For many Americans with office jobs, commutes now consist of the time it takes to get from your bed to your living room. As companies shift rapidly to continue operations while employees are at-home, some question how these new policies and procedures may evolve after the pandemic. Host of Full Disclosure, Roben Farzad, talks with Kelly O'Keefe and Matt Williams of Brand Federation to discuss both potential long and short term changes with the white-collar work environment.
Episode Excerpt
The following excerpt was edited for clarity. [29:07]
Kelly O’Keefe: There are very niche little categories that no ad agency is ever going to be able to have on staff. Like naming experts, people who do analytics on social media etc. If you're a client, it's hard to find people who do some of this work.
Roben Farzad: How important is FaceTime actual FaceTime, I'm not talking about the iPhone, iPad app right now, with these big payable accounts?
O’Keefe: Well, here's a really cool thing, Roben, long before this crisis made us all introverts, we saw that our clients were starting to migrate more and more toward holding zoom meetings instead of putting people on planes, to working with remote software that can help them manage their projects and manage the details in the data at a distance. So our whole business has been built on a remote workforce, to begin with, and it's becoming more and more remote. I think one of the things we're all going to see as a society, when things get back to normal, if they get back to normal and I'm an optimist, so I'll say when. I think a lot of us will still be working this way. Some people are actually saying, “hey, this is not bad. I'm doing zoom meetings five times a day with clients and colleagues from my living room. It's not too bad.” Now, I'm not suggesting there isn't a place for that face to face meeting, and we certainly have had them, especially when we're working on significant projects and we need to really get with people. But I will say that we're all seeing that the technology is getting better and better at us being able to work remotely. And this broadcast is an example of that, couldn't be done this way years ago. Now, these things are relatively routine.
