Digital Desks: Getting to know each other in a remote world.

Why Digital Desks?

Inspiration does not come from sterile environments; designers are used to working in environments where the walls are furnished with inspiration and in progress work stacked with post-it notes allowing them to feed off the visuals around them.

A desk also tells a story about a person, whether that is photos of their family or friends, books they are currently reading, medals from events they have competed in, lego, plants, a favourite mug or stickers on a laptop. Each artefact gives you an insight into their interests or hobbies.

These visual triggers are missing while we are all working remotely and this creates a barrier in getting to know each other. This means a lot of conversations are focused solely on work, where there would be more fluidity in a dialogue in person.

I joined the Sky Betting and Gaming design team in February 2021 meaning I interviewed for the role and onboarded remotely. I was conscious that it was going to difficult to build relationships in the way I usually would, a key ingredient to candour and collaboration is getting to know people on a personal level enabling you to build empathy and mutual trust.

When I joined the makeup of the team was as follows:

Team Members hired remotely: 60%
Of those hired Remotely 83% Interviewed remotely
Worked together in the office (prior to lock down): 40%
Met each other in person (prior to digital desks): 50%

I quickly realised I was not the only one in the team facing the same struggle with 60% of the current team being hired remotely. Although they had been working together as a design team for nearly a year there was a lack of ‘team togetherness’, this in part was due to most meetings being formal and focused with only work in mind.

What are Digital Desks?

Earlier this year I read Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration a book by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, in which he talks about how to cultivate a creative culture in a fast-moving large company. He talks about how the company spaces are geared for creativity,

“ The animators that work here are free to- no, encouraged to- decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and castles whose meticulously painted, fifteen-foot-high Styrofoam turrets appear to be carved from stone. … The point is we value self expression here.”

Around the same time, I also virtually attended the LeadingDesignConf where I was inspired by a fantastic talk by Noah Levin, Design Director at Figma. In his talk he described how he had scaled the Figma design team and some of the processes he had put into place around hiring, collaboration, and team building.

He briefly mentioned different approaches they had taken to get to know each other and showed screen shots of what they called ‘virtual workspaces’.

This got me thinking, as we don’t have a physical dedicated design space to adorn with inspiration and current work, or a desk space that people are walking past each day, we do have an opportunity for each member of the team to create their own ‘digital desk’. This would allow the team to decorate a desk any way they feel in order to express who they are when they are not a Product Designer at Sky Bet. Later, the team would share their designs with colleagues to get to know each other better, these can be then saved in a shared virtual location used by the design team.

What did the session look like?

At Sky Betting and Gaming we are lucky to have half a day every week dedicated for Learning and Development.

The Product Design team in our Bet Tribe take their L&D time on a Friday afternoon so we used this time to run our digital desks session.

Prior to the session I created a basic Digital Desk template in Figma for each member of the team so that we all started with the same foundation.

The session was structured as follows:

13:00–13:15
Digital Desks Kick Off

Get the team together to go over the brief and ensure that everyone has access to their template and answer and questions.

13:15–15:30
Digital Desk Creation Session

During the main part of the session using the template provided they are tasked with making it their own, they can create their Digital Desk in any way they want to.

Change the floor, desk, chair.
Change the colour of the walls.
Add a door or a window.
Use images from google, cut up photos from your phone
Use your illustration skills to draw!
Include pets.

Most importantly it allowed the team to express themself in whichever way they wanted in to describe who they are and show individuality.

15:30–16:30
Digital Desk Share Out

Time to come back together and share our Designs. Each person took it in turns to talk through all the elements they had added or changed and what that means to them.

What was the Outcome?

Every member of the team put their heart and soul into this task, they were all incredibly open in the elements they shared talking about their families, hobbies and interests.

At the start I described our team as 10 team members, but after this session I would describe us as a group of…

Coffee lovers, craft beer drinkers, film script writers and art gallery fans that enjoy evening meals at small plate restaurants and nights at the cinema. Lovers of books from Stephen King to Patricia Cornwell. An active group of running, cycling, skateboarding, weightlifting and ski fanatics. Dog and Cat lovers with a yearning to travel. Garden and house plant cultivators with eclectic music tastes from Stormzy to Slipknot and Nat King Cole to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

Going forward we will be running a Digital Desk session for all new starters as part of their first week onboarding.