William Sargent is keen to talk about a challenge facing him and Framestore, the animation, visual effects and creative production company he co-founded in London in 1986, and chairs today having recently stepped back as chief executive.

The Dubliner’s multi Oscar-winning firm employs over 6,000 people in 11 cities around the world, but he’s expecting to spend at least another year trying to figure out its hybrid working policy, and what that will mean for reconfiguring its offices.

The last time we met was last September one morning at a coffee shop and bakery near where he lives in north London.

It was for a general chat and catch-up after the lockdowns, during which we discussed Covid, British politics, and various business news at the time. He also recalled some of his time working in the Treasury in London, and the several occasions when he met Jonathan Ive, the former design chief at Apple.

Back travelling again, he is on a call from the company’s Los Angeles office when we speak on a Saturday night, so he’s eight hours behind me, but has stepped out of a screening to talk.

Buy and build

Sargent also has a new partner in leading the business, however. In November 2020, amidst the pandemic, Framestore merged with US post-production business Company 3, with the new enlarged company boasting annual revenues of $700 million.

The move took place after financiers at London private equity firm Aleph Capital and New York-based Crestview Partners offered the Irishman equity financing for a buy and build acquisition strategy.

The merged entity is now working towards annual revenues of $1 billion he says, as he and Stefan Sonnenfeld, Company 3’s founder and CEO, continue to build, with a shared vision against the background of their respective companies’ success, amidst further consolidation that is likely to be seen in their sector.

At the same time, they’re trying to solve the conundrum of keeping their staff – some of the most sought after in the world of TV and movie production – happy in how and where they work, while somehow maintaining a shared company culture and vision.

“Surveys of the workforce over the past 18 months found that a consistent majority wanted to work from home two or three days a week, and the same in the office. It was clear that they didn’t want to be full time in either location,” Sargent explains.

“It fell across the lines you’d expect. People with young kids had a preference for being at home. But students and graduates wanted to be in the office full time.

“We committed to a hybrid structure, and we’ve done our best, but the way we’ve done it is that we’ve delegated the decision-making responsibility about exactly how it works down to the team level. So, it’s gone down to the leaders in each city office, who have then delegated to the teams there.

“We said: ‘You’re the guys on the ground. You know what’s needed. But the challenge now seems to be that a majority of people sort of want to be told that they can work from home, but choose when they come into the office. So, the hybrid model has its challenges. About 60 per cent of the staff in our London headquarters are dividing their time between WFH and the office.”

On a basic level, staff who wanted to work from home during the past two years were provided with the necessary technology to do so. “It was expensive, at $4 million, and the technology and systems were buggy, so there was all that to contend with.”

The future of the office

Sargent took part in a 45-minute talk organised by the Wall Street Journal on this subject, where Airbnb boss Brian Chesky explained his approach.

“I got to hear his whole thought process, and it was similar to mine in many ways. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a 10-person or a 10,000-person business, we’re all still dealing with this challenge, and I imagine many of us are having similar thought processes,” the Irishman says.

“I’m a huge admirer of his thinking, particularly around the idea of interventions, where the status quo is that you’re doing your job from home. However, the company will bring its staff together, but not necessarily in the office. It might be a convention centre, or somewhere. It might be one week in every 12.

“It will be for a specific purpose. There might be 50 people in a room for some software training. There will be some teaching, some strategising about the software, and then an opportunity to provide feedback for our software people

“He is saying that the property costs will be lower. But in their place will be travel and perhaps accommodation costs and those of staging these interventions. On one hand, I’m drifting in that direction. I’m thinking that’s where we might end up.

“On the other hand, I have another thesis that over time, the inclination to drift back to the office will be greater. People might start to again increasingly appreciate the high energy levels that you can find when you’re collaborating in the office and taking on challenges.

“At the same time, the background to all of this is that we’re facing a world with higher inflation and other associated factors. Commuting, electricity, and grocery bills are higher.

“The cost of commuting can be a significant portion of people’s monthly costs. Or if they’re living further away from the office because of the cheaper rents there, there’s a cost in time with their loved ones to people of the longer commute. All of this places significant pressure on our colleagues, and it is top of our agenda at the moment.

“Chesky also pointed to the impact all of this is going to have on designing our offices. If we were designing our London headquarters now, which we did in 2018, the layout would be different. We wouldn’t have open plan areas, nor a reception area. We might not have a café area either.

“As a company, we decided that this year would be a trial period. My assumptions have changed roughly every six months since mid-2020. I think we’ll be going through 2023 still in a fluid situation, and I can see it will take another 12 months at the very least before we get some clarity.

“I’m constantly pulling and pushing, thinking and asking, trying to learn as much as I can and figure this out. I like this idea of interventions, and of making sure that when we gather people together, it’s meaningful.

“I don’t know yet what the reconfiguration of our HQ is going to look like. We certainly don’t have any 50-person spaces. I’m going to keep fine tuning, and trying different ideas.

“The obvious negatives of WFH is that there’s less of a barrier between work and home. With the office it was a physical separation. You had a commute, and there was a mental and visual barrier as well as the physical one.

“There’s the question of respecting people’s need for boundaries and flexibility. You might need to talk to a colleague about a time sensitive issue. But they might be looking after their kids or using their lunchtime to go out for a walk.

“It was clearly more difficult for the junior staff to learn from the senior ones. It was harder for staff to bond with each other through work and collaboration.

“The company and the work became very much a digital experience over Teams or Zoom, rather than a physical one, and that changed people’s ideas of what a company is. How do you build shared values? There’s a whole suite of behaviours to deal with. Bullying online is still bullying, but a different form of it.”

Retaining staff

Has Framestore lost any of its staff because it hasn’t promised its staff will be able to WFH full-time?

“We have a shortage of talent in this industry, so of course, the answer is yes. We didn’t promise full time WFH, and went down the hybrid working path. We do believe there needs to be a physical connection to the company,” he said.

“For staff who are managers and producers, it’s a challenge for them to be on Zoom calls all day, because there’s an intensity of them that just isn’t there meeting in person. So there’s a wellbeing issue there.

“My friend Alex Mahon, CEO of Channel 4 in the UK, they have their teams all do their Zoom calls on a Friday. They also insist lunchtimes are Zoom-free. I like the idea of a Zoom-free basis.”

The Dubliner is hoping to gain further insight soon at a meeting with Thomas Heatherwick, a London-based co-designer of Google’s newest offices in London’s King’s Cross and Bay View in California, who he recently connected with.

“The problem for a multinational, multi-timezone company is that it’s more difficult to do the Zoom-free idea. We have offices located between GMT-8 and GMT+9,” Sargent reflects.

A typical Framestore production office might have accommodated 16 staff, but three or six of them might need to be on Zoom calls, Sargent explains.

“So they’re speaking out loud, and that impacts the other people’s work and concentration. So the office layout needs more rooms for people to go and do those calls,” he says.

“In my layout, I had two-person, three-person, six-person, eight-person, and 10-person rooms, with 14 review rooms. I thought I was ahead of the curve in 2018. But it’s clear now that I didn’t go far enough.

“We’re going to keep the office space we’ve got until we see what the reconfigured office is going to look like.

“What I can say for definite is that we won’t take on more space. We expect to grow over the next five years. Our markets are growing, and we intend to grow with them. But I’m clear that we won’t need any more space,” the former civil servant, who at one stage worked with New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who he now counts as a good friend, in the days of Gordon Brown’s Treasury.

Sourcing talent

Sonnenfeld is as equally well-connected as Sargent. He worked closely with George Clooney on his sci-fi epic The Midnight Sky, for which Framestore was on the Best Visual Effects Oscars shortlist for producing 459 shots for the film.

“We had to shoot a pregnant astronaut floating in space. Framestore did a brilliant job with all of it,” Clooney said of the work. He had previously starred in Gravity, for which Framestore won an Oscar in the above category.

The standout sequence, which Clooney conceived in The Midnight Sky was “a visual tour de force with the blood dancing around almost like an alien creature,” Indiewire journalist Bill Desowitz wrote, adding that Framestore visual effects staff and the US actor-director together took inspiration from NASA video footage of ink dancing around in zero-gravity aboard the International Space Station.

The opportunity to do such work doesn’t come easily. The careers section of Framestore’s website lists dozens of job vacancies, with a recruitment team of 22 staff battling to find the best talent.

Sargent, a Trinity College business and law graduate, maintains that despite losing some staff, the challenge of how the company will work in the future hasn’t materially impacted the firm’s growth plans. “It’s an operational item that needs dealing with,” he says matter of factly.

The issue of staff wanting WFH to be promised must have been a source of conflict at times though? “How our model will work is a source of constant dialogue,” he says, neatly side-stepping the question.

There must have been impacts on productivity and creativity during the past two years? He had also previously told me of up to half a dozen meetings cancelled every week because someone was off with Covid.

He himself had asymptomatic Covid in 2021, and had only realised he had it after doing an antigen test before a meeting.

“Productivity is difficult to be precise about, because it varies across the skill sets in what we do, circumstances of people’s home set-up, and how people are feeling in terms of their wellbeing.

“Clearly, building and maintaining people’s mental health and resilience is very different when people aren’t in the office.”

What are his and Sonnenfeld’s fears if they get it wrong? “I hope we’re effective at constantly reviewing what is working and what isn’t, and adapting to that. The fear is that we get it wrong without realising it.

“Our rivals and ourselves are on the same journey. From what I hear on the industry grapevine, some are trying variations of what we are trying, and they too are equally unsure about the endgame.”

The merger took place in the midst of one of the waves of Covid, and there must have been some standout moments then and during the time leading up to that? I ask.

He deftly bats the substance of the question away, concluding our call: “That’s perhaps a subject for another day. I’m happy with the progress we’ve made since then. Our two world class teams have prospered in the recovery from the depths of the pandemic.”