Maintaining the invisible force of agency life: office culture
How can you maintain your company culture while everyone’s working from home? As we enter another “great pause”, Speak’s managing editor Laura Smith reflects on how to maintain your team’s bond and energy at a time when it’s more needed than ever.
Here we are again, working from home for the foreseeable future. Before Christmas, it felt as though life might be about to open up. Now it very clearly won’t be for some time.
Like so many businesses with employees lucky enough to be able to work from home, we went fully remote in March. A situation we expected to last for a few weeks turned into months. Now it’s clear it could last a year or more.
While our whole team has responded brilliantly, so much is lost through remote communication. The big question – how to replicate the bond and sense of shared purpose you build through being in the same place at the same time – remains ever-present.
Staying connected while working apart
For the team at Speak, one thing we all agree on is the importance of continuing to live the values that bind us together, even though we’re working apart.
That means regularly finding time to think about how to keep our operations efficient, effective and well-adapted to remote work; continually reviewing how we’re working in the ‘new normal’ to make sure everyone has what they need to stay as happy and healthy as possible; and creating team training sessions that will bring us all together to maintain our focus on innovation and personal development.
But it’s also about the less tangible aspects of working together: the fun bits it’s hard to replicate when you’re not making the teas in a work kitchen. Since March, we’ve taken our weekly tradition of Friday beers online, with two ‘hosts’ chosen by what we’ve dubbed the ‘wheel of fortune’ at our Monday meeting. Activities might include trying to double bluff our team mates (two lies, one truth), find an object that’s smaller than your thumbnail (scavenger hunt) or dressing up head to toe in tennis attire (do we need a reason?).
The last year has been hugely challenging for everyone, but it has also made us reflect on what we value about our agency in a whole new way. We've supported each other through house moves and bereavement. We've packed up our studio space in boxes and committed to home working for the foreseeable. We've welcomed new team members and held virtual leaving dos. We've even had a goat called Brett (I kid you not) join our Monday morning traffic meet.
We've also gotten to know each other, and our clients, in a whole new way – it's hard not to when dogs make unscheduled appearances on Zoom or people are attending meetings from their child’s bedroom. And through it all, we've become an even more streamlined, lean operation.
Office culture is an invisible force, hard to pin down and quantify – but hugely influential in its hold over the way organisations work, play and be together. In the absence of the beer fridge or boardroom training session, we all need to find new ways to instil and reinforce our culture and energise each other at a time when that’s more needed than ever.
Creative agencies should be good at this kind of thing. So, how are you going to do it?
A version of this article was originally published on the PRCA blog before the current lockdown.