Should Your Office Feel Like a Club?

I've been reading John Hegarty's book on advertising and creativity, and I can’t stop thinking about one specific thing he said.

He was entertaining the idea that creative agencies should be run like clubs. I know how that sounds, but bear with me - I’ll explain.

Think about the last time you didn't want to leave work (if that ever happened to you). Not because you had a strict deadline to meet or because your manager was watching, but because something was happening there and you didn't want to miss it. Maybe your colleagues were working on something fascinating, or you felt that you were around your pals and just wanted to stay there for a chat a little bit longer before you wrapped up for the day.

That's what Hegarty is talking about. And if you're struggling to remember a time that felt like that, that's also kind of the point.

Most offices are designed to process work. The club is designed to make people want to show up. They are not the same thing, we know it, but what if they somehow could?

What "Club" Actually Means (And It's Not (Just) The Foosball Table)

Hegarty paints a pretty vivid picture of what an office as a club could look like in theory:

“The office layout would look and feel like a club where people could drop in and spend the day to chill out or work as they chose. Like a club, the office would serve food and drink. It would organise events, talks, and social outings. It would have rooms for private meetings, for thinking and presenting. It would be an office, but it would feel like a club. ”

I have never ever thought about it like that before, but after reading it, it kind of makes sense. As someone who loves working on interesting projects a little bit too much, I can see the appeal.

His point is that the most enduring institutions weren't designed around output, but around meaning and membership, which then drove the output.

And it’s not just Hegarty being “poetic”. The research on intrinsic motivation by Deci and Ryan have been saying this for quite a long time - their research and basically every replication since have agreed that people do their best, most creative, most sustained work when they feel autonomous and connected, not managed like little kids (what a surprise, eh?).

The club, at its best, can give them that.

Why Don't More Companies Have Clubs?

Because building an office is much easier. You can do it in an afternoon. Put some desks, buy computers, set up Slack, a few process docs, and in your head, you’re more or less done.

Building a club, however, is hard. It requires something that isn't on any procurement list: a coherent identity and a genuine point of view that everyone shares. Leaders need to somehow create a good enough reason for their colleagues to be in the room that isn't just "this is where your salary comes from."

Most companies don't (and can’t) have that - they draft up a mission statement and hope that it will do a good enough job.

I've never worked in a large company, so I can't speak to that, but I've worked in small and very small places where the culture existed in theory. It existed in the job ads, initial chats, and onboarding, but once I got inside and sat at my desk, I didn’t really feel it much. And it’s not because they didn’t try, it’s just that I think it’s very hard for companies to sustain such a culture for a long time. The longer I stayed in these small companies, the more I noticed that the “club” they kind of mentioned at the beginning somehow turned into the expectation of compliance. “We're building something together” turns to “here are the things you are expected to deliver” fairly quickly.

The Bit I Think Hegarty Glosses Over

Okay, so I love this club idea and all, but I also want to be honest about where I think it gets complicated.

Clubs have bouncers. And sometimes the people deciding who gets in aren't just filtering for good ideas, but for familiar ones. The tighter the shared identity in a room, the more easily it tips from genuine belonging into something more like groupthink. By now, we probably all know that cohesion and conformity travel together, and one slowly becomes the other before anyone notices.

There's also a structural problem that Hegarty kind of skips past. He describes a core group of "keepers of the flame" surrounded by a wider circle of contributors who come in for specific projects. Fluid, expert, and highly energised. This sounds great in this context, but what happens to the people in the outer ring? The ones doing excellent work without the safety net of being "the core"? The ones who are technically in the club but not fully?

Project-based structures work brilliantly for people with strong networks and high demand for their skills. For everyone else, "flexibility" can mean uncertainty with better branding. If the people doing the work don't feel like members, you don't actually have a club. You have a gig economy with a nice logo and people who are stressed and not that interested in your club activities that don’t directly translate to security.

What's Actually Worth Taking From This

What Hegarty is really arguing here is that the **conditions in which people work are not a footnote to the work, but the inputs to it.

The atmosphere, the sense of purpose, the feeling of being in it with people who give a damn - these aren't some basic perks. You don't get great, committed, creative output from people who feel like they're renting their attention to a company for eight hours a day - you get it from people who feel, at least some of the time, like what they're making is theirs too.

This is something I think about constantly in the context of founder-led companies. Because I know that these companies often start with the club feeling built in. Most founders want to have a cool business and hire people like them so they can work on cool things together and have fun while doing it. At the beginning, the founder is the curator. The values aren't on a slide deck yet; they're just in the room.

But most companies eventually grow, and one of two things happens: founders either make a conscious effort to keep designing the conditions that keep producing that feeling, which requires real structural thinking (not just good intentions). Or founders assume that it will survive on vibes, with no intentional effort there, but it doesn't.

The operational layer and the human layer are not separate things. Or they shouldn’t be, in my opinion. You can't have a healthy culture sitting on top of poorly designed work. You can't sustain the "club" feeling with role confusion, management behaviour that contradicts the values, or systems that grind people down.

Hegarty attempted to design an atmosphere deliberately by introducing flexible, stimulating and radical work practices. Most founders inherit it accidentally and then look at the team that’s grown and wonder what the hell happened.

So Should Your Office Feel Like a Club?

Not a literal club, but I think you can get inspired by the idea of it. Do the people inside your company feel like they're part of something awesome or like they're just servicing it to earn the money?

These two experiences produce very different work cultures, mindsets and behaviours, and it’s up to you to decide what you’re actually building towards