Parliament: The Village Fell Away. We Built Another One.
People love to call their workplace a family. But families don't have performance reviews. Families don't let you go when the budget tightens. Calling your team a family is a nice sentiment that falls apart the first time you actually have to fire someone.
The more fashionable correction is to call it a team instead. Teams are honest about stakes. Teams win and lose together. But a team is still built around a scoreboard, and I don't think that's deep enough either. A team disbands in the offseason. A team's loyalty runs exactly as deep as the win column.
What we're actually trying to build is a village. A village isn't sentimental like a family, and it isn't transactional like a team. A village is just a community of people who show up for each other's ordinary lives, on purpose, because proximity and repetition make that possible. You don't get fired out of a village, but you also don't get carried by one forever. You get held while you're in it.
I keep coming back to that word, village, because I think it's the missing piece in the entire return-to-office debate. So let's talk about Adam Grant, who just published a piece in the Times that's making the rounds, because I don't think he's wrong, but you know I have a hot take.
What Grant Actually Found
Grant and his co-authors studied executives across the Fortune 500 and found that the strongest predictor of who wants everyone back in the office full time wasn't trust in employees, or love of in-person collaboration. It was narcissism. The bigger the ego (measured, fascinatingly, by things like signature size and photo size in annual reports), the harder the return-to-office mandate.
But here's where I get stuck: a study that explains some bosses' motives is being read as an indictment of all in-person work. And those are not the same claim. (and to be fair he is talking about all five days in office, but of course we lose sight of the nuance)
The Other Piece Nobody's Citing
The same week, the Times also ran a piece built on new research out of Science: remote work has measurably deepened isolation and mental distress in this country, especially for people who live alone. Not a vibe, but a dataset: five national surveys, hundreds of thousands of workers.
So we have one study saying RTO mandates are often about ego, and another saying remote work is making people lonelier and sicker. Both can be true. Neither one tells you what your company should do. They tell you what some leaders are doing wrong, in opposite directions.
This is a sticky issue. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
Why I Still Believe What I Believe
I don't need a study to tell me what I've felt for sixteen years inside of a Hoot office building. The conversation that happens walking back from the kitchen with a coffee is not the same conversation that happens on a scheduled call. The way a junior designer's face changes when she finally says the thing she's been circling for ten minutes, in a room, is not visible on a shared screen. We were not built to spend our days narrating ourselves through a webcam to people we never actually stand next to while managing texts and emails at the same time.
We've written about this more than once, because it keeps proving itself out. We wrote about the Rumble format and what happens when people are forced to disagree in a room instead of a thread. We wrote about opening The Bird House because we'd rather build a building than keep pretending Zoom can hold what a workshop holds. We wrote about Pocket Presence, the small unscheduled minutes that turn into the actual work. We wrote about the workshop model itself, and why we stopped trying to mine a founder's story across six weeks of fragmented calls and started doing it in one focused day, together, phones away.
This is the actual mechanism by which our work gets better, faster, and we've watched it happen enough times to trust it.
The Part Grant's Piece Skips
Here's what I think is missing from the entire RTO conversation, on both sides: nobody's asking what happened to the rest of people's lives that made working from home feel like the only option left.
Most of us don't live near extended family anymore. Fewer of us go to church, or to the kinds of weekly gatherings that used to absorb the logistics of raising kids without anyone having to ask. The village that used to catch your kid at 3pm, or bring a casserole when someone was sick, or just notice when you were drowning, has largely dissolved. Women went to work, and nothing else changed to support that. Childcare didn't get cheaper. Paid leave didn't materialize. The village didn't show up to fill the gap. Somebody still had to be there when the bus dropped off at 3:05, and the office never left room for that.
I don't think the real argument was ever in-person versus remote. It's whether you're building something worth showing up for, and making room for the rest of someone's life while they do.
What We Built Instead
We didn't solve this by sending everyone home. We solved it by redesigning the office around the parts of life that don't fit a 9-to-5.
Core collaboration hours run 9 to 4, Monday through Thursday. That's the window we ask people to protect. We don't schedule meetings on Fridays, on purpose, so there's room for the appointments and errands that only happen during the workday: the doctor, the dentist, the DMV.
We partnered with Windsor Street Montessori so our team gets 50% off childcare, because daycare now costs more than a mortgage in every state in this country, and no amount of ping-pong tables fixes that.
Life Support puts $250 a month back into our team's hands for whatever buys back their time. Not because the money changes their life. Because the time does.
None of this works as well for someone who isn't actually here. The discount on Windsor Street doesn't help if your kid isn't local. The hallway conversation that turns into the breakthrough doesn't happen over Slack. We built a village substitute, and a village only works if people are in it.
Which Brings Me to the Job
We're hiring an Associate Creative Director, in person, in Columbia. We're offering a $5,000 relocation stipend, because we think this place is worth moving for, and because everything I just described only works if you're actually here to use it.
If you've read this far and felt the pull instead of the friction, that pull is the point. We're not asking you to prove your worth by sitting in a chair until 6pm. We're asking you to come build something with us that we genuinely think is better in the room than it is anywhere else.
Some bosses want you back to feed their ego. We want you back because the work is better, and we built a place worth showing up for.
