Getting The Future Started

It's Wednesday, it's April 21st, and it's Creature’s first day back in the office of 2021. Which is not a sentence I’d have expected to be typing a year ago. But then there hasn’t been a whole lot about the last year that’s gone to plan - for us, for the industry, or, without wishing to be too dramatic, for the world as a whole.

But we’re trying to look forward: we’re trying to work out how we can how we can build back better. After all, if you should never let a crisis go to waste, then the last year has given us a hell of a lot to work with.

The biggest shift is that we’ll be going in today, and we’ll be going in tomorrow, and then on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, we’ll be remote-first again. And repeat. Forever. The office is there all week for folk who need it (or just hate working from home), but for those three days, we’re remote-first. We call this the 3:2 model, and it’s Covid-enabled, rather than Covid-enforced. We think it will give us the perfect balance of time spent together, enjoying the unplanned, impromptu, serendipitous chaos that drives proper creativity, and learning - all of us, but particular more junior members of the team - from each other (as well, of course, as the social stuff that helps make this industry - at its best - such a brilliant one to work in), and time spent, well, wherever we choose, getting our heads down (or up, for the occasional Zoom call), and cracking on with being the efficient, brilliant business we’ve shown ourselves to be over the last year.

Will we be less efficient with two days a week in the office vs. all five working from home? Probably. But we’re quite excited about that. We’ve never really believed efficiency sits at the heart of being a great creative business: and what we sacrifice in efficiency, we think we’ll gain a hundred times over in terms of effectiveness. But adopting this hybrid, 3:2 model means that all of the positives we’ve discovered in the last year don’t get sacrificed either: a better work/life balance, not having to commute every day, being able to just crack on when you need to… All of these things are great, as long as they're part of something bigger: and we think 3:2 gives us that.

The last year has shown us that so many of the things too many people previously thought unimaginable (remote pitch processes, creative development via Zoom, working the hours that suit you, offering genuine flexibility) are all too achievable: and, more than that, we’ve seen that if you hire brilliant people and trust and empower them to get stuff done (with just the right amount of direction), then brilliant things will happen.

Turns out that looking after your people makes your business better. Who knew?

We also, for what it’s worth, think it’s going to change the face and shape of Creature, and the make-up of the people who come and work for us. For example, we’ve just hired an Account Manager who lives in Norfolk. Normally, if she wanted to work at a London agency, she’d need to move to London, with all the expense and hassle that that brings; a commute from Norfolk is manageable, though, when you only have to do it twice a week. Our hope is that we’ll be one of the first London agencies for whom London itself isn’t a barrier to entry. We want to leave the industry better than we found it, and we think - THINK - that this is a big step on that journey.

And that ‘think’ is important - because probably the most important point is that we don’t know if this will work: and if it does, it probably won’t work exactly how we’re doing it right now. We trialled it last year, and learned a bunch of stuff: and today is the start of the next phase of that trial. We’re convinced, though - and determined - that we’re going to build something better; and that we’re going to have a fuck of a lot of fun doing it.

For today, though, that can all wait. I’m just going to focus on getting to hang out in an office that is, thanks to the insanely hard work of a few people (shout outs to Charlotte, Sian and Bebe on that front) pretty damn safe. Today, I’m going to be in the same place as all of the brilliant people that make our agency what it is, and breath the rarified air of a bunch of smart, excited, creative people misbehaving intelligently in the same building. It’s going to be fucking great.