How Creative Leadership Is Collaborating Remotely with Clients, Staff, and Freelancers
Lisa Hassell / Contributing Writer
Agencies across the globe are reacting to a new reality. In the wake of the pandemic many creative firms had to act fast to prepare their employees for the challenges of working remotely, while still maintaining professional relationships with their existing clients. We talk to two leading agencies about how they have adapted their internal workflow for remote collaboration with paying clients and their predictions for a post-COVID world.
Hammer Creative was founded in the early 90s as a movie trailer house and has since evolved. As Brett Hocker, Executive Creative Director and CCO, explains, “we took our post production and marketing roots and applied them to the games business in the early 2000’s and have since grown into an industry leading production studio and creative agency.”
Along with Scott Hayman, Executive Producer and COO, Hocker helps lead the company as Hammer's ECD, overseeing creative for both the studio and agency. “We’re around 40 people with a good mix of staff and freelance. We bring on talent for both permalance and project-based work to fill a range of positions from ADs, designers and animators, to more specialized technicians.”
Onboarding new team members in the grip of a pandemic presents its own set of challenges. “It’s always a challenge to find the right people at the right time so we come at recruiting from a couple different angles,” says Hocker. “We like to start by tapping our existing network for artists we know and trust, who’ve worked with us before and have done great work. We then also pair that with searching on platforms like Behance, LinkedIn, and Working Not Working too to find new talent. We’ve also recently added an integral new team member, Jessica Rothstein, as the manager of the art department and talent recruiter. A big part of that position will be building a roster of artists that will be good fits for the array of work that comes through our doors.”
Tobias Cummins, Managing Director of marketing technology agency Byte New York, says that hiring freelance support is often dictated by the volume of work “We’re a client service business so sometimes there are requests depending on the work that we’re doing and in those moments, we would look for freelance support and WNW has been a very viable tool in that respect I’d say mostly on the design side.”
Working across four main areas, Cummins explains: “We do creative work, so everything from strategy, concepts to the production side of that work; graphic design, motion design, photography, editing. We also do media planning—social channels, strategy, media buying and planning; and analytics is our third, and we also do a lot with tech such as chatbot builds and AR design.”
While Byte have also benefited from having a team that has been proactive and quick to adapt to the situation, Cummins admits they are completely reliant on their own team’s adaptability. “We are very fortunate. This is not by any means something you can simply do managerially—people are adopting to these new approaches in real-time essentially.” Cummins adds, “We are also incredibly fortunate to work with clients who are already very digitally minded, especially in New York. Our clients are very digitally savvy, so the ones that we have worked with historically are very used to working with us via Hangouts and doing team meetings remotely. They are used to that dynamic.”
Collaborating with clients
In the case of new clients, there has been a shift in gears, taking a more relaxed approach to the formality of that first client meeting. “The reality is we’re not going to be face-to-face for quite some time, and we’ve got to compensate somehow. Just simply by trying our best to be personable; this is where we’re going to be for a while. We’re not robots. We can’t operate like that.” By taking this approach, they have reaped the benefits. “I’ve found that it’s been appreciated, and I think I’ve seen the results—you can smile, and have a bit of a laugh and a chat, while we’re all sitting in our lounge or bedrooms.”
Employing around 40 people with a good mix of staff and freelance, Hammer Creative ECD Brett Hocker says that while communication hasn’t been a challenge, one area that has changed is how they approach doing pitches and presentations on Zoom. “There’s a different dynamic to doing them digitally and we’ve had to adapt our thinking to make sure they carry the same impact as doing them in person.”
“The reality is we’re not going to be face-to-face for quite some time, and we’ve got to compensate somehow. Just simply by trying our best to be personable...We’re not robots. We can’t operate like that.”
“At the studio we’re always surrounded by other team members and creatives that we can constantly be bouncing ideas off of,” Hocker says. “One of the interesting things about working from home is that it’s given people more time to do less distracted work. There’s of course the downside of not getting the benefits of a group dynamic, but it also leads to some really great, focused work.” Hocker adds, “It’s a challenge to replace that easy, improvisational way of working so it’s become more and more important to stay connected as much as possible digitally.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Cummins, who says there is a loss of serendipitous workflow that can’t be recreated digitally. “The thing that might have been said just as part of a conversation, or for instance if you’re making your sandwiches together and get an idea—because we’re creatives right? Not everything comes to you during the meeting or blossoms into life on a Google Hangout. It’s hard to pick up those non-verbal cues that might give you ideas—and that is a loss, by all means and a challenge that can’t easily be solved.”
Staying connected
Maintaining team momentum and keeping employees engaged has been an ongoing challenge for agencies, particularly where mental health and wellbeing is concerned. To counter this, Hocker has made it a priority to connect with everyone from the team on a frequent basis. “We want to stay connected as a company and to feel like a cohesive team even if we’re not physically together.
“We schedule social events too; we’ve done after work drinks, trivia nights, and we’ve thrown a couple of surprise parties as well. Early on we tried to make it as easy as possible for people to work from home; we upgraded people’s internet speeds, supplied more equipment like dual screens and standing desks, to make life easier and better.”
In every aspect of Byte there have been sweeping changes in order to adapt to our existing reality, explains Cummins, who says it’s been an area where he has been particularly conscientious. “One can’t ignore that some employees are burdened by the situation more than perhaps others and in some form or fashion this situation has had an impact on everyone. We all deal with these things in our own way, but one thing we all have in common is this shared reality. There have been a few initiatives that the managerial team in particular are putting together which are quite profound but I would say that the individuals and the teams are being more empathetic to their colleagues and understanding, all the way up to management.”
“I think I had a profound misconception of what it means to be an office and what that requires. A lot of people were guilty of this...we are still very much working through the implications of it now.”
“I think the idea of working from home is less of an issue than working under quarantine,” says Hocker. “It’s more about being on lockdown and the isolation from social activity in general; so it’s trying to ease that as much as we can on the work front and then whenever we can get together to be social we will do that.”
There can be no denying that the pandemic will have a profound, lasting impact on how and when we work, particularly in the creative industries. As the rules around social distancing start to ease, there are many agencies preparing to return to the office—but with thousands of employees enjoying a better work-life balance in recent months, and arguably increased productivity and a boost to their creativity as a result, is a return to the traditional work day realistic? Or should employers allow flexible working to continue in the long term?
“I think I had a profound misconception of what it means to be an office and what that requires,” admits Byte New York MD Tobias Cummins. “A lot of people were guilty of this I believe; this attitude of coming in, working together, and then going home. Every single day. Perhaps that might be changed, but to what extent I can’t say—we are still very much working through the implications of it now.”
“I think there are going to be a lot more people choosing to work from home now because they are getting so much of their life back.”
Hocker says that while this has been a forced experience that nobody asked for, it has been good and exciting in many ways. “The idea of making flexible working more routine had never really been part of our culture and prior to COVID, we probably felt it was a ways off from happening. But in many ways we’ve been really happy with the flexibility working from home has afforded us. Los Angeles is in such a unique place that our staff are sprawled out all over with some people having these long commutes. I think there are going to be a lot more people choosing to work from home now because they are getting so much of their life back. They can have their normal routine plus work from home. I think we’re going to have a happier team overall.”
“We are still very much working through the implications of it now and the idea that the workplace can be a bit more flexible is something we have embraced and has shown to be perfectly feasible considering we were forced into it at the drop of a dime, and certainly very productive,” adds Cummins. “This feels like a moment of profound change in the workplace and flexible working in general; and it’s also a change that we haven't necessarily opted into—we’re reacting to the reality we are faced with; but at the same time the outcome of which need not be a negative one. It’s an opportunity for a positive outcome and I think we need to be open-minded towards that and how it shapes the future of how we work.”
Header Illustration by WNW Member Sol Cotti