Office or Home Working?
As some of us graduate back to our offices after months of working from home it’s time to reflect on how our lives could change forever…
Artisan was quick off the mark when it came to getting all of the team safely moved home with all the equipment they needed to work remotely. With everyone settled into their new workspace, be it the spare bedroom, the kitchen table and for the lucky ones a home office. We were all safe and connected, we embraced the new technology with some excitement. From Teams to Zoom, from Skype to WhatsApp we became experts in virtual meetings overnight, even the older team members, like myself were forced to embrace this new way of communicating.
We became paperless and introduced new production scheduling to enable all the team to manage their own projects independently as well as a group.
It all appeared to be going very well on the surface, with smiley faces at our daily production meeting and we certainly had the support of some great clients!
But has it worked for us as a business and our team?
From a business performance perspective with the team, we had working full time from home our revenue per person increased and of course our costs reduced significantly but at what cost.
It goes without saying that you can get a lot done from home in a short time. You can focus on the job in hand without your colleague asking you what you are having for Tea! But where is the fun in that?
Our customers began to expect us to be working 24/7 with the general office hours becoming a thing of the past. In this industry we have deadlines and we are used to working out of office hours but the team began to work silly hours and the impact of working remotely without the personal hands-on support of team members started to show some cracks in this new way of working. There is only so much you can do remotely and for us a creative team it began to feel a little tough for some.
As founder and Managing Director at artisan for 27 years, I have enjoyed the buzz of a creative office, working with fabulous people and interacting on a daily basis. We worked hard to achieve this with virtual meetings, both internally and externally but for me, I love working with real people and virtual meetings don’t deliver the same satisfaction, although of course, I know they are essential at the moment.
With many companies considering closing offices and migrating their team to home working I worry that we will lose those important opportunities to bounce ideas around and look into the eyes of our friend and colleagues to see what is really going on in their heads.
Are we really all going to be looking at screens for all of our inspiration! This certainly won’t work for the creative industry in my opinion.
We are now back in our spacious barn in the middle of a rural location that we can drive to every day without coming into contact with people. We have adapted our offices to allow a huge amount of social distancing and are confident that any of our customers would feel very safe in returning into our offices to join in an old fashioned style meeting.
Never has there been a better time to work out of town. We have the best of both world’s we can all be safe together in our offices whilst maintaining safe distancing, but this allows us to work together as the full-service marketing agency our clients love and respect.
We would rather see you but If you don’t want to come in to see us we have fitted large touch screens throughout all our meeting areas for improved virtual meetings.
Get in touch to understand why some of the best creative talents can now be found outside London.
annienurse@artisan-creative.co.uk.
