1. Face-to-face conversations are priceless – Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack have worked really well for us, being invited into people homes has created a new connection but you can’t beat a quick chat over a coffee or asking quick questions at your desk on the fly to get instant feedback or input.
2. Remote working is here to stay – We’ve championed it for some time now, but now the doorbell going mid zoom call or a dog jumping into frame mid client meeting doesn’t seem so bad and certainly does not affect productivity. As we look at the new normal and what that looks like for us this is certainly factored into the outcome.
3. Time – We have all managed to get some extra time back in our day. With no commute to the office, if you can quite literally save hours, I’ve personally managed to have more sit down dinners with my fiancé than ever before, after work walks and quality time has come easier due to extra time in my day.
4. Work-life balance – When you shut your computer down and leave the office each day you have a natural barrier between work and life, working from home has sometimes seen these lines blurred. From day one we set clear boundaries and made sure the team stuck to our working hours.
5. Sharing is caring – We learnt very quickly that you can end up buried in an idea without sense checking it against anyone else when working from home so we introduced more reviews and quick stand-ups via zoom so we can all stay connected to our ideas. Instant feedback as you’d get in the studio.
6. Integrations – We always been pretty well integrated but we’ve taken that to the next level now with our tools, type /zoom in a Slack channel and you can have the whole group on a call in the click of a button, this helps us to not only save time but generate better ideas.
So what’s next, from September we are trialling one day a week in the office, to allow us to get some face time back and then increasing from there on towards the end of the year. Fingers crossed we can all safely be back in the studio together in January. We then are going to run WFH Wednesday where we always work from home on Wednesdays to break up the week and keep some of the benefits we’ve learnt
Everything is changing day-by-day at the moment and adapting, and overcoming is key, as well as ensuring our team, clients and anyone else we come in contact with are safe and well.
To be continued...