Over eleven weeks ago, when we set out on our office journey to work from home during the pandemic crisis, as COO of a burgeoning New Jersey advertising agency I had one main goal for us: not to skip a beat. From our clients’ point of view, besides the obvious fact that we are all working from home, I didn’t want clients to notice anything different. Nothing different in our client service and especially nothing different in our level of creativity.
Luckily, from an IT standpoint, we have long had the infrastructure in place to work from home due to the severe northeast winters we usually have. Oddly enough, we did not have one snow day this year before the quarantine began! Once we started working from home due to the pandemic, there were some minor internal bumps in the road as we got acclimated, but all in all the team has been coming through with flying colors.
Since the pandemic, one thing in particular our clients seem to be interested in learning is how we’ve been able to remain collaborative as a creative team when we are socially distanced. Fortunately, with technology on our side, our creative meetings have turned into virtual creative meetings on Zoom. Also we constantly share tons of articles and random social posts on what we are reading and seeing that’s creative in the world right now.
While we’ve certainly had many team Zoom happy hours, I was also pleased to hear that staff members are starting to have Zoom lunches as well. Not to talk shop, but just to talk. A big part of what makes our creativity work as a team is how well we complement each other. So keeping up our interpersonal relationships is important.
The bottom line is I miss my staff every day, even though I speak to and see most of them (virtually) on a daily basis. I am proud of them for what we are accomplishing and the tremendous amount of creativity they are bringing to the table. After we get through this, we hope to get our ad agency staff back to the office sometime in some capacity in the future, I can’t wait to see what we’ll do with the burst of creative energy we’ll get by being together again.
