How We Work as a Remote Agency in 2022
Over the last two years, many businesses have changed some fundamental aspects of how and where they work. If you’ve ever wondered what it really means for Swash Labs to be a fully remote agency — or just how it might work with any business for which being remote is a good fit — then this blog is for you.
Background
At Swash Labs, we’ve had remote employees for most of the time we’ve been in business. The company was founded in Denton, Texas and is still headquartered there eleven years later, but early on we knew that the nature of our business (creative and strategic work) lent itself particularly well to remote staff. We found this to be true, especially because of the highly collaborative format of how we go about providing marketing and advertising services to our clients, rather than in spite of it.
Because video conferencing has been fairly solid since we started out in 2011, that element of collaborative work has always been fairly straightforward. Everyone learned that this kind of software was in great shape for rapid adoption in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, and platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have only improved in the intervening years.
Collaborative tools (like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Airtable) have joined business infrastructure tools (like CallRail) and project management software (like Teamwork) in a rapid evolution of features and options that make it easier than ever before to have staff all over the world, or more importantly, wherever they’d most like to be. These tools and their respective advancements made it possible for us to shift from having two remote employees to being entirely remote in the space of about a week in March of 2020.
The Advantage of Having Staff All Over America
For a family-owned small business, there’s plenty of charm and advantage to having your whole staff come from a single local geography, and for a while, the majority of us were local to Denton. However, the intervening years have shown us the considerable advantages to having staff located all over the country.
The primary advantage of being a cohesive unit with members living in several different places is the different perspectives we’re all able to bring to the work. In creative work and advertising, perspective is critical both to keeping your work fresh and to understanding how different messages and strategies will work and be received in different geographies by different audiences.
To be blunt: the United States is big and varied and the people who live here are not a monolith. An audience in Boston isn’t going to respond to things the same way an audience in Dallas or Phoenix or Raleigh or Fargo will. Hell, some states (like California and Texas) are big enough that they have what functionally amounts to five or six truly distinct geographical audience zones contained within one state border. Those communities and geographies represent different cultures, traditions, and habits, with varied audiences, behavioral economies, and habits concerning technology and media. In short, different communities respond to different stories and learn about things in different ways and, believe it or not, they buy things differently, too.
By having people on staff living in very different locations with different daily lives and perspectives, we are less likely to end up with a myopic view of the stories we should be telling or the methods we should be using to get those stories in front of people that should care about them.
Being open to hiring people all over the country also gives us a competitive advantage over agencies that only hire locally and, as a result, only have access to a single talent pool. Because we can draw talent from a national pool, we can reliably hire people that are not only a good fit for our culture and mission, but also have broad capabilities, talent, and experience which vary significantly from what we’ve already got on the team.
The Advantage of Having Clients All Over
A broad and varying range of experience allows us to apply what we’ve learned to our core digital advertising and marketing tools to create continual opportunities for improving our work. At Swash Labs, we’ve never focused exclusively on any single vertical or industry, and we’ve done it that way by design.
My operating theory from day one was that we should be very good at being a digital creative and advertising shop, and that we should approach every new client and industry with a beginner’s mind. We know what works in marketing and advertising but we’re never going to know more about a client’s business than they do.
This strategic positioning — not in a market, but within the working relationship itself — means that we can have a truly collaborative operating environment, one in which the things we learn from each other can be actively applied to what we’re doing on both sides, thereby making everyone better and more efficient at the work we do in pursuit of the client’s goals.
This rich experience requires us to be highly adaptive, which also means that there’s not much we haven’t seen. We have an operational and institutional understanding of how to go about our work that is both deep and broad. Functional, tactical, and procedural lessons are learned in running campaigns for regional and national clients all over America. Each client expands our understanding and capabilities for working within their specific industry, and those lessons specific to platforms and audiences and geographies can also be applied in an industry-agnostic way to clients of all sizes in all verticals. Because so many small and subtle things can vary in meaningful ways from market to market, having real and functional experience in running successful campaigns across multiple platforms in multiple geographies is extremely valuable in the 21st century.
Writing the Future of Work and Creativity, Every Day
Since 2011, we’ve been at the forefront of business communication, marketing and advertising, and finding creative solutions to business problems. In the past two years we’ve made the move to being a fully remote agency, and we’ve also shifted to a four day work week. These are big changes but it is in our organizational nature to adapt to and embrace change.
We’ve made these moves for a variety of reasons, ranging from the very practical (going fully remote certainly made sense during a global pandemic, and it’s worked so well we’re keeping it that way) to the forward-thinking futurist take on work in America (the four day work week represents an idea that is both good and timely, and focusing on improving the working lives of your employees is not just the right thing to do, but it is also critical to being competitive as an employer with where the future of work is headed).
The nature of work in America is changing radically now, but not in unpredictable ways. The basic underpinnings of corporate culture in America are shifting — whether American businesses want them to or not — and while we’re mostly concerned with writing the future for ourselves and our clients on a daily basis, we are once again at the forefront of where things are going by embracing not only remote work but also other changes as they arrive.
Benefits to Employees
And speaking of those other changes to work in modern America — there are distinct benefits to employees in being a fully remote agency. The main benefit is that there’s no commute, which makes other changes like shifting to a four day work week even more impactful. According to a 2021 Census Bureau report, the daily commute time for the average American worker is right around 55 minutes per day; if a worker commutes using mass transit, the daily average time jumps to 93 minutes.
This means that working at a fully remote job and having no commute saves the average American worker five uncompensated hours per week, or 260 hours a year. That’s almost 11 days! For mass transit commuters, the average commute eats almost 17 days per year. Obviously, if your focus is on improving the working lives of your employees and it makes sense for your company to be fully remote, this is a good way to give back a significant amount of time that would otherwise be unproductively lost. And if, like us, you then institute a four day, 32 hour work week, you’ll be giving the average American employee what amounts to 28 full days of time. That’s almost a month, and that kind of extra time in a working year can really and truly change someone’s life for the better.
Conclusion
In our case, working remotely kept us safe during COVID, increased our capabilities, improved our working lives, and made it possible for us to do some things we might not have otherwise even attempted, like when the CEO and Director of Operations moved a thousand miles north to Minneapolis and established a satellite office in preparation for aggressive expansion into the American Midwest. (You can read more about that here!)
Not every business can be fully remote, and for some kinds of businesses not even a hybrid model makes sense. However, for many American businesses, being fully remote is not only plausible but is likely to carry significant, immediate benefits for both employer and employee.
