I do think that we’ll see more agencies (and companies generally) making the move to the four-day-week, but I think we’re at least 5-10 years away from any kind of sweeping changes across the industry.
