Sharing the desk with a team 👨👩👧👨👩👧👧
Notes from the talk we held at Blend 2017.
2/3
Hey, we’re https://illo.tv/ a design and animation studio based in beautiful Turin, Italy.
For those who were there in Vancouver, and for those who weren’t fast enough to get a ticket (as the event sold out in just 12 hours!) we’re sharing our 25 minutes speech @ Blend divided into 3 small articles, respectively focusing on how we started working together (being a couple creatively and affectively), on how we built our team (this one) and on how we ended up sharing our desk with machines, thank to our automated video project https://algo.tv/.
This second article focuses on what growing and start sharing the desk with a team looks like.
Let’s get started!
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Less than a year after starting the studio, interesting upcoming projects were piling up and we started feeling the need for additional help. That’s when we decided to stop being a duo and become a team.
3–5–7–8–11 (2017)
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Our growth wasn’t excessively fast, but we made sure to add on average a person per semester to be able to blend him/her in the team before hiring someone else.
So how is starting to share your desk with a team when you are used to freelancing, working in pyjamas/naked, skipping lunch, or taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon?
At first giving to others the responsibility over the work that comes out from your own firm can be challenging. You’re pretty jealous of sharing your designs and animations with someone that — well — you hired exactly for that purpose.
You always want to open the illustrator file and do that little edit that will make things right.
But you shouldn’t. You should just provide verbal feedback.
Because only by letting new team members do their stuff and make their own errors you allow them to grow.
The long-term outcome of this is just awesome. They’ll become better then you at creating things, and will turn into an incredibly valuable asset to your company.
For us it has been a very great experience so far. Building up our team, that’s sitting here in the audience today, is probably one of the biggest achievement of our entrepreneurial experience.
We built our team on 2 key factors.
1. Diversity
We’re currently 11, from 5 different countries and probably 11 different backgrounds, because we value diversity a lot.
We work internationally and our team should reflect that aspect.
But it’s not just about country origins.
We have engineers, Armenians, designers, ancient music instruments experts, Southern Italians, Northern Italians, Chinese people, women, lots of women, self-made animators, freshly degreed animators, East Europeans — and a dog (oh, and the dog is also East European).
The best thing is that some of these features can be found within the same person.
Why do we value diversity?
If you are a 100% Italian team, than your company culture will be, well… Italian, with its pros & cons.
But if you gather within your team international talents, then you will be able to build and shape your own company culture.
This is exactly why we do it.
Our team happens to be made of 7 women out of 11 people, right now.
We were recently featured in an article on Motionographer as a good example of gender equality in motion graphics.
Big props to ILLO for flipping the scale
Having a mostly female team in both creative and management roles wasn’t planned. We were just trying to hire the best people, giving equal chances to boyz & gurlz and, simply, in some cases the best talents were women.
We’re always intrigued by what happens when you balance the team even more, for example by having a boy covering a traditionally female role, and vice-versa. Sometimes good things happen when you just subvert stereotypes.
2. To do good work, be a good place to work at
Some of the world’s best design and animation studios are here at Blend, and I guess that in all their HQs the office vibe should be pretty good. On our way up to Vancouver we visited Oddfellows and we’d love to spent our next holidays there, for instance.
But when you’re working in an average small company outside the enlightened Bay Area, what’s the daily office-life like?
Most of the time, not as fun.
When we started our studio, we saw that the West Coast was developing a new work culture, very human oriented.
Being a small company, it’s probably hard to manage things like open vacation policies, or 30% time to focus on personal projects.
But we think that, in the end, you don’t need to be Google to make your work place friendly and liveable.
So, f**k crazy working hours, delivery food eaten at your desk and you’re-going-to-talk-to-your-desk-mate-only. We can do more than that.
Here’s what we did.
Eat together (and for free) 🥑
We doubted about putting this first as we don’t want to confirm the stereotype about Italians-food-oriented-people.
But, god, we are! So, let’s start from this.
We eat together 4 days out of 5.
3 lunches are provided by a vegetarian young chef and 1 is Pizza day. Wednesdays don’t suck anymore just thanks to the glorious Pizza day.
But, beyond the chance for everyone of having their lunch paid by the studio, the most important thing for us — and the reason why we do it — is that we gather everyday around the same table, just like a family.
When you are a dozen, you’re probably not working with the whole team at the same time. So having the opportunity to be together and share something more exciting than an Excel spreadsheet or a slow After Effect RAM preview is absolutely great!
You’re not alone, even if you’re the last intern hired, and you can share your worries, ideas or plans for the weekend with everyone.
Plus, if you have to spend lunch with your colleagues, you can’t be an asshole during the rest of the day. That’s important, too.
Weekly creative talks 🎤
Every week one of us holds a talk in front of the whole team about something that inspires him/her. It should be somehow work related, with a focus on design, arts, technology, but it could be also Wine tasting or Modernist eggs decoration.
It’s a way for us to be able to express ourselves, transcend daily projects and rehearse public speaking skills, but — above all — it’s the best way to learn new things and widen our horizons, while finding out what other team members are passionate about.
To give you some examples, lately we talked about…
artificial intelligence, stereoscopy, sprints, emoji, why we do like the eighties, internet freedom, vocal interfaces, millennials, animation trends, strange music instruments, what to visit in Vancouver.
The concept is very inspired by TED talks and the Creative Morning movement: it usually lasts 30 min and your audience will cheer you better if you bring breakfast 🍩 or beers 🍺.
Desks swapping 🔁
This is going to be quick. If you ask me — where is your desks? — I can’t reply exactly.
Because, at ILLO, we don’t have any assigned desk. Around every 2–3 weeks we swap our desks, not randomly but accordingly to projects’ needs. This leads us to share work and spaces with the whole team over time.
Worried about having to move all your stuff, from one desk to another?
It takes just around 5 minutes — and if you have too much stuff on your desk…
you better clean it and throw away that ugly doodle you designed during a feedback call with a client or the brochure with the best offers of the new deli’s around the corner.
So when we talk about sharing the desk with the team, we mean it literally.
Stay tuned to continue reading our Blend talk wrap-up in the third article focusing on our automated video project Algo,
👉 https://stories.illo.tv/sharing-the-desk-with-a-robot-c541ee218d74.
Or go back and read what it’s like to share the desk with your partner
