Working remotely: up close and personal
The way we have always worked in the creative industries has just never felt right to me. Like some kind of Industrial Revolution hangover (when work was boring, uncomfortable and even dangerous) the starting point with agency employees still seems to be that they don’t enjoy working — that they need to be coerced with carrots and sticks into productivity, and must arrive at the same place and time each day in order to have their progress monitored.
But, in my experience, having an aversion to work has never applied to creative people. Creatives thoroughly enjoy the challenges thrown at them — solving problems, or crafting a design or paragraph of copy — and so they actually resent being made to feel otherwise. Research supports my observation that creative problem-solvers are far more likely to produce outstanding work when they feel enabled and trusted to succeed, and given the freedom to work in ways that individually suit them.
The more balanced, rounded, inspired and experienced we all are, the better we’ll be at our work. Surely. And so if we joined up a whole bunch of remote workers operating in this way to collaborate on a project, in theory we’d have a team comprising the most inspired, productive and passionate talent in the world, and from a far greater pool than might be available simply in our studio or city.
With all of this in mind, nine months ago, Dave Brown, David Bicknell (Bic) and I decided to start a branding agency, Brown&co, using an outsource model. Now, having worked with outsourced teams on a few large projects for two global companies, here’s what we’ve learned so far from our great experiment:
Many of the obvious benefits to our collaborators have stood: more freedom, more inspiration, more ownership, fewer distractions. But the million dollar question is has this actually resulted in better work for our clients?
That’s for them to say, and what we’ve already been told (by different, highly experienced corporate clients across different brands and businesses) is that ours is “some of the best work we’ve ever seen”, and achieved in “miraculous timeframes”.
So it seems the work we are producing is living up to its promise, and this can only really be as the result of working differently and attracting better people by working differently. Having no physical office space means lower overheads too, so a bonus has been being able to charge our clients less for our work, while still paying our collaborators top dollar.
All of this, of course, challenges the old school thinkers who say if you leave people to their own devices nothing ever gets done, and that you can’t do good creative work unless you’re all sitting physically together in the same room.
It’s 2017, and with technology where it is, there really is nothing besides convention and fear now stopping the creative world from working in ways that are more human and humane.
It’s time to build our work around our lives, rather than keep building our lives around our work. It’s time to take our lives back.
Troy Wade is co-founder and lead strategist for Brown&co — The Brand Collective: www.brownandco.co
A version of this article first appeared here: www.creativebloq.com/features/the-benefits-of-working-remotely
