Lockdown and the challenges of making work work

"Hi there. How are you? Weird, isn't it? Are you bearing up OK? Hang on - sorry, I'll just close the door. Yeah, they're a bit stir crazy. Right, that's better. No, they're fine really... It IS weird though. Do you know if anyone else is joining? Ah, here's Karen now..."

Is this who we are now? It's exhausting, isn't it? Every interaction seems to start this way, though we've adapted pretty quickly. After all, it's what we do in this business, right? Adapt. All that shifting landscape, constant change, blah blah stuff. Personally, though, I'd like to forget about that stuff for a while. Call me cynical, but I'm not convinced by the certainties of trend-spotters five weeks into a crisis where the world's changed completely but every day feels exactly the same. I'm going for the longer view on that one.

But I do think there's another form of adapting that we were always pretty good at, and which is worthy of examination right now. I'm talking about the persistent, low-level, intangible adapting we all used to do, without really thinking about it, as we shifted from mode to mode throughout the day. We would adapt all the time, wouldn't we? To situations, job roles, contexts. To the different people we’re asked to become throughout the day.

It was - and is - particularly true for planners. We need empathy in equal parts for clients, customers and creatives, and authoritativeness when the time is right. Then there's the different modes we adopt for the different aspects of our role. Researching. Brainstorming. Building an argument. Relationship-building. Presenting. A working day would usually mean having a crack at some or all of these, with and without other people, and moving between different places in order to do them.

So as we all sit in lockdown, rooted to the same seat, interacting in the same way regardless of the purpose of our work, I wanted to understand the effect isolation is having on the invisible, human factors that used to make work work. The soft skills with hard impact. Listening, collaborating, presenting, creating. Leading. How do you do these things without everything we used to take for granted, like eye contact, body language, the serendipity of corridor conversations? How can we transcend the constraints of admittedly incredible technology to replicate what it felt like to properly work together? And how can we be all the people we need to be when all our work is happening in the same way?

To investigate this, I wanted to talk to other people and get a rounded view. I've interviewed planners, creatives, clients, start-up advisors and service designers. Between them they work in media, advertising, marketing and digital transformation. They represent agencies of 600+ people and fifty. All are very smart people whose work relies on effective connections with others. Some of the companies they work for were already used to distributed teams and remote working; others are learning for the first time what works and what doesn't. For some the shift has focused on people, for others it's about the work. What's clear is that everyone's experience of lockdown is unique, yet there are challenges everyone shares.

I'm going to introduce those shared challenges in a minute, and I will explore them in more detail in subsequent posts, but first I'll explain why I wanted to do this. There are two reasons and the first is pretty straightforward: coronavirus meant my previous role was made redundant a couple of weeks ago. I experienced the first two or three weeks of lockdown - by which I mean the insane noise of Slack, the need to make strategic decisions with no map, the creeping sense of despair at one's own face on the seemingly limitless number of video calls - but right now I am unemployed. Researching and writing this series has been a way of staying in touch not just with people I like and respect, but with the idea of what work feels like right now. It's pretty easy to withdraw. But I want to return to work quickly, so a sense of the challenges businesses and teams face in shipping work is a way of staying match-fit, I guess. Maybe it might even be useful. Everyone I spoke to seemed to appreciate the chance to reflect, and while all were open and candid with me I do get the sense that it's hard for anyone to look beyond their own situation right now. Maybe if others feel that way too, perhaps they will also welcome the chance to hear those reflections.

The second reason for doing this is that what's interested me about my work lately is not just the work of planning and creating communications, but engineering and influencing the conditions where it can happen. Partly that's down to my career so far. I've led strategy teams at agencies with many different prefixes — media, advertising, digital, CRM — and seeing the similarities and differences that cut across disciplines helps you get better at knowing what mode a given moment requires. It's put me in agencies of different sizes and very different cultures too, so I've become fascinated by what motivates people, by what they want from leaders, colleagues and partners, and by the critical factors beyond craft and knowledge that make them effective at what they do.

Here's what I mean. Last year I experienced a greater range of new stuff in one go than ever before. I spent 2019 feeling like three very different people, all at the same time:

• Person 1 was the guy leading communications planning for Cabinet Office’s Brexit campaign. Yes, that one. The activity you all saw, telling you to GET READY, and a load of stuff you probably didn’t because you don't work in fishing or haulage or data protection or any number of sectors we had to reach along with the general public. It was a unique experience, constructing a campaign in real time against a backdrop of near constitutional crisis. And I, along with an amazing team, was responsible for advising senior marketing and policy officials on spending what had been trailed as the single biggest public information campaign spend since WW2. The lesson? Behind the politics are some talented and stressed civil servants who don't need your hot take on Westminster gossip right now; they just need your opinion on the right thing to do. You are consultant, confidante, and backstop (no, not that kind - though does anyone even remember that phrase now?). And guess what, your smart strategy needs to be understood by people who'll never hear you present it, so you better write simply, write clearly, and provide documents that travel. Oh and no one has been here before, so get over it.
• Person 2 was the agency planner embedded in the B2B marketing team of one of the UK's biggest banks. Everyone who's worked like this says how useful a perspective it is, and they're right. Aside from seeing how things worked, I wrote briefs to myself, which was a test of my confidence, and to one of the best creative agencies in the UK, which was even more so. (It's tough when there's no one else to blame.) I worked with internal planners on their stories to 'the business' - your clients' clients that you never think about. I ran workshops with the client team to work out what their brief might be about. I had greater access to stakeholders which made it easier to understand the priorities and to hook agency thinking onto them. The take out? Context changes all the time, in incremental ways you don't notice from the outside. Take the time to listen. Understand how decisions get made. Everyone needs help with something, but everyone can be of help in some way, so lean on each other - there'll be a better balance that way
• Person 3, who lived somewhere in the gaps left by the other two, was the person who devised and delivered presentation training for more than 70 people in one of the UK’s biggest media agencies. It was a day-long course helping people harness the techniques of storytelling to create more persuasive presentations. I pitched it to the CSO, who said yes, and suddenly I was an in-house trainer. The days were intimate, fun, stretching. I was nervous, no one knew what to expect and they looked to me to tell them. I learned to be what delegates needed me to be. Turns out writing a presentation properly, or influencing any audience, entails the opening up of all kinds of invisible issues: self-confidence, workplace norms, stress, thwarted dreams. Those PowerPoint decks you see every day conceal lot of anxieties, and people appreciate oblique ways to poke at stuff like that, so creating a safe space for these things to bubble up became a huge part of the role. At the start I was a bumbling mess of ego (look what I know!) and doubt (why would anyone listen to me?), but after a while I found the rhythm of the day, and also its meaning, and the confidence to let people uncover it for themselves, and so eventually I felt I had some credibility. What did I learn? That having done it was the thing that most made me feel legitimate doing it. And that leaving room for those who are learning is the best possible way to teach. Both are counter-intuitive, both are invaluable to know.

So that was 2019. Entirely different environments, entirely different modes of working, and an entirely more rounded view of how work makes its way through companies and ultimately into the world. And now in 2020 we face... whatever THIS is. A time when work isn't so much making its way through companies as snagging itself on the door handle of every virtual meeting room. When what's making its way into the world is a series of identikit press ads and zoom-based ads hate-copied from that celebrity Imagine video. Inspiration, energy and imagination are thin on the ground right now, which is completely understandable, and it's precisely the reason we need to find a way to overcome the blockers isolation has put up to collaboration, to creativity, to effective communication.

And this is why I wanted to write this series. I've been lucky enough to have had a front row seat at what is now merely the last 'unprecedented' crisis before this one. I've been exposed to what can help and what can chip away at client-agency relationships from both sides. And I've helped people take a step back from the tools on which they're overly reliant, to think more effectively about what and how they want to communicate.

As much as the situation is horrible for everyone, it's fertile territory for anyone interested in the way work works.

My intention is to write three more posts after this one, each going in-depth into a different aspect of our remote work experience. I'll try to capture the experiences of the smart and senior people I spoke to, as they adapt to work under lockdown. If I keep to my intended schedule I'll be posting one a day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) so watch this space.

To give a flavour of what's coming up, here's the precis of what I'll cover.

• The next post will be about how we are communicating with each other. I'll look at the impact that excessive use of video calls is having and how to manage it. We'll see how the constraints of presenting over video might counter-intuitively be generating better practice. And we'll examine the value of micro-interactions and the stresses isolation puts on stakeholder relationships.
• Then we'll look at creating work together. We'll look at what we're losing as creative teams and partners work remotely, and we'll see how people from different disciplines are using different tools and techniques to stay productive.
• Finally we'll look at leadership and teams. I'll share some challenges that people are experiencing and look at what it means to lead teams when you can't be together. We'll talk about comms channels, behaviours, and what to think about when everyone wants you to know what to do.

I hope this sounds interesting, and I look forward to hearing your own experiences too.

The first in-depth post of the series, on communicating and connecting with each other, is here. Please do read and I'd love to read any responses you'd like to share.