Best Places to Work: The New Philly Workplace

In the past few decades, Philadelphia seems to have developed into the world’s largest office park. We have quality infrastructure, plenty of top-notch colleges to supply eager graduates, and open land from Malvern to South Jersey just begging to have office buildings parked on it. Hundreds of local and national corporations have noticed, and have either relocated here or expanded their existing operations.

This means, of course, that we now have more corporate employees in the area than ever before, and this is not a good time to be a corporate employee. Whereas college grads used to stay at the same company until retirement, they can now look forward to changing careers five to seven times during their working years. Layoffs are a fact of modern life, and economists bleakly offer the news that this generation will be the first since World War II to earn less than the one before it.

And then there’s the stress. Depending on how you look at it, computers and cell phones and faxes make work either more accessible, or inescapable. Either way, the conclusion is that the lines between leisure and labor have blurred. Only 14 percent of office workers still use their two-week vacation to actually go on vacation, and when they do, they probably take their laptops with them.

A grim trend? Yeah. But fortunately, a counter-trend is emerging in its shadow. It’s not about spending fewer hours at the office, but about companies making those hours more relaxed, creative and rewarding. Which is why I decided to go work for four of them.

The Anti-Corporation

I am in a meeting at Gyro Worldwide, listening to a young man describe a possible marketing campaign for some tennis equipment. His t-shirt bears the name of an indie rock band. One of the young women in the group is wearing a tank top and sitting cross-legged on the floor, chewing gum. The atmosphere is less high-­powered business meeting and more free period in high school.

The young man describes what he’s working on: a sports equipment ad featuring a tennis player who’s down to his last gasp in a tournament. He describes a visual image of a player who has given his all in the competition and is struggling, physically and emotionally.

“Yeah, yeah,” interrupts Gyro’s CEO, Steven Grasse, getting the image. “And he has blood spilling out of his head.”

The young man pauses, looks around. “Uh, no. No blood.”

Grasse nods, still enthusiastic. “Okay. No blood. Go ahead.”

This is how Grasse has built Gyro into a multimillion-­dollar media empire; by creating an environment that encourages, rather than stifles, creativity. If the CEO thinks nothing of throwing out outlandish ideas, he figures others will be inclined to follow suit.