Hagerty Announces Return-to-the-Office Plan, Will Bring 500 Employees Back Downtown Starting Next Year

The Ticker has learned that Hagerty, Traverse City’s largest private employer, is notifying employees today of plans to move from its long-held “remote first work model” to a new hybrid work arrangement. Hagerty employees who live within driving distance of the company’s Traverse City headquarters will be expected to be in the office three days a week starting early next year. The move will bring some 500 workers back downtown, and will likely reignite at least some of the economic impact Hagerty drove there prior to its pivot to remote work in 2020.

According to Coco Champagne, Hagerty’s chief human resources officer and chief administrative officer, the company has about 1,800 employees worldwide. About 42 percent of those workers live in Michigan, and the majority of the Michigan-based staff reside in the Traverse City area.

“I would say there are about 500 people that are within a reasonable driving distance to the office,” Champagne tells The Ticker. “Of that group, probably only about 10 percent are here on any given day, currently.”

Prior to COVID, Champagne says Hagerty had about 1,200 employees, “about 65 percent of whom were working in the Grand Traverse area.”

Like most employers, Hagerty shifted gears to remote work in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike most employers, the company never executed a true return-to-the-office plan, even after it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021. Hagerty representatives previously told The Ticker that the company’s remote work model enabled it to “recruit talent that previously would not have been able to join us.”

Because of remote work, Hagerty has phased out some of its non-Traverse City offices – including locations in Dublin, Ohio and Golden, Colorado – and has also vacated office space in and around downtown Traverse City. For example, Hagerty used to occupy 7,500 square feet above Chase Bank at 250 East Front Street, but left those offices behind in 2022 and now subleases the space to another tenant.

“Since then, we have really committed to a smaller footprint here at our River’s Edge location,” Champagne says, referring to the company’s multi-building headquarters off Cass Street.

Despite sticking with remote work, Champagne says Hagerty ventured back into “intentional gatherings” of its staff in 2022, bringing employees from across the company’s workforce to Traverse City for quarterly meetups focused on “programming and development, and on experiencing the automobiles that we insure.” Based on employee surveys about those events, Champagne says it was clear that “people get more engaged when we get together.” Those findings prompted the decision to launch a more in-person-focused work arrangement.

“I think it will be valuable for us to have a more permanent presence, where people can get together on a regular cadence so they can continue to develop and grow in their careers, and where they can meet with people face-to-face to have important discussions,” Champagne explains. “This isn't around eliminating remote work, or eliminating work that happens outside of Traverse City; those things are both critical parts of our world talent strategy. But when we bring people from another market here, we want to make sure that there's a core group of people at the office who will benefit from collaboration. And I think that will ultimately help the velocity at which we get things done.”

When the new arrangement goes into effect, local Hagerty employees will be expected to come into the office three days a week. Champagne says the goal is to have most people on the premises together “on the same three days.” Hagerty workers abroad, meanwhile, will likely be expected to make more frequent trips to the Traverse City for programming and professional development.

The pivot won’t go into effect right away. “We won’t start this until later in the first quarter next year, so sometime in March, or maybe even the first of April,” Champagne says. “But it’s important to us to communicate this change to our employees now, so they can start making plans for themselves and their families.”

Hagerty’s return to the office has the potential to be felt beyond the company itself. In a report prepared for the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority (DDA) back in 2022, national consulting firm Progressive Urban Management Associates noted that downtown was “heavily reliant” on Hagerty to drive economic activity. The report stated that, “compared to peer cities,” downtown Traverse City had “a below-average number of downtown workers and employment density,” and encouraged the DDA to recruit “additional anchor employers in growth industries” as a means of bringing workers back downtown.

Speaking to The Ticker even before that report landed, former DDA Director Jean Derenzy acknowledged the outsized importance of getting office workers back downtown on a more regular basis.

“We need to try to bring new business in and old businesses back,” Derenzy said at the time. “Because [having office workers downtown] immediately impacts and provides assistance to our retailers and our restaurants.”