What’s the Right Answer to In-Housing in a Post Pandemic World?

As physicist Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change,” and right now that mindset feels like it has real currency for our industry.

Proximity, speed, and better understanding of a brand’s tone of voice and approach to the guaranteed availability of resource are all benefits of in-housing that have been widely touted by its advocates. However, the transformative changes technology brought in during the pandemic - in terms of access to talent anywhere, and remote/hybrid working – now poses the post-pandemic question, is it time to change the approach to delivering an in-house solution for clients?

To answer that question, let’s look at the potential mid to long term challenges the conventional approach to in-housing outlined above throws up.

Regardless of whether clients employ people directly, or appoint an agency to do it on their behalf, if clients want people present in their offices, they need a high quality talent pool to draw upon within their geographic catchment. 

This expectation is fine if their business is located in, or around, one of the major centres for digital, creative and media. It becomes a little harder if they are located in an area without a creative industry heritage, economy or talent infrastructure. Even within a hybrid working model this problem does not go away, because the expectation that people will be physically present at the office at some point in the working week prevents a widening of the talent pool.

This poses the question - if creative talent is everywhere in this post pandemic world, why restrict yourself to a geographic catchment driven by a desire to have people sitting in your offices two days a week?

If clients can solve the talent paradox, they are then confronted by the challenge of keeping their team’s skills up to standard. That’s an easier solve if clients have an agency providing in-house talent because training and development can form part of their SLA. However, if clients have employed their in-house team directly, the burden falls on them, and let’s face it, training and continual reskilling of creative industry people might not be their core business competence.

With the current talent shortages in key skill areas across the industry, the issue around training and development is sitting on the top of the wish list of many would be employees.

With some companies opting for a presence that is “strongly encouraged” on certain days of the week, and others fully embracing predominant remote working, it begs the question why do you actually need designers, creatives etc actually sitting at desks in a client’s office? 

If the client isn’t in the office five days a week, why should the in-house team be there? The lack of client presence defeats the proximity of talent argument that was often touted as one of the benefits of in-housing.

This one is a multi-layered challenge. 

Firstly, companies already invested in tech solutions to support in-housing; from workflow management to asset management solutions and creative software, have to continue investing to remain best in class. Aside from the initial investment, they must keep their staff fully trained on latest releases and ensure their tech continues to be fit for purpose. This is a major undertaking, and one for which many corporate IT departments may not be geared for in the long term.

The second layer of the technology paradox is the consequence of the pandemic and remote working. If necessity is the mother of invention, the pandemic powered connectivity to the point that where someone was based geographically became an irrelevance. So long as they had the skills, a solid broadband connection, and were prepared to show up for work at the time zone a client was operating in, location became irrelevant. 

With the current talent crunch, capitalising on the global idea of talent being everywhere seems like a sensible approach. From an economic stand-point it allows you to utilise rates and cost bases of different countries and economies to provide a more cost effective solution.

So against this complex and varied backdrop, we must evolve our thinking to adapt to these changing circumstances in a way that offers clients the benefits of the in-house solution they want, while at the same time making it fit for a post pandemic world.

Bringing these threads together leads to one logical place that we have chosen to call lite-housing. Instead of locating your team - creatives, designers etc - on a client’s premises (even on a hybrid basis), agencies should look to locate a core team that manages the work and interacts with the client. This small team can be present in the client’s offices. They can align with the client’s hybrid schedule. 

This team would be made up of project management people and you may choose to have a very small cohort of designers, video editors etc as part of that in-house resource to manage super-fast turnaround briefs. Presence and proximity can be a real advantage when the CEO wants their Investor presentation edesigning with less than 24 hour’s notice.

However, the whole team of creative and design resources need not, and indeed should not, be in the client’s offices. A smarter way to approach clients’ needs is to use remote talent, whether they are located in an agency’s studios around the world or as a geographically dispersed team working remotely the whole time. Connecting them with technology to allow work to flow from the client facing project management teams means that regardless of the solution clients choose to take, agency teams can adapt. 

Whatever shape a client’s chosen in-housing solution takes, Albert Einstein’s quote still rings true because the measure of intelligence truly is the ability to change in this fast moving and increasingly uncertain world.