How Creative Clicks is Returning to the Office
“The last 20 months have provided many challenges,” said Creative Clicks HR Manager Thomas Bickes.
“But out of these challenges came the opportunity to define work patterns to better suit our employees, partners, and clients. And one of the opportunities was to focus on specific functional teams, which is empowering our individual employees,” added Thomas.
It starts with the team
At Creative Clicks, we’re working with every employee in every office to make sure that we address all their needs and concerns - personal, health-wise, and professional - before bringing them back to the office. With a company philosophy that revolves around personal and professional development, and social connections, we believe in the value of bringing teams working together back into the office together. That’s why teams will now work either three days in the office and two days away or four days in the office and one day away.
At CC, we use the 7 Cs to enable each team to structure tasks based on when the team is together in the office or while team members are working away:
Collective (in the office as a team):
- Creativity: Jointly developing and shaping new ideas
- Collaboration: Quickly asking a question without hesitation
- Coaching: Guiding and learning on the fly
- Coffee machine talks: Getting to know colleagues (better), hearing what they’re working on, belonging to a social group
- Coordination and Communication: Jointly coordinating projects and tackling issues
Individual (while working away from the office):
- Concentration: Doing focused work without distractions
- Calls with external parties: Having digital meetings with external parties without other colleagues
Beyond the 7 Cs, for junior employees, the value of working together in the office three or four days/week is a central part of their professional development. And personal employee development is very important to us at CC. More senior employees benefit from in-office time to show others what needs to be done to ensure that each member of the team understands their role and the tasks which need to be completed to service Creative Clicks’ clients.
Zoom is an excellent application, and we’ll continue to schedule meetings via Zoom, Skype, etc., but this can’t, and it shouldn’t replace working side-by-side with your team permanently.
The truth is not every team’s work can be 100% structured, particularly in a client-facing and dynamic industry like marketing. So team members will reply to emails from the office, and we’ll still hold Zoom calls to collaborate on projects which arise on days when the team is out of the office.
Teams bond
One of the benefits of the team-focused approach we’ve undertaken at Creative Clicks is the creation of close relationships within teams. This has enabled some junior employees to receive more effective guidance than they previously did.
As someone who has been working in human resources for more than a decade, I believe that the team approach we’re adopting is best-suited for all of our employees. I’ve seen many examples where this approach helped a more junior employee get important mentorship on an issue that was challenging them. And I’ve watched senior employees able to take on new opportunities due to teamwork and collaboration with more junior employees. Everyone is benefitting from this approach.
Company-wide community is important, too
Beyond team bonding, creating a sense of community is also important at Creative Clicks. That’s why all employees are in the office on Fridays (or the last day of the week). We schedule social activities on Fridays to ensure that employees interact with one another across teams to build our community at CC, which is part of our DNA.
Though we have all experienced new challenges over this period, it’s important to continuously revisit how we work to make sure that it works for employees, clients, and partners. And as American founding father Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Out of adversity comes opportunity.”
