Well that was emotional!

In the last 14 months, I can count the number of times I’ve been into work on one hand. So Tuesday was quite emotional for a trip to work, as we had our first trial of hybrid working in the studio, meaning it was the first time I’d physically seen colleagues I’ve cherished working with for nearly two decades, in well over a year.

It was amazing being able to have conversations with my relaxed eyes, not focusing on a bright screen a foot in front of me all day long. It was beautiful to have incidental, casual chats with colleagues on various teams, that wasn’t on a clunky pre-arranged, agenda’d video call. It was all the small things that add up to the big thing - office culture.

There is a lot of talk of a workplace revolution, but I see this very much as an expedited evolution. 

At Blue Zoo, for years we’ve been unpicking bad habits of legacy workplace norms. Avoiding clocking in at set hours or having a list of rules of dos and don’t on company forums. Instead, we have one rule: treat our employees like adults. This means trusting our colleagues as sensible humans tasked with delivering their agreed work, on time at the quality expected. If someone deviates from that, they are spoken to privately, not blanket messaged as a group or in front of a group.

So with that approach, if someone’s got a job to do at a computer, and they can communicate well and deliver as agreed, why does it matter when or where they do it? It doesn’t. So pre-Covid we’ve been encouraging regular part-time working from home for some time, to allow deep focus away from office interruptions, working their preferred hours with commute-free days.

As a byproduct of this, before Covid, we evaluated several video conferencing platforms and found Zoom to be most robust. Therefore in 2019, a large majority of our senior staff were hybrid working, using Zoom.

So when the pandemic hit in early 2020, largely due to this simple mindset, we didn’t have to scramble and rapidly invent new ways of working, we just had to rapidly scale from 20% of the studio remote working on a day or two per week, to 100% of the studio remote working for 100% of the week. No small task, but our trusty IT team pulled it off without complaint.

So 14 months on, has it been hard? Yes. Has it been exhausting? Yes. Has it been as productive? Depends on what team you ask. And that’s the crux of it. We celebrate diversity as a core value, and that means celebrating different individual work styles, which means allowing not just individuals to flex their preference, but whole teams. If someone’s not a morning person, why on earth force them out of bed at 7am just because their manager is? It’s nonsense logic.

So moving to a hybrid work pattern, we’re letting teams experiment and find the right balance between individual and project demand. Some teams work at a very rapid pace of interaction due to short timespan projects and client requests constantly evolving, so thrive with effortless physical communication, therefore preferring to be together more often. Whereas other teams work more independently without rapid interaction, so can be together less often.

A hybrid office means hybrid meetings so now the focus is on how we can support this to the max; what technology we can utilise and how we can re-configure meeting room spaces to avoid the remote meeting participants feeling like second class citizens struggling to participate.

But one inescapable element that works best with physical proximity is training. There is no passive learning taking place when everyone is siloed to the max, meaning our remote trainees are taking five times as long to learn the ropes. Casually over-hearing peers discover, learn and share means everyone learns quicker. Plucking up the courage to ask a senior for a Zoom call to resolve a query adds up to a lot of wasted time, or even worse, not asking at all and instead of wasting hours trying to figure it out on their own.

So there are lots of experiments to be done, new technology to try and balances to weigh. But we are focusing on how we can learn from the last year, and keeping diversity and trust at our core, as they are not virtuous platitudes; they have without a shadow of a doubt helped Blue Zoo stay ahead of the curve, benefitting our staff, our clients and business sustainability, for the last few years and hopefully far into the future.