When you say you work in communications on a first date, or when your friends ask you about your job on weekend, there’s a kind of cloud around you, have you noticed?
Halfway between 99 Francs (already 20 years old!) and the fantasies about Google and Silicon Valley, you represent a kind of avant-gardist, creative, passionate, and cool elite (emoji here?)
So naturally, the ping-pong table, the flex office, brainstorming sessions and escape games with colleagues are all familiar to you.
So what a surprise when your manager refuses you your 1/2/3 days of teleworking per week (tick the box)… You ask yourself:
Why are some agencies reluctant to telework?
You are equipped for it. And it helped you to finish the Panzano reco or to answer the L’Oréole customer the day you were waiting for the Darty delivery man or when Junior had chickenpox.
You have a nice Mac Book Pro for this purpose. An iPhone 48. And all-round access to the agency’s drive. You even know how to redirect calls from your landline to your mobile phone in 15 seconds with your left hand (you challenged yourself one night at a cocktail party, but that’s not the point).
Rest assured, you are not alone. Surprisingly, many agencies (digital or not) are still reluctant to let their employees work remotely all or part of the week.
At the time of the Covid, and after a period of confinement in which everyone had started to get into the swing of things, it seems surprising that once the alert was over, all these service sector employees, kings of intellectual services, were asked to return to their offices, with public transport as a bonus.
Why but why? Let’s take a look at the suggestions.
Suggestion n°1: we have to be together physically to create value in the agency.
First of all, that’s what you suppose.
Brainstorming is better when we’re all in the war room, sweating it out on the Burger Queen reco
We exchange, we argue, we get carried away and we end up finding the three tracks we want for tomorrow. And then, how can we give feedback to Ben from the creative process without standing next to him for half a day, sharing breath and Haribo?
Not to mention the Monday co’ meeting which is unmissable!
Since the 2000s, however, researchers have repeatedly shown that the belief that group effort produces more creativity is a myth.
An analysis of 241 different studies involving 24,000 subjects in the Psychological Bulletin concluded that the presence of others had almost no effect on task performance, and certainly not in the way Osborn had hoped.
The presence of others “increases the rapidity of execution of simple tasks and decreases the rapidity of complex tasks”
Suggestion n°2: Teleworking ruins team cohesion?
You applied here after seeing the Insta photos of the parties and subscribing to the agency’s Snapchat. Obviously, when you are 30 years old ( +-10 years), the atmosphere, the relationships between colleagues are important.
“You like to talk about your holidays during the coffee break. Discover the little restaurant in the area that-doesn’t-look-good-but-is-too-good with them. And round off the intense weeks of a well-deserved afterwork.
And yet, several agencies have opted for teleworking, and some have even given up their offices following the lockdown! Physical meetings in the form of teambuilding or seminars are thus regularly organised. And this seems to be quite successful for the employees…
Obviously, we are social animals and need contact with others, but with the latest confinement, it appeared that a kind of professional conviviality could also exist in a virtual mode.
Suggestion n°3: The distance are holidays for the teams.
The major obstacle to teleworking, whether admitted or not, is sometimes the belief of managers that productivity will collapse.
And this is often true if the organisation is not rethought: still too often, company executives and managers of divisions operate at loss. They don’t know exactly what their employees do every day, and ignorance inevitably leads to fear. Because from far away, it is impossible to check from a distance how busy Martine or Franck are.
We can understand that in March the situation took the agency owners by surprise. Nobody expected a pandemic, and certainly not a lockdown.
Since then, some companies have managed to get out of the game and move forward. These are the most agile structures, the most capable of adapting and rethinking their organisation and operating methods.
The size here can have an impact, but not necessarily. Small agencies may be stuck in a historical mode of operation… while large groups have been quick to equip themselves with the right tools and processes.
At Furious, we were fortunate to be particularly in demand at that time.
Indeed, many agencies were not prepared to manage remote operations… As a result, some of them found themselves completely blind during this period, and the issues are numerous:
- Performance management
- Customer relationship management
- Planning
- KPI’s
- HR Management
- Absence and leave management
- Invoicing, etc…
However, it is crucial for operational staff to be supported and for managers to be assisted in their remote supervision. We have therefore worked hard to ensure that our new clients can take advantage of the situation to reorganise and digitise their processes and tools.
And it works! Ready to try?Contact us!
