We know that everyone has different home life, priorities and challenges so we actively promote asynchronous working, being as flexible as possible. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t run the agency like a jelly, I would describe it more like a Christmas Day family dinner where it’s all about the prep so that the day and experience is magical and enjoyable. We plan, plan and plan some more at the outset of a project, setting milestones, key deliverable dates and collaboration dates etc but around that we are pretty relaxed, agile, leaving us open and receptive for inspiration. This means we are able to spend much more time in the creative space which results in broader, better and more exciting results. We don’t use time sheets, this has always been a creativity drain from my perspective and removes the trust and adds an unnecessary pressure that focuses too heavily on deadline and revenue rather than autonomy and collaboration.

After the remote move it opened up even more opportunities placing us in a position to be able to work with the best people, wherever they happened to be, if the current team moved area or county it didn’t matter and this has offered up numerous opportunities for further agency recruitment. After five years of going remote I can honestly say that this has allowed us to work with the best people, working where and when they are at their best. 

It has created an empowering dynamic in our team and strengthened our sense of trust, collaboration, ownership and collective wellbeing – after all, that’s what our agency values and culture are based on.

Has the pandemic changed our practices as a team?

When the pandemic arrived and everyone shifted to remote working it certainly highlighted that the remote model rises to the occasion for the unexpected. 

Obviously we have members of the team who have had to be home schooling and looking after or shopping for isolated parents, so the asynchronous way of working has come into its own. The ones with family segmented down their day into smaller regular chunks of time so that they can spend time with the family throughout the day and extended even into the weekend if that suits and it has flexed well.

Our flexible ‘places’ of working has had to change simply reducing the options of course but we still encourage variety. One example of this is often in the ideas and concept stage for a campaign, the best thinking often isn’t done at the computer, it’s done on a run or a walk. Just because we’re not at our desk doesn’t mean we’re not working – we still actively encourage this as work time, varying the surroundings, having a conversation with someone outside the team, doing a bit of gardening, sketching and observing. Creatives need stimulation, space and ways to be free to think. A Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘How To Kill Creativity’ quotes:

“Creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t, however, let employees choose which one.”

We’ve experienced a lot of clients who have struggled with the transition to remote working at this time. We had months to plan and research our shift, so the people who have had to transition to remote working in a matter of days, if not hours, we have a lot of sympathy for. We’ve been helping them with practices that have really worked for us.

Here are my top tips for to keep creative teams refreshed:

• Use ‘creative’ collaboration tools – I don’t about you but a Google Doc doesn’t do it for me on a creative front. It’s important to find collaboration tools that allow you to be creative. Milanote is one of our favourites. It’s like an Evernote for creative people. It’s a fun and informal way to share ideas. We thought we might miss sharing ideas in the studio so we searched for a platform that would allow us to use something that would be fun to use and allow everything from notes, screen grabs, sketches, video and keeps things pretty organised in an organic way. 
• Asynchronous working and allow creatives to be creative – if the project allows, promote asynchronous working, in my experience this is the way to get the best out of creative people and especially in a remote working environment. As I mentioned we are project driven and not time driven, so as long as the projects and client commitments are met, I’m less about the detail about ‘when’ the magic happens, I trust and know my team to know that it will. Even when we were studio based, some of the team just weren’t morning people so we had a flexible working day, a different start and finish time dependent on what suited people best. Sometimes a solution can take 5 mins sometimes it takes 5 hours. You’ve got to be ok with that. Let go of control.
• Invest and make time to discuss ‘non work’ regularly – as a creative director I make sure I know what interests the whole team have, I know what makes them happy, what sports they like, which teams they support, what type of cooking they do or what diet they’re following and who’s important to them. That’s who they are and it’s important to me that I understand what drives them and makes them happy.
• Appropriate channels – this is a contentious one and not everyone will agree with me here but I encourage people to not use things like Whatsapp and Messenger and similar channels for work projects or clients (these can be very noisy and disruptive channels)  – I think it’s best to be clear and respectful of professional channels to allow the team to keep the noise down and keep these for social. I do hear from people who communicate with clients and the team in this way and it can get quite overwhelming and it can also diminish and confuse work life balance.

In summary:

Allow creatives to be creative. If you are in a charge of a creative team or are in a creative team yourself, vary the day, ways of working, channels and be flexible and honest to what suits best. We are sensitive, idiosyncratic but bloody brilliant people. The less we fence ourselves the broader our thinking will be. As a client, working with an autonomous team built on trust and respect, you can be assured of a creative outcome that has a happy heart and bursts with positivity and purpose.