In April, Jellyvision moved its headquarters to TeamWorking by TechNexus, Chicago’s longest-running tech hub located at the Civic Opera Building.
For Jellyvision, a well-known Chicago software firm that helps organizations and their team members untangle the complicated web of employee benefits, the Covid pandemic shifted the way the company thought about office space. No longer did Jellyvision need a space for its hundreds of employees to work five days a week. It needed a flexible, dynamic, and purpose-built office to accommodate a company that’s fully embraced hybrid work.
With half of Jellyvision’s nearly 300-person team now located outside of Illinois, and local employees producing quality work remotely, the company opted against a full return-to-office mandate that many firms have turned to.
We spoke with Jellyvision CEO Amanda Lannert about what her company was looking for in a new office, where full return-to-office mandates fail, and what’s next in Jellyvision’s mission to simplify employee benefits.
What was it about TeamWorking that was attractive to your team? What was it about the space that worked for Jellyvision?
For us, it was absolutely about flexibility. We came from a large bespoke, off-the-beaten-path office that had been very important to our identity, that we could no longer woo people back to for any reason at scale. And it was lonesome to have only six people in a full office that could seat 300 on any given day. So we said, we're not going to do a return-to-office mandate. We're not investing in office space and forcing people to use it.
Our mission about office space is flexible first. That doesn't mean remote only. It means flexible. And when it comes to office space, we said, “it's purpose, not presence." There are a small number of people who desperately want to leave their house, put on pants, and get a change of scenery or silence or focus or boundaries. And we have desks for them. But now at TeamWorking we have overflow so that when teams, departments, even the whole company wants to get together, we have these wonderful amenities to host them in a really easy-to-get-to location.
The Bevi and the soda machine, those don't hurt either, but it really is purpose not presence. And our purpose is to serve a very small number of people who want a desk that isn't in their home, to allow for easy collaboration and planning meetings for small groups of people, and then to provide a launchpad for the entire company to get together and break off as needed once or twice a year.
What we got and didn't expect, though, was how often I bump into somebody I know. It's never boring to turn a corner and see someone you know who doesn't work at your company. It does feel like I can have serendipitous encounters. It's just so delightful to bump into somebody who's just there working and then you get to have a little chat on the way back from coffee or whatever. So for us, work has changed. It is now completely done wherever people want to be. Just every now and then you want to get together, make some noise, have some socialization, and TeamWorking is perfect for that.
I love the idea of purpose over presence. What else defines purpose for Jellyvision?
The true North Star is a mission statement of “be helpful,” and that doesn't mean be present. It means get your work done and hit a quality and quantity bar that is set by your manager, but how, when, and where you do it shouldn't be part of the purpose. There should be implicit trust. We really try to give as much autonomy as possible.
And then the whole getting together part—do we mandate getting together because some things can only be done in person? Not really. We really encourage people to get together because employees aren't loyal to companies; people are loyal to people. And it's very important to us that coworkers get together to, of all things, not work. To spend time hanging out, having coffee, having lunch, catching up. Zoom happy hours are dead for good reason. They're awful. They're just awful. We'd rather say, one day come down just for two hours. Co-work, get lunch, go home. We have such amazing people. If we have a chance for those amazing people to meet other amazing people, they'll like their jobs more. They'll be more inspired to stretch and push. The best part of Jellyvision is, was and always will be our people. And so getting to show them off and creating opportunities for them to bump into each other is our retention strategy more than anything. Interesting work helps, but the people are what really makes it go from being a job to a career.
So many companies had return-to-office mandates — five days a week in an office. Big companies to small startups. Why was that not the right approach for Jellyvision?
Well, it's because the work got done not that way. People's lives changed. They got comfortable and you got that time back. But the work still kept getting done.
I really believe if you treat people like children, they will act like children, which is why you hear so many return-to-office stories of people literally commuting in to scan in and then ghost for the rest of the day. Those are normal, hardworking, good people that don't appreciate being mistrusted to get stuff done. It just feels very juvenile and mistrusting in nature. I don't have a good reason to say that work has to be done with bench style seating with everybody hearing everybody. I don't believe that was ever the best way to get work done. It's just what everybody did so we didn't question it.
How are you finding your employees utilizing the TeamWorking space? Are people in the office a couple days a week, are there set schedules?
Almost nobody is in five days a week. There are a couple people, but it's more like teams will get together. Work from work Wednesdays for one team, work from work Thursdays for account management. There are teams who want the socialization where they agree that they will work in the office on that day. And the best part of the space is it's really easy to be in the fray or to step aside and get silence if you need a call or a Zoom or things like that.
But when they're together, I think that the priority isn't productivity. It's socialization. And because it's once a week or twice a week, great. Share war stories. Talk about what you're working on. Teach people how you're approaching things. If you've got a good hack, share it. You wasted a bunch of time? Share it. I don't think it's ever a good idea to telegraph in any policy “I don't trust you,” and I feel that's what return-to-office mandates have done, particularly because so many companies did really well during the pandemic. Record corporate profits in 2022 with everybody working from home — you can't tell me you didn't do well.
You touched on the community element of the TeamWorking space. Bumping into executives that you know and are friendly with and have relationships with. Is there an additional benefit of being able to talk shop and share war stories with other business leaders?
Yeah, the most important thing is just resilience. Tenure can beget value. Consistency can beget value. Having patterns and war stories and recognition can create value. So that's the most important thing. The second is, you can get time-saving advice about vendors or places or strategies or things. You don't have to have to make every mistake yourself. You don't have to find every great discovery yourself. Having peers, particularly outside of your business, but still in a kind of a club where you've got each other's backs, that's the best of all worlds. There's some sense of belonging that people will really tell you the truth, but it's not people staring at the same problems. It’s people staring at different problems, which can create more universal, creative problem solving.
I want to talk about Jellyvision a little bit. You guys recently launched a new tool to help HR teams with managing leave. Why was that an important product and an extension for your benefits platform?
Well, to be really honest, it's not because more Gen Z and Millennials are having babies or that people need more mental health leaves. There has been a trend of de-federalization. The government used to say, you have to observe FMLA. And then they're like, "No, we're gonna leave it up to the states.” That means states are allowed to create 50 different rules for FMLA. And then they're like, let's create more complex needs. So now as an employer, we have employees in more than 15 states. We have to be aware of all those different roles, and we're a small business. There's a big trend where benefits are getting more expensive and never easier. But both of those things are true. Everything gets more expensive and everything gets more complex. So we did it to help employers with de-federalization of rules. But we built Medicare to help my mom. Everything we've done in the employer space, we're now doing in any beneficiary space because the world is finally ready for really great digital tools that hold your hands, so you don't have to talk to some predatory salesperson on the phone. There's a better way to do this than in phone calls or meetings in church basements, and so we're building that. We're using all kinds of large language models for new tooling for better ways of doing things. I keep saying UX is dead. Long live the natural conversation and natural language conversation between you and a robot. To me, that's the future of UX.
What’s next for Jellyvision? What's something that you're excited about over the next year?
We're building a whole new platform that is going to wildly expand our capabilities in the employer market. And we are building an end-to-end Medicare solution, where someone who is 65 or older or someone who is supporting someone 65 and older, can come in, figure out what Medicare is, find a plan, enroll in a plan, and be supported year round by Jellyvision. It's a totally different business model for us, and I'm really excited, because then maybe I'll get my mom off my back.
Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Image credit: Amanda Lannert/Jellyvision