Covid-19 has pushed us all out of our comfort zones one way or another…
Of course that’s the least of it just now when people are worried about health and livelihoods. But for those of us fortunate enough to be working our way through the pandemic, it’s thrown up some interesting challenges and learnings.
Not least has been how to work creatively and effectively together – when we’re physically forced to be apart. I’ve lost count now of the times I’ve heard friends and colleagues talking about how difficult they’ve found the transition to remote working. Not to mention the multitude of articles that have popped up offering advice on how best to work from home.
I won’t spend time here on the very real (!) challenges of parenting while remote working, I recognise that it’s a huge issue – particularly impact working mums… (And needs to be fixed!)
But I think we’re seeing here the start of something, something that could in fact be glorious. The distributed working world that’s long been imagined as a halcyon possibility.
I have my own what I like to call ‘micro-consultancy’ focussed on helping businesses and brands behave more purposefully. MB&a was set up from the outset borrowing from the ‘film crew’ model, bringing together the stars who were just perfect for that particular project. Because these are all super competent senior practitioners, the work has always happened as a mix of remote independent tasks, interspersed with a coming together of minds to spark new thinking.
The last project we worked on kicked off just as lockdown started in the UK. So we knew we needed to step up a gear to meet the challenges of 100% remote-working. Here’s what we learned…
1. Especially when it’s a new team coming together, you want to meet regularly and often… But keep it short and sweet – the Zoom headache is real! We had regular morning kick-offs to plan our days – ranging from 15 to 45 minutes depending on what we needed to cover – and once weekly check-ins with the client team.
2. Coming together as a team is all about people. That doesn’t change with remote working. We started all our internal meetings with a 5-minute meditation session, to help everyone ‘arrive in the room’, and ‘tune in’ to one another.
3. Social time together is also important. Yes, drinks via a screen aren’t half as much fun, but getting to know each other as people - not just as colleagues – helps build the social capital we need to call on to get the work done efficiently.
4. Which brings me to trust. If you’ve brought a great team together, trust in that. Take each brilliant idea and run with it, build on it, accept it as a gift and see where you can go with it to make it even better… By the way, this is absolutely a great way to work when you’re not remote too!
5. There were some practical learnings too, for example, traditional workshops need to be broken down into bite-size pieces, with more pre-reads and ‘workbooks’ for feedback. And keep discussion for groups of 3 to 4 people, anything more is a cacophony online!
6. And if and when things don’t go to plan – and the way of the world right now is that nothing does! – it’s even more important in a remote world to take a hiccough and see it as a positive… What can we learn, how do we best move forward from this.
7. And finally - and of course, Covid or not, distributed or not - crystallise and communicate your shared purpose. Teams perform best when you all know why you're there, and what success looks like. Even more critical when you're all relying on each other to do the right thing in the right moment without the benefit of sitting across from one another!
It turned out that the project we kicked off in early March with Affinity Water – working up a water savings consumer behaviour change campaign strategy, 5-year roadmap and creative start-point – was a fantastic experience from start to finish. We all agreed it couldn’t have been more positive – given all that’s been raging around us. Thank you @Andrew Holder-Ross, @Dennis Pannozzo, @Lucie Cohen @Mitra Powell for joining together on this grand adventure – and of course also to our clients @Affinity Water!
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