It’s time to break the holding pattern
You’ve worked hard to build a great culture and support your people during the most challenging time. Your team has shown the same commitment and done their best to rapidly adapt. Your leaders, many new, have stepped up, shone through and realised what they are capable of.
If you can relate to any or all of the above, then you’re in a good place. But like many agencies you may also be stuck in a holding pattern when it comes to how day to day working and culture will function in the future – particularly if you’re used to a more traditional set-up.
So how do you maintain momentum and not get held back by what you can’t control? How do you motivate and manage people across teams and locations? And how do you start to be more intentional about designing a working experience and culture that supports your future goals?
Answering these questions starts with recognising that there’s no looking back and no point in transferring old ways to new realities. The future of work isn’t about being remote from one another, quite the opposite, it’s an opportunity to be more meaningfully connected than you were before – in every respect.
You’ll now need to think differently about how you transition from one working era to the next, so here are some initial prompts to help focus your approach:
Uncertainty remains but a new year deserves a new outlook. Start as you mean to go on with a clear plan for how your agency and your teams will work together. Be deliberate about it and create the conditions for your business and your talent to do their best work.
If you’d like to know more about any of the points we’ve raised here, or just chat about any of the issues you’re facing in your business, we’re here and ready to talk.
Here at Armadillo we’re excited to announce that we will now be offering all staff external coaching with renowned confidence coach, Jo Emerson.
The introduction of external coaching follows our decision to move away from a traditional line managed structure. We have chosen to replace line managers with networked support; task-based support to bring clarity to deliverables, skills-based support to build expertise in key specialisms, and growth-based support. This is where the coaching will come in. We hope that this move will give people the headspace to work through their challenges, ambitions, frustrations and ideas, as well as empower staff to seek their own solutions and decide their own actions.
Fiona Craig, our Strategy and Planning Director, explains why external coaching was a must-have for us: “Internal support is very much focused on the work we do for our clients – you could say the client is the key stakeholder here, and all efforts are focused on doing a good job for them.
Fiona continues: “The support offered by external coaching is centred exclusively around the individual – often there can be a tension between the two areas of focus, and in a traditional structure, line managers can struggle to do a really good job of supporting on all fronts. So, this allows those who are exceptionally skilled in one area to excel, while the individual still gets supported on all sides.”
Jo Emerson is a confidence and human behaviour expert, author, and the winner of International Executive Coach of the Year (2019-2020).
Fiona goes on to say “Jo is highly experienced in dealing with change and confidence, and has a wonderful energy that felt right for us here at Armadillo. She will spark some great conversations and even greater ideas, we feel sure.”
Jo adds, “It’s a real privilege to be working with Armadillo at such a critical time and to support team members as they grow and develop within an incredibly fast-paced industry. Armadillo’s new networked-support structure coupled with external and objective coaching shows what an innovative and agile company they are!”
We hope you will join us in offering Jo a very warm welcome. We thoroughly look forward to working with her and cannot wait to see members of the Armadillo team succeeding in their career and self-development goals.
The world has changed significantly, and agencies will need to change with it. Just because you’ve been successful in the past; you won’t have an automatic right to thrive in the future. But the pressures are more fundamental than just this crisis. The agency world has been at a tipping point for many years and it’s time to move to a better model. One that shifts focus away from what agencies ‘do’ to the value they can create in all respects – uniquely solving genuine problems for clients, empowering great talent and running businesses more sustainably so that everyone succeeds.
At Tonic, we’ve invested significantly in developing Future Positive to help agencies understand and respond successfully to the required depth and speed of change. The new guide draws together our frontline client experience, extensive research into changing expectations and a range of perspectives from an industry going through and seeking positive change.
Get your copy of Future Positive here.
Insightful, practical advice for all agency founders and leaders looking to emerge stronger and lead the way in a new era of business.
Following the success and popularity of the last one, I’m thrilled to be hosting a second online discussion between authors of some of the best books on new ways of working, the future of work and self-management. It’s going to be another awesome conversation! The theme for discussion will be: New ways of working sound great! Where do we start? Grab your free ticket here and join me in the ‘fishbowl’ on 4 Nov @18.00 with:
You’ll get the most out of the event if you attend with colleagues (including leaders) and schedule a catch up after the event to discuss what landed and what you might try / change. So do invite your team along, and definitely invite your boss! You can watch a recording of the first discussion below.
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The Creative Economy Unit at UWE is researching the impact of Covid19 on the South West exploring resilience & adaptability in the sector.
They are reaching out to all sectors of the creative industries, from community arts to architecture, food to festivals, fashion to photographers, and everywhere in between.
The survey is anonymous and the research team aims to use the results to lobby policymakers & stakeholders with a more complete understanding of how the creative & cultural sector functions in order to support recovery.
Please share far and wide to support & ensure your needs are represented.
ADLIB, a B Corp certified recruitment business based in Bristol has become one of a handful of recruitment agencies in the UK to transfer 100% of its business to its employees. The company provides recruitment solutions across several core sectors, including Technology, Data, Engineering, Science, Sustainability, eCommerce, Marketing and Design. The business works with all manner of clients, from start-ups and scale-ups, through to global brands across the UK and increasingly overseas.
The Employee Trust will work alongside ADLIB’s Directors, to oversee strategy and growth, with an emphasis on ensuring that the business’s sense of purpose and values remains paramount.
ADLIB’s major shareholder, Nick Dean, will remain part of the Trust for the foreseeable future, whilst staff will play an increased role in directing business profits and inputting into the running of the business via the Trust, a model similar to that of the John Lewis Partnership.
A share ownership scheme will provide each and every employee access to share options based on length of service and responsibility. New employees will also be eligible to access the scheme and take advantage of a reward and ownership model that will significantly boost their earning potential, whilst creating a deeper sense of purpose and engagement.
Nick Dean “Over recent years we’ve been considering the future of ADLIB. We’ve always felt it would be a challenge to find a suitable buyer who would retain ADLIB’s ethos, substantiated by our B Corp certification in 2019, and the drive to balance profit and purpose. The most important factor was retaining our independence and the flexibility to invest into our growth, whilst ensuring we retain our B Corp certification. By far the best solution to ensure ADLIB has a long standing future, was to hand over the business to the people we know and have helped create it into what it is today, whilst adding an additional layer of employee attraction for those who will help spearhead our next phase of growth.”
Lawless and Inspired have combined to bring together the UK’s best emerging street-artists and their influencer networks, allowing agencies and brands to tap into visual culture. Artists include Jody Thomas who created the 15m high Greta Thunberg wall mura, which highlighted issues of climate change and was featured on the BBC, across national press and went viral on social media.
The Lawless Inspired partnership aims to harness the power of today’s creative pioneers, to deliver physical/digital projects that excite and inspire. Alex Kopfli, Director at Inspired notes ‘by joining forces, we essentially offer agencies and brands a turn key solution, delivering creativity through artistic talent, brought to life by impactful real-life productions merged with digital creativity. The concepts are then distributed to an authentic and sizable audience online through our network.’
Since Lawless launched during the Covid Pandemic, the niche influencer agency has started working with brands to deliver artist-led creative solutions, adding a stamp of cool and credibility to brand campaigns and executions. Lawless Studio has already built up an impressive roster of artists, with the likes of Jody Thomas, Jack Watts, Nerone, Bond Truluv and Shay Casanova, reaching a significantly growing audience of 760k followers as a combined network, quality audiences loyal to each artist they follow, and trend setters in their own right.
Josh Moore of Lawless Studio calls out Inspired’s ‘exceptional track record in delivering first-class brand experiences for the likes of Wavemaker, Mediacom, M&C Saatchi and Fuse’ is the missing piece to the puzzle of delivering stand out creative solutions.
‘We now have the production capacity and logistical know-how to give brands access to creative pioneers and allow them to create amazing content, to give credibility and authenticity to brands through their output, and also reach huge dedicated followings through their social channels.’
By Jacob Topp-Mugglestone, Junior Developer & Wagtail Consultant
When I joined Torchbox as a developer, I was worried. I had no previous web development experience. I was coming from a very different background of laser and plasma physics, where I’d used Python to simulate what kind of conditions hitting a sample with a laser might get, or analyse just what kind of densities my latest experiment might have reached – but never to manage someone’s website!
After finishing my Physics Masters at the University of Oxford and then trying out research, I found that what I loved most was coding – so I started looking for a job where I could do that full-time. Torchbox jumped out at me as somewhere I’d have the opportunity to try a range of different projects, and I was excited about their ethical focus as well – so I applied. Thankfully they were willing to train me up on the web development side of things.
In the month before I started, I was able to meet some of the team at a Wednesday lunch and for a punting trip (in turn, they were also introduced to my baking obsession). During this time, I did some reading up on Django and database design, but once I started in earnest, this got a lot more practical. My line manager, Nick Smith, and the head of the Tech team, Helen Warren, came up with some requirements for a test website to build to get the hang of Django fundamentals, as well as arranging code reviews from the rest of the team. While building that, I also got involved in a little support work for our existing client sites.
Soon, my first big project began. The Motley Fool were sponsoring extensions and development on the open source Wagtail CMS, which Torchbox founded. I was excited to get the opportunity to work on such a big open source project – I started contributing in small ways, with documentation updates, then minor feature changes like adding a way to disable moderation, but quickly was able to gain experience with the support of Karl and Matthew, the other developers on the project. I always felt supported, no matter what I was taking on.
Before long, I was able to get stuck in to developing Wagtail Content Import: an app for importing documents from Google Docs into Wagtail StreamField (since then I’ve had the opportunity to expand it to Word documents as well). From then on, I was nearly full time on this work (as well as some support work for our existing clients). I loved the diversity of it, since it gave me opportunities to pick up experience in all sorts of areas. Over my first year at Torchbox, I’ve developed apps like Wagtail Image Import (my first React-heavy project), Wagtail Content Import and Wagtail Draftail Anchors, helped on others like Wagtail Transfer, and worked on big features for Wagtail itself – of which the biggest, Workflow (a fully-customisable moderation system) has just been been officially released as part of Wagtail 2.10. Early this year, I also joined the Wagtail core team, responsible for keeping the project going, so I’m looking forward to staying involved with Wagtail’s development, with work on features like inline commenting in the edit view and page analysis tools planned for the near future.
I’ve just finished my first year, and thinking back on it, I couldn’t have asked for a better combination of a supportive environment and constant new technical challenge in which to grow into a developer role. The tech team has always been keen to provide advice and learn from each other, and on the other side, there’s always interesting new requirements from clients driving development.
The course objective is for you to enjoy your job more and to be an even better member of your team. You’ll learn collaboration and leadership skills, how to hold better meetings, and how to make better decisions faster. You’ll feel more comfortable giving feedback, know what’s getting in the way of being a great team that does awesome work, and have the mindset to help make change happen.
To do this we’ll borrow from the best sources. These include agile, self-management, organisational psychology, and the most progressive companies on the planet.
The course is led by me, Mark Eddleston. I’m a new ways of working consultant, coach, facilitator and founder of Reinventing Work. Since 2015 I’ve been practising new ways of working and synthesising the mountain of information that’s out there (you can learn more about me at the bottom of the page). New Ways of Working: Made Simpler is something of a greatest hits. We’ll fast forward to trusted, tried and tested patterns found in some of the world’s most progressive organisations.
On this course, you’ll be practising and learning all the way. You’ll get better at listening, teamwork, and self-organising. There will be pre-work ahead of each weekly meet on Zoom. You’ll have the chance to ask questions and to form a community on Slack. You’ll become familiar with Notion, where course content is shared, and with Focusmate which will help you to get through it. You’ll experience Mural and Liberating Structures. You’ll design experiments to be implemented in your own team. You’ll form partnerships with classmates who will help you, hold you accountable and be depending on you. Throughout, you’ll be experiencing some of the best collaborations tools and practices out there.
Throughout the course, you will learn structures that you can pop in your pocket, take back to work and use immediately.
Expect practical, interactive and participatory. Each week the format looks like this:
So it’s a weekly commitment of at least 5 hours per week, though some of this is during work time.
The five-week course begins on Monday, October 26 October. We meet every Monday at 18.00 – 20.00 BST, wrapping up on 23 November.
This course is for you if you are:
To secure your place double-check the eligibility criteria ☝️ then send me a note to confirm ([email protected]) and make your payment via PayPal. If you need to be invoiced I can generate one right away.
Please note that cohorts are limited to 12 places.
I came across new ways of working in New Zealand in 2015 after spending a decade in traditional workplaces. It was the first time I found consistent fulfilment in work. This experience was with a law firm and community organisation that features on the distinguished Corporate Rebels ‘bucket list’. Once you taste this way of working it is impossible to go back. I’ve since been a member of staff in two organisations that have departed from traditional management structures, so have plenty of lived experience.
I’m also co-founder of Reinventing Work, a decentralised global movement for people interested in more human-centred, purposeful and self-organised ways of working. So far we’ve gathered in 25 cities across five continents, including in Bristol (where it began) London, Berlin, Melbourne, Montreal and New York. I have delivered online content to hundreds, spoken about new ways of working at The University of Oxford, and facilitated at Meaning Fringe Conference. I’ve also appeared on the wonderful Leadermorphosis podcast and the University of the West of England’s MSc Occupational Psychology programme discussing the future of work.
You can check out my website (including testimonials) here: https://www.marco.work
This article was written at the outset of COVID-19.
Having gone through the set-up of home offices, and the adoption of new business practices, processes, and tools, many now can’t wait to get back into the office. Why is this?
It is because the choice to do so was taken away.
According to recent research by Forbes, millennials in particular have struggled to adapt to working from home, which is hardly surprising given that they had no choice in the matter. What is absolutely critical here, though, is that this is not a struggle to adapt to remote working, it is a struggle to adapt to isolation. The opportunity to go to the gym, see friends, eat out, visit family, or indulge in any of the escape mechanisms that life usually affords us has been curtailed, and this is a struggle that I’d guess most of us are feeling.
Despite running a creative agency specifically set up to work remotely, I too am desperate for a change of environment, and that is because this is not really remote working. However, there has been a shift in working practices which is unlikely to be completely undone even upon the return to the office, so how can we make the most of this moving forward?
If the role of the office is likely to change, along with greater flexibility and working practices what is the key to remote working success?
The difference between those organisations that have been forced into adopting new working practices and those already set up to operate remotely is choice. Do not underestimate how important a factor this is, and it works on two levels. Recently, the Harvard Business Review investigated the link between levels of motivation and working location, finding working from home to generally be less motivating. Critically, though, they also determined that this suffered a huge plunge when the option to choose the environment is taken away; being forced to work from home is the worst possible option. Human beings react negatively when their freedom to make a choice is removed, and this ‘psychological reactance’ generates such negative feeling that it’s unsurprising motivation dwindles as a consequence.
This leads me into the second branch of why choice is so important. As I mentioned previously, being forced to work from home is not true remote working. The effect on all of our lives has been drastic, and our psychological reaction has been one of stress and anxiety. But let me be clear, we must break the cognitive link that has been formed between forced isolation and remote working, because it is false. However unintentionally, we now associate it with this sense of cabin fever and lowered productivity that we are feeling, and this damages the true potential of authentic remote working.
98% want to work remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their careers.
Source: Buffer – State of remote report.
For many that have chosen to forge their own path away from permanent employment and the office, the choice to do so has been made accessible to them as a consequence of their level of experience and expertise. Their years within industry enable them to both perform their roles with a greater degree of autonomy, and fit this around other aspects of their lives; family, exercise, hobbies, personal projects etc. The difference here is that, whilst traditional agencies may well be ‘pivoting’ (sorry I know that word belongs in a box with ‘Agile’) away from the office, they do not benefit from the intrinsic culture of an organization comprised of people that have chosen to work this way. Well before the Covid-19 crisis, which has confused the reality of remote working with forced home working, the majority of companies had flexible working policies in place, and an investigation by Vodafone back in 2016 found that 61% of respondents reported increased profits, and 83% reported increased productivity.
Setting up Sparro House Creative, flexibility and wellbeing have been at the forefront of my mind, and it’s clear to me that these are inextricably linked not only with each other, but with improved output and increased value. With the level of experience in my teams, it benefits neither myself nor them to impose a work routine that fails to take into consideration both the other important things in their life, and the fact that they may well do their best and most creative work at 5am, perhaps before their children have woken up (hopefully!), or at their local coffee shop, in our clients offices or collaborating in shared spaces. This is true remote working – the option to choose how the work thread weaves into the rest of your life. It’s important this message is clear, this freedom reduces workplace stress and increases productivity.
Of course, this structure is dependent on trust between team members, including myself, that the work will be completed efficiently and to the highest standard. In turn, this trust is reliant on industry experience. It is the senior team members who have the expertise that allows them to work in this way and make effective and timely decisions. With the acceleration of decision-making caused by the current crisis, this is vital.