Advertising agency BBDO's new office in Mumbai is the first office where I am tempted to take off my shoes at the entrance. This is precisely its intended effect. A sign outside the front door guides me to the "BBDO Ashram". Incense, chatai mats and a replica of Mahatma Gandhi's "workspace" frame the reception. Inside, the office is composed of a single large room bordered by a conference room, meeting room, dining area and tiny library. Bare white walls, two rows of long wooden benches and ergonomic office chairs highlight the spartan aesthetic.
I am here to meet Josy Paul, the agency's chairman and national creative director, and self-styled veteran "challenger" in the Indian advertising industry. Paul was tasked by BBDO's global arm with setting up the India office in January 2008. Six months ago, he relocated the Mumbai office from a 750 sq. ft space in Khar to a 6,100 sq. ft space in the Paragon Centre—a former mill compound in Worli—and used the opportunity to "create an ashram", he says.
Ashram as social experiment
The idea of building an ashram in an office was "spontaneous and instinctive", Paul says, and inspired by a visit to the Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati in July 2009 with Ajai Jhala, CEO of BBDO India. Seeking ways to ignite energy in a sealed office environment, he says he was attracted to the "energy of congregations found in religious places, rather than (conventional) boxes and cabins. Sabarmati stunned us by its powerful simplicity and higher ideology. It resonated with our own working philosophy of creating ‘acts, not ads'."
Stripping the office of cubicles and eliminating privacy is "a blind experiment", he admits. There is free seating for all employees, regardless of seniority: no cabins, allocated workstations or partitions between desks. BBDO Mumbai's 35 employees can choose their own spot to seat themselves, just as they would in an ashram or a place of worship. "People tend to choose a spot and come back behaviourally to it," he notes. For confidential talk, co-workers head to the meeting rooms, the sliver-like library or the adjoining terrace patio. Documents and personal possessions are kept in individual lockers in a designated storage area.
Paul's personal workstyle is highly nomadic too as he "fluidly moves from one group to another" in the normal course of the day. "What's nice about this place is that you want to sit with people" rather than being tied to a desk, he says.The day usually starts with ideas being swapped with executive creative director Raj Deepak Das at a particular desk, but Paul is not bound to any one location, and travels light, with only a laptop and notepad, often seating himself at a bench at the reception or in one of the office's designated nooks. Most of his best ideas, he says, actually originated in coffee shops outside the office.
The openness has its challenges, he acknowledges. New recruits are initially "enamoured" by the space, but then find the lack of privacy constraining. Paul encourages this friction between workspace and worker, saying that the office acts as the agency's recruitment "filter", deliberately promoting specific behaviour and weeding out those who are unwilling to adapt.
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