Why Huge is swapping many of its physical offices for experiences and co-working spaces

Huge is betting on experiences, co-working memberships and cultural calendars as it makes significant changes in favor of a new working model its global CEO Mat Baxter calls “Fully flexible.” As a result, Huge, which has offices in 13 locations and 1,400 employees globally, will be closing its physical office spaces that inhabit a “smaller” number of employees (between 50 to 150, for example), Baxter said. The agency will be giving out memberships to co-working spaces to employees from those locations who still want the option to have an office space. Elephant, which is under the Huge network and shares office spaces with Huge, will also follow the new structure. Over the next 12 months, as leases end, the agency will be letting go of real estate in areas like Chicago and in Atlanta, where it has 40 staffers, as well as other offices in the southeast and Midwest, Baxter said. Huge has offices in Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, California, and Washington in the U.S., plus international offices in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, as well as London, Tokyo and Toronto. The agency declined to disclose which physical offices will be impacted but a spokeswoman confirmed that 75% of its employees will be within commuting distance of a physical location “should they want to take advantage of it.” 'An office is like a comfort blanket to me' The decision had less to do with cost and more with employee quality of work, Baxter said. The move comes as the agency’s employees have made it clear that they want something different when it comes to their workspace. A recent internal survey found that 91% of employees said they were more productive at home and 74% didn’t want to return to the office or felt they could do their jobs outside of the office, Baxter said. When the agency attempted a voluntary hybrid model earlier this year there was less than 10% attendance overall with smaller offices, in particular, “trafficked at a low rate,” according to Baxter. Get your tickets for the Small Agency Conference & Awards, held in Chicago on July 26 and 27, at AdAge.com/SACA2022 Huge employees aren’t alone. Last June, a We Are Rosie report found that 100% of marketing professionals surveyed want the option to decide where to work. “People don't want to go back to the way that they used to work," Baxter said. "I had to catch myself because I'm 40 plus years old and an office is like a comfort blanket to me. [I thought] how can you run a company or be in a company without an office? I found myself going back to the office, not because it was necessarily the thing that everybody wanted or was the right thing to do but because it was my security blanket for what I thought we needed as a company to continue to operate in the way that we've historically operated. When you free yourself from that comfort blanket, and say, hold on, ‘You're doing everything that we criticize clients and brands for, which is holding on for dear life to the past and not learning from the current dynamics in the market. If you listen to what's going on in the market and the current dynamics, it's clear people want to reimagine the office.” Yesterday, Elephant announced that it is merging its East Coast and West Coast locations. Cara DiNorcia was also elevated to president of the agency reporting to Baxter. Eric Moore, who had been Elephant’s CEO since its inception six years ago, is stepping down from his role. Experience centers Huge's move is the latest example of employers envisioning the future of work post-COVID. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made headlines a few weeks ago when he announced that the company’s employees can work remotely indefinitely. Agencies like Mother, Known and Grow—to name a few—have also constructed new office spaces recently to make them more inviting. Huge’s Medellín and Brooklyn offices will be reimagined as “experience centers,” according to Baxter, who says he wants the new spaces to be more like clubhouses. There are about 1,000 employees between the two spaces. The Interpublic Group of Cos. agency is moving its Brooklyn location to a new undisclosed space that is still being built out. “It will be a different style of workplace,” said Baxter, who explained that the agency has been working with a consultant to help design the new space over the past six months. The goal is to create a space where employees would want to "chill out." “We briefed them and actually have gone back twice challenging their responses saying you're not pushing it hard enough,” Baxter said. “We want it to be more radical, more different than what they were coming back to us with. The brief to them was design us a space that's post-COVID, that is an experience center, not an office." The space will still be able to accommodate around the same number of employees as the previous one did, said Baxter, who is looking to update all aspects of the space including workspaces, kitchens, and communal spaces. Get your tickets for the 2022 Leading Women event, held in New York on Aug. 9 “You are going to have almost every meeting now where somebody will video into a conference,” Baxter said. “So how you use technology cameras, screens, how you allow them to participate with a whiteboard or write their notes or comments during a brainstorm, ow you use that technology and you design that space will have to be different because you'll always have a degree of remote presence in that room in a way that before COVID you never had. So it's forcing companies to rethink the layout of the room, the shape of the tables, where screens are, and how whiteboards are used." Baxter envisions the space will still be used for client presentations, pitches, or allowing clients to use the space as an occasional workspace. He also will look for the agency to visit clients more moving forward. “We want to be visiting them not have them visit us necessarily,” he said. “I think that's a good thing for us as we get into a more consultative mindset and focused on understanding client businesses. Part of that is understanding their culture and being part of that culture. So visiting clients in their offices and being part of that experience is important as well. If you look at the consultancies, they're much more likely to visit a client than their client is to visit them." Cultural content calendar and co-working spaces The money saved from getting rid of many physical locations will be redistributed to fund a cultural content calendar and popup events for employees across the globe as well as travel to the Brooklyn office, and other types of engagements for clients and staff. “The problem with the lease is you are paying for a space that's not utilized,” Baxter said. “It's available five days a week, 24 hours a day. It used to be utilized five days a week ... Now it's getting utilized two or three days a week by 10% of the workforce. That’s money that could be better deployed.” The cultural content calendar will be used as a way for “clusters” of employees in different regions to experience events together. Baxter defines a cluster of people as at least six employees who live in one city. One example is the nearly 20 Huge employees that now live in Austin despite there never being a Huge office in the Texas city. “You don't need an office to create physical and human-to-human connections,” Baxter said. “It’s a much more democratized way of experiencing the company as an employee than the office structure ever provided, because unless you live near an office, hey, guess what? Tough luck, you didn't get to experience the brand under that structure.” Locations with significant enough numbers of employees will be deemed “talent hubs.” The calendar will be managed by Huge’s office services team, which has been rebranded as the agency’s “workplace team” and ideally will include at least two events per month, which could be virtual or in-person. All employees will have access to co-working spaces if they want. There hasn’t been a decision made on which brand of co-working space (i.e. WeWork) will be utilized. “No matter where you live if you want to go out of your house and work in peace and quiet, separate to your home then we will give anyone that wants one access to a co-working space,” Baxter said. “But what we're not doing is creating branded Huge co-working spaces. It's an availability option for people on an individual basis. Now, of course, if you all live in Austin and you've all got WeWork memberships, you can all meet up at WeWork and do whatever you want to do.” Huge’s office decisions are the latest example of the agency changing its work model. Six months ago, Huge launched a “New World Working” program which included initiatives such as requiring employees to take at least 10 days off a year, as well as several "Huge Holidays" throughout the year when the whole agency takes off. “There is an undeniable reality in the market about where people are at and what people are looking for,” Baxter said. “People are just not willing to sacrifice the balance that they've been able to achieve working from home and the commuting time that they've been able to cut from working from home. I think the companies that blindly force their talent to adopt those old practices again are going to really struggle and are going to find themselves out in the cold a little bit with those employees." Don’t miss the latest news. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters here.

Why Huge is swapping many of its physical offices for experiences and co-working spaces

Featured Stories