On numerous occasions my team and I have been together in our office meeting room on a zoom call with clients who are fascinated with the fact we are still coming into the office 5 days a week.
We don't enforce this within our team (employees are welcome to work from home if life needs it!) and yet almost every day our whole team enters our brightly pink lit office ready for the day ahead. Since 2020 we seem to have become a rare breed of workers who are still very eager to enter the office 5 days a week. I feel the hybrid and working from home lifestyle has been stealing the limelight in these most recent years. It’s time to showcase the positives of a 5-day office week and let it make a comeback for those who have been craving it.
Since the pandemic we have inevitably seen the increase of remote and hybrid working within companies across the UK. Over 20 million people worked remotely for UK companies in 2021. I can see the benefits of this working lifestyle and have reaped the benefits first hand (I have never had so many clean clothes in my wardrobe at the same time!) but equally, for us as a creative agency, we feel there are more positives to working in the office together than there are negatives.
Collaboration
Collaboration as a creative team is a vital part of how we can produce the best work we can. Allowing ourselves the freedom to brainstorm, present, sketch, laugh, shout and cry with each other in a face-to-face environment gives us the light bulb moments that I feel only happen when you aren’t confined to a 1 hour zoom call meeting whilst in your pyjamas on the sofa.Being able to walk across the office to someone’s desk and quickly ask for their opinion on what you are working on, gives the fluidity a creative environment thrives on to achieve exciting and trailblazing projects. It has been said, face-to-face communication is more effective than written or audio only conversations. This is because seeing one another allows us to pick up on non-verbal cues and body language. A lot of communication is nonverbal so being able to see each other (without bad WIFI cutting each other up!) allows for an easier workflow. We find at DCTR we overhear exciting ideas from across the room and give each other the chance to pitch ideas, even when the project may not be their own! Input from all areas gives us the chance to truly explore the project openly.
Purpose
Whilst conducting a quick survey around our team, all members felt coming into the office gave them a purpose and a clear mind set to begin their work. K2 Space company recently wrote about the positives of an office space and how it gave a sense of purpose. They quoted a Mckinsey study“82% of employees felt that it’s important for their company to have a sense of purpose, and more than two thirds of employees felt that their own sense of purpose was at least in part defined by their work.” I feel this really highlights how important it is to provide employees with a space they feel safe, supported, and listened to, to make sure they feel their input to their everyday work matters. The way in which the working day can start when you enter the office and can end when you leave grants simple boundaries which again reiterates the feeling of your purpose.
Room to work
It seems like an obvious comment to make but the importance of having your own desk/workspace seems to increase job satisfaction and inevitably helps productivity. A recent study from Stanford University, for example, showed that only49% of American workers log-in remotely from a dedicated room, while the remaining 51% are working either from their bedroom or a communal area. You can easily assume Americans in general have far bigger homes than the UK so who knows where the Brits are working at home! Being able to set up your desk ergonomically and technically correct can help both mentally and physically in the long run. The luxury of leaving your notebook and laptop on your desk at work and coming in the next day to it not being moved has now become a vital pro when it comes to the office vs working-from-home debate.
Inclusivity
Being altogether in an office can naturally allow social interactions to occur and gives us the chance to really build relationships within our teams. According to a May 2021 study by the American PsychiatricAssociation, nearly two thirds of people who spent at least some time working from home say they’ve felt isolated or lonely from time to time. For 17%,that’s a constant feeling. I believe the small office banter interactions are vital to build effective teamwork and help encourage loyalty with the company and peers. It also can boost productivity as the team does not feel pressured/guilt stricken to be working constantly within their 8-hour days.Having a quick, light-hearted chat about non-working topics can ease stress of deadlines and put things into perspective. It can also allow the team to really learn the ways in which their colleagues work as productively as possible.Understanding each other’s work processes and ways they communicate can reduce the time it takes to brief, brainstorm or present. At DCTR we encourage a good balance between non work chat and work discussion throughout the day. One of our 4 values is “Real” which we try to uphold both client facing and back in the studio. We follow this up with a few team outings scattered throughout the year to make sure the team get to know one another before heading back into the office.
Let’s be honest, there are lots of benefits when it comes to working from home and I understand it depends on numerous work and personal life factors as to how people work best. Here at DCTR the 5-day office week remains our best strategy and we will continue to do so if it works for our whole team! So, if you are ever in the Surrey area Mon-Fri please pop in as you know where we will be….
