AN ANTROPOLOGICAL SHIFT
Background
I had always been passionate about moving to a model that allowed my staff to get a better work life balance. My predecessor has lacked the trust in people to want to move any distance from a traditional 5 days a week in the agency approach to work. I had started to introduce a small number of relaxations to the previous draconian approach. I was making small changes as I did not want to impact our very successful financial perfromance.
Also as a business that was very tech heavy with high end workstations costing in excess of $10,000, and an on prem server farm, remote working for one or two of our studios was always seen as a technical challenge.
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March 2020 blew apart the ‘small steps’ approach and gave me the opportunity for dramatic change. However, it brought with it technical, cultural and mental health challenges
Action
I think everyone saw Boris Johnson’s March 23rd lockdown speech coming. Fortunately we had not only seen it coming, we had planned for it. Two weeks before hand we started to test the techncial solutions for remote working. We rotated 50% of a dept to work from home each day and we were able to compare productivity. We ran tests on people’s wifi speed, we shipped extra hardware to peoples homes. The week before Boris’s announcement we have 95% of the business working productively from home!
The judge of productivity was daily output. Now it could be that people were working more hours in the day because they werent having to communate and also because they are an amazing group of talented people. Either way we are able to move to WHF with minimal impact on the business.
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Our tech solution involved delivering micro machines to people homes and using specialised software to allow then to jump onto their workstation in the agency via the micro machine. It was the strangest sight in the studios when you saw a bank of workstations and screens with the cursor moving around the screen being operated remotely by an invisible team!
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Whilst our operations team focused on the technical side of WFH, I focused on the human side. I arrange a weekly all staff call on a Friday to ensure that all the staff were as up to date as the leadership team were. We held bi-monthly Team Leader meetings to ensure that our managers were upping the frequency of team and individual virtual meetings . We encouraged the obvious Zoom quizzes, coffee sessions and end of week virtual drinks. We continues to run our recognition programme ‘Superheros’ and rather than presenting the quarterly awards in an all staff, I drove the the winners houses and presented the awards socially distanced. I would say for most of the staff, they actually felt closer to the whole company that they did when sitting in a studio in the building.
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This was not the case from all. Some people struggled. They struggled to adapt to remote working, they struggled because they were not seeing their friends and colleagues and they struggled due to the remoteness. My HR manager and I held a ‘watch list’ for those people that needed a little more support. Normally it was their line manager that identified them, sometimes it was a colleague, either way, people looked out for each other.
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I found myself struggling. Not on the day to day stuff but I realised that as well as be being an energy giver as I drove the staff and the business forward, I got my energy from people. Without being able to interact with people I found that I had less energy. As soon we the level of lockdown was eased (summer 2020 and Summer 2021) I spent 2 or 3 days in the agency and encourages others who felt they needed interaction to do the same.
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When lockdown first started, although like most, I thought it would last a few months, I decided to continue with recruitment and have new starters join a remote environment. This was a challenge for a number of reasons. People learn from others. Creative solutions are a result of collaborative thinking. We are a business that thrives on our culture. Continuing the culture was difficult and probably one of the two areas that in hindsight I should have don’t better with.
Client relationships was the other. As the MD I built strong relatioships with our clients at all levels. Most of this was done by a chat over a coffee when the client was in the agency. Once the client no longer comes into the agency this is far more difficult. You cannot happen to bump into the client on a Zoom call the way you can in the kitchen! Lesson for me is to be more proactive into those client relationships.
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Results
We are now moving to a agile way of working where staff will come in for 2 days a week averaged over a month. I believe that we will be able to relax this approach as personally I feel that it is still a bit draconian but as always, I need to ensure that the business is not negatively imapcted by any change so I will make small adjustments over time.