Originally published October 2020 during the COVID return-to-office debate. Rewritten June 2026 as a five-year retrospective on how the office decision played out for PR firms.
In late 2020, PR firm leaders were making one of the most consequential decisions in modern agency history: full remote, full in-office, or hybrid. Six years on, the structural answer is clear — and the firms that chose right are operating from substantial cost and talent advantages over the firms that didn't.
The 2020 conversation. The 2026 retrospective.
The 2020 positions
John Lacy, president and COO of Idea Grove, the Dallas-based high-tech PR firm, reopened the firm's offices in June 2020 under Governor Abbott's reopening guidance. Lacy described a 60% in-office / 40% remote pre-pandemic structure that the firm largely returned to. His reasoning: cultural cohesion, idea velocity, and the structural value of in-person creative collaboration. "We know, culturally, we are better when we are working in close proximity."
Jonathon Narvey, founder of Mind Meld PR Inc., took the opposite position. Mind Meld had operated out of shared office space pre-pandemic. Narvey reported that the firm shifted permanently to remote operations, saving rent costs while preserving productivity. He flagged the tradeoff explicitly: "the camaraderie over the water cooler... that's gone. It is a tradeoff. And it's not a tradeoff every PR agency should make."
What actually happened across 2020-2026
The PR firm office story sorted itself into three structural patterns.
Pattern 1: Permanent fully-remote. Firms that committed early to fully remote — including Mind Meld and a substantial cohort of boutique and mid-market PR operations — captured the rent savings, expanded their hiring radius beyond their original geography, and built operating cultures around asynchronous collaboration. The firms that executed this transition well are running cost structures 20-30% below comparable in-office firms. The firms that executed it poorly lost the culture without capturing the cost benefits.
Pattern 2: Hybrid as the default. The largest cohort of PR firms — Edelman, Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, BCW, Ketchum, and a long tail of mid-market shops — settled into hybrid models with 2-3 days in office as the default. The model has held. The implementation varies. Firms that built deliberate in-office rituals around hybrid days (client meetings, creative sprints, new-hire onboarding) maintained culture. Firms that left hybrid as a coordination problem each team had to solve on its own lost cohesion and operational tempo.
Pattern 3: Return to full-office. A minority of firms — including parts of the Idea Grove cohort and a number of NYC-anchored boutiques — returned to substantially full-time in-office operations across 2022-2024. The firms that executed this well were typically firms with strong specialty cultures (legal PR, financial PR, luxury) where mentorship density and senior-junior proximity were structurally important. The firms that returned to full-office without that cultural rationale lost talent to the hybrid and remote competition.
The 2026 reality
The PR firm category has settled into a roughly 50% hybrid / 30% remote / 20% in-office split, with substantial variation by specialty and geography. The cost and talent implications of the 2020 decision continue to compound. Firms with fully remote operations are paying senior talent rates from lower-cost geographies. Firms running rigid five-day in-office policies are losing senior talent to flexible competitors.
The structural answer Ronn called in 2020 — "the future of offices is forever changed" — has held. The deeper structural answer the 2020 conversation didn't anticipate is that the post-pandemic period also produced the AI Communications shift that has restructured how PR firms operate at the work-product level, independent of where the work happens. The firms that built AI-native operating models — measurement on Citation Share, GEO embedded in service mix, AI Visibility audits as a core deliverable — are now compounding advantages at a pace that makes the office-vs-remote conversation feel small.
What this means for PR firm operators in 2026
The office decision is no longer the strategic question it was in 2020. The strategic question is whether the firm has built AI Communications capability as a core service line, regardless of where the team operates from. The firms taking share through 2026 are operating across all three office models — what they share is the AI Communications operating substrate, not the floorplan.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
