Veteran advisor shares how new work setup, complete with Zoom rooms and a bullpen, has changed the dynamic for his team
In the years following the COVID pandemic, countless advisory practices have had to re-envision the way they work.
With remote work setups no longer considered out-of-the-box, wealth firms and advisor-owners have experimented with working from anywhere, fully returning to the office, and some combination of the two to hopefully strike the right balance between efficiency and work-life balance.
For Rob McClelland, senior financial advisor with The McClelland Financial Group at Assante Capital Management Ltd., it’s been a challenging process that’s resulted in the transformation of the workspace at his Ontario-based practice.
“We’ve stopped assigning individual offices to individual advisors,” McClelland explains. “Now we have different types of offices for all the advisors to use.”
Today, their workspace includes four offices for meetings. Two of those are in-office meeting spaces for advisors to welcome clients in the flesh. To add a touch of personalization, they’ve added digital photo frames with USB slots, where advisors can plug and play USB drives to show pictures of their families.
The other spaces, meanwhile, are “Zoom rooms” optimized for one-on-one calls between clients and advisors.
“They’re literally telephone booths for doing virtual calls,” McClelland says. “If you just had a quick question for the client, you could just use a Zoom room.”
When the advisors aren’t in client meetings in the office, they work at the “bullpen.” That shared space, which used to be the boardroom, now contains seven desks that can be set to stand-up or sit-down configurations, depending on the individual advisor’s preference.
“It’s a great environment to share ideas and discuss clients,” McClelland says. “Along with getting people out of their own offices, I think it’s really helped us to become a more cohesive group of advisors.
“We haven’t seen any complaints. If anything, the more senior advisors actually enjoy the bullpen,” he says. “Before, we’d be in our own rooms from nine in the morning to six at night, and just going out to have our lunch. Now we’re moving back and forth between rooms, and I think it’s a better dynamic for the team.”
Like many other practices, the McClelland Financial Group was quick to transition to a 100% remote work setup during the COVID pandemic crisis of 2020. In 2021, they moved to a hybrid schedule with people spending two days a week in the office; last year, that was ramped up to four.
Recognizing the benefits of remote setups in promoting work-life balance, many wealth firms have restructured to allow advisors to spend part of their week working from home. But with the threat of COVID-19 largely in the rearview, McClelland says their practice is now transitioning back to a full five-day workweek.
“We were just not functioning well with people not being in the office,” he says. “Every time I would be looking for a person, it would be their day to not be in.”
With all hands on deck, McClelland says he and his business partner can spend their time more productively. If a client meeting ends 15 minutes early, for example, he can use that spare time as an opportunity to connect with different team members on various issues.
“I expect there could be some pushback … I could lose a person over this,” McClelland says. “I definitely think there's some people on my team who could be productive and work from home. But we’re only 20 people, and I’ve got to treat everyone equally.”
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of Assante Capital Management Ltd.
