Cloud Campaign, a business that helps marketing agencies manage clients' social media, has signed a lease that will effectively double its footprint in the Pearl District.
Cloud Campaign, co-headquartered in Portland and Boulder, Colorado, is moving from one of eight buildings that make up the so-called Pearl District Portfolio into another of the buildings. The company will take space inside the 1039 Building at 1039 N.W. Glisan St., according to a spokesperson. The company has about 25 people total, with a dozen or so in Portland. It is planning to hire more.
The company used to operate in another small office in Portland. Then as the coronavirus hit, that office closed for around a year, and the lease was ending, said Ross Gray, chief operating officer and co-founder. The team had been growing amid remote work, he said.
"We've always been really big on having an office culture," Gray said. "You miss a lot of communication when you don't. That being said, people got used to the freedom of working from home. So we decided to go with the hybrid of three days in the office, two days working from home. And six months ago, we moved into this place in the Pearl. It's great. But we just outgrew it."
Space was tight. People would jockey for call rooms or take calls in a server room. They were running low on desk space. The firm signed a lease for the new space across the street this month, going from around 2,600 square feet to about 5,100. They plan to move in soon.
Meanwhile, Cloud Campaign has test-driven a four-day workweek for employees during the fourth quarter. That's four 8-hour days, not four 10s. Gray casts it as "balance over burnout."
"We can't compare on some things to these massive companies like Google or Twitter," he said, telling the story of a recent Cloud Campaign engineer hiring that fell through after Twitter purportedly offered to double the person's salary. "It's hard for a small company like us to compete with that. So we were trying to figure out things that we could do to just make the work-life balance part more appealing."
The idea behind the four 8s is that people are more productive when they're present at work. There aren't down periods every company struggles with where employees are filling a chair sometimes, he said. "Your brain just runs out after a little bit."
So has he seen people run more productively on a leaner schedule?
"Overall, our productivity was actually up, so that was great to see," said Gray, who noted that key performance indicators were established and info was compared to prior quarters. "We're going to continue with different experiments to try and find the right solution in the following quarters. But we very well might come back to this, because it actually worked really well."
