ScreenCloud and Golden Hippo Embrace Hybrid Work to Optimize Flexibility and Collaboration
Flexibility with regards to one’s schedule is a compelling benefit regardless of where and how you work. In Los Angeles, though, the ability to steer clear of a 9-to-5 can easily save you hours each week — and potentially days worth of idling in traffic each year.
For Casy Alvarado, a sales development representative, ScreenCloud’s hybrid approach to work has all but eliminated the dread of the daily commute.
“The flexible schedule allows me to leave home and travel back from the office when the commute time is the shortest — which in itself is a difficult task in LA,” Alvarado said. “This drastically cuts my travel time. I save an hour and a half each day. It’s definitely a game changer in the workplace.”
Likewise, Jamie Metcalf, a customer support team lead for ScreenCloud, plans his commute around traffic so he can spend more time with his family and his dogs.
“There’s a definite theme here. LA traffic, right?” said Anna Thomas, head of recruitment and onboarding for ScreenCloud. A cloud-based SaaS company, ScreenCloud offers digital signage solutions that help its more than 8500 customers drive sales, productivity and engagement. The company has been an advocate of a hybrid approach to work since its inception in 2015. And a renewed emphasis on flexibility and in-person collaboration in the past few years has, according to Thomas, allowed the company to be both more productive and more amenable to its employees.
“We respect that people work differently and have a variety of preferences depending on their home life, their role, projects they’re working on and peaks of activity across our company cadence,” said Thomas. “We believe that the physical workplace should be a place that is a joy to come to. We invest in bright airy spaces that work for desk-based activity as well as they do for collaboration and creative thinking.”
Prior to 2020, ScreenCloud team members could come and go to the office as they saw fit — sometimes working remotely for weeks on end. Recently, though, the company has redoubled efforts to ensure that its hubs are collaborative workspaces where ScreenClouders can connect with each other and enjoy themselves.
The ScreenCloud team is expected to come into the office two to three times each week, with the focus of those days being collaborative work — planning meetings, trainings, cross-functional sessions and other team tasks. Each week, the company’s departments have a designated in-office day to discuss ongoing projects and plan cross-departmental projects and in-person collaboration time.
“We encourage ScreenClouders to think about the type of work they do in our hubs in comparison to remote working for heads-down asynchronous work and those zero-distractions days,” Thomas said. “We believe this makes for the most productive overall work environment.”
Golden Hippo is an employee-owned vertically integrated e-commerce company that operates a direct-to-consumer marketplace for health, beauty and pet care brands. While headquartered in Woodland Hills, CA, the company’s 1,000-plus employees include many remote workers. With that in mind, Golden Hippo has taken a hybrid approach to work for a number of years.
The key to the company’s approach, according to Tannum Sullivan, employer brand and employee engagement manager, is balancing a culture that privileges in-person collaboration with an emphasis on flexibility.
“We encourage Hippos who are close to our headquarters to come to the office at least once a week,” Sullivan said. “This promotes more of the in-person collaboration and teamwork that many of our projects and initiatives require. It’s a great reason to stop by the office, grab a coffee and snack from our fully-stocked kitchen and have that face-to-face communication we’ve been missing over the last few years.”
In pursuit of that goal, while in the office, team members — or “Hippos” — can also enjoy a number of perks that go beyond lattes and chips.
We treat our employees as professionals. That respect, commitment, loyalty and drive to succeed is what we get in return.”
“Hippos can enjoy our employee-led yoga classes, sit with their peers for a catered lunch in celebration of the month's diversity awareness initiatives and enjoy a team-sponsored happy hour in our game room and employee lounge,” said Sullivan.
Sullivan and the Golden Hippo team enjoy an optimally flexible working environment in which team members ultimately choose the schedule and workplace that works best for them.
“‘Flexible’ is the keyword here,” Sullivan said. “Whatever works best for our Hippos and our teams, whether it's one day a week or five days a week, our office is open to our Hippos for that in-person work environment. We treat our employees as professionals. That respect, commitment, loyalty and drive to succeed is what we get in return.”
Sullivan continued: “Our departments have the autonomy to choose what days work best for them and their teammates. Can’t make it that day? Not a big deal. We’re incredibly flexible and our ultimate goal is that our Hippos are productive, having fun, collaborating — either in-person or through our various virtual options — and hitting goals.”
