Now that people are putting their masks aside, company leaders are faced with a litany of operational and cultural questions about when and how to return to the office. Hanson Bridgett — a full-service, midsize law firm in California — began working on all that (and more) about 14 months before the pandemic began. The firm’s leadership didn’t foresee the crisis, but starting in 2018, they had been looking to reduce fixed costs and spend the savings in creative ways to become more competitive. The author presents four lessons from the firm’s successful shift to remote and hybrid work. As Hanson Bridgett has demonstrated, announcing a hybrid work policy does not mean immediate implementation. They’ll patiently work out the details, communicate carefully, achieve alignment, and then implement. Midsize companies would be well advised to do the same.
Now that businesses are trying to figure out how they’re going to operate in a post-pandemic world, company leaders are faced with a litany of operational and cultural questions. Do we bring everyone back to the office? How do we continue supporting people and work processes remotely? Can we develop a hybrid office-work-from-anywhere-anytime system, with its attendant complexities, costs, and potential cultural friction? Can we maintain a healthy company culture at a distance? A company I used to work with, Hanson Bridgett — a full-service, midsize law firm in California — began working on all that (and more) about 14 months before the pandemic began.
The firm planned for a 33% reduction in space in their San Francisco main office and piloted tests to see how it would go. Consequently, by the time they sent their employees home due to Covid-19 on March 13, 2020, Hanson Bridgett experienced “literally zero interruptions to any of our systems or to any of our people,” says the firm’s managing partner, Kristina Lawson. “Every single person picked up their stuff and walked out the door. Everyone just kept working. And we were fully remote on March 16.”
Hanson Bridgett’s leadership didn’t foresee the crisis, but they had been looking to reduce fixed costs and spend the savings in creative ways to become more competitive. Now that people are putting their masks aside, the firm already has answers to many of the questions businesses are confronting.
What Hanson Bridgett Did — and Why
In January 2018, Hanson Bridgett’s San Francisco headquarters occupied three floors at 425 Market Street. The lease on that space cost the firm $1.6 million per floor per year. Looking to free up budget, David Longinotti, then head of the firm’s real estate and construction section, began examining triggers in the company’s lease, including a negotiated option to give up one of the firm’s three floors. He formed a working group that called themselves “the breakout artists,” a cross-section of senior partners, new associates, and everyone in between in the firm’s real estate practice, to pilot various working modalities. Some lawyers would share offices with others, rotating office time with work-from-home time. Others would work mainly from home, reserving desks at the office (hoteling) when they felt they needed them.
According to Lawson, there was “significant cultural resistance” to the idea that people would be allowed to work at home full-time. But the idea that giving up the floor would be a significant cost saving and that that money could be used to attract and retain younger associates by increasing the firm’s ability to pay them — thereby making this midsize firm more competitive with larger ones — eventually won over the partners.
The pilot ran for six months, and the firm discovered that, based on billable hours, productivity actually rose. (Although it’s not definitive, the commuting hours saved are believed to have contributed to the increase.)
Given those results, the pilot moved to its second stage, now led by Lawson, who had succeeded Longinotti. Lawson disseminated the results of the first pilot across the firm, letting her people know that it was considered a success, and, focusing on the whole San Francisco office, asked who wanted to work in the office, who was interested in a desk-sharing arrangement, and who would be happy working exclusively from home. (Remember: This was before the pandemic made remote work a necessity.)
The responses to that survey showed the discomfort some employees felt at the idea of not having a desk to call their own, as well as their anxiety that by not being physically present in the office, their influence might wane and their careers might suffer. There was also some suspicion that people working from home would not be pulling their weight. Yet the consensus was ultimately that this was the right thing to do for most employees and the firm. To mitigate any discomfort, leaders held regular town hall meetings and provided clear and transparent communication.
In January 2019, Hanson Bridgett exercised its option to vacate the 24th floor and began mapping a reconfigured office on two floors while restoring the vacated floor to its pre-occupied condition (as required by the lease). The cost of that restoration, plus the office reconfiguration, totaled about $5 million, delivering an approximately two-and-a-half-year payback on the office consolidation. (The firm took on debt to finance the move.)
During the construction, as everyone was moved off the 24th floor, some people had to switch offices two or three times. Many attorneys who were not involved in the initial pilot volunteered to work from home rather than squeeze themselves into temporary workspaces, discovering that they liked the flexibility remote work afforded. This encouraged Hanson Bridgett to let everyone — not just lawyers, but support staff, too — enjoy that flexibility.
Among other things, this meant the company needed to invest in IT. The firm ditched old desktops in favor of laptops. They beefed up their virtual private networks (VPNs) and established new vendor relationships to support working from home. They purchased and implemented new software to improve the firm’s hoteling system. Everything that could be digitized was digitized, and everything that could be moved to the cloud was moved.
At the same time, Lawson and her colleagues attacked the problem of maintaining the firm’s culture through the transition. One strategy was to hold regular offsites to bring people together. Lawson held an event at her home. The firm held a series of events at wineries in the area.
The firm designed its hoteling system to give first priority to “pods”: work groups that would arrange to be in the office at the same time, both to work and to connect. For example, the real estate group reserved Tuesdays and Thursdays at the office, with a team lunch. As it evolved, the group began socializing after hours.
By January 31, 2020, after two years of planning and work, the 24th floor at 425 Market Street was officially gone. A month-and-a-half later, the pandemic sent everyone at Hanson Bridgett home.
Lessons Learned
It was sheer luck that Hanson Bridgett began their pilot to reduce their office space when they did, giving them time to ready themselves for the demands of the pandemic. But the intentionality of their effort — and what they learned — reveals four lessons for midsize firms working to understand both how to reintroduce workers to the workplace after over a year of enforced absence, and how to optimize a new work paradigm.
Prioritize your culture. Going from a totally remote or totally office-centric workplace to a hybrid arrangement is a major culture shock. There will be turbulence. People working from home may feel left out. In-office workers may suspect their colleagues aren’t putting in a full day’s work and grow resentful. New employees may struggle to connect with new colleagues they may never meet.
Consequently, leaders must give a lot of thought to how they’ll create bonds between people and maintain and shape the company’s culture. This will require managers to be active, involved, and creative. They must reach out and create ways for people to get together, seizing opportunities for in-person interaction whenever possible, as they did at Hanson Bridgett.
Lastly, any vestige of suspicion that people not present in the office can’t be hard at work must be erased. Employees and managers will have to learn how to build trust through meeting objectives, not the sight of someone sitting in front of a screen.
Take care of your IT. Lawson considers a significant contributor to the pilot’s success to have been the firm’s effort to ramp up its IT game to equip everyone to work dynamically. Specifically, the firm’s hoteling system was kludgy, and improving it allowed lawyers to feel more comfortable with not having an assistant at hand. “Our IT people just went above and beyond in terms of their planning and the deployment of solutions,” Lawson says.
Be planful. Today, over a year after people had to leave the office, few are sure what they really want. Some people fell in love with working at home. Some missed the office. What will inevitably emerge will be a mix, but few have actually lived that mix. Now is the time to experiment with various arrangements, making sure to consider the financial costs of both giving up space (including the common tenant improvements required) and improving IT systems, as well as the overall time and costs of change management.
Articulate metrics and business goals. Figuring out how and in what way to return to the office is something every company is going to have to do. But how will you determine that you’ve done it well? Useful metrics might include turnover, measured a year after everyone has settled back into their jobs. Another might be productivity, as was the case in the Hanson Bridgett pilot, or an increased ability to retain and hire talent through saving money on rent and facility maintenance. Whatever metrics seem most appropriate for your business, it’s not a good idea to embark on significant change without a way to gauge success.
Leaders at Hanson Bridgett believe work-location preferences will continue to change as we emerge from Covid-19. By June 30, they’ll be ready to run their offices at 100% capacity on a volunteer basis. They’ve just announced the next phase, called the “agile workforce initiative,” intended to allow their employees to work any time at any location, with firm-approved parameters. All five office locations throughout California will have shared office space for employees who primarily work remotely. For employees who wish to work mostly in the office, the firm will provide them with their own, dedicated workspaces. As Hanson Bridgett has demonstrated already, announcing such a policy does not mean immediate implementation. They’ll patiently work out the details, communicate carefully, achieve alignment, and then implement. Midsize companies would be well advised to do the same.
Editor’s Note, 6/24: This piece has been updated to correct the details of Hanson Bridgett’s location and rent.