Nuclear-powered introvert though I am, I’m happy (or was, at least, pre-pandemic) to visit clients’ offices for meetings and creative sessions. I even have, on occasion, worked in those offices for extended periods of time. (Shout out to the client who brought me in to essentially be The Boss for three entire days. I was tough but fair.) I like the occasional chance to actually engage with people in person from time to time.
And then go home and work from there, because it’s so much better and my output, and the success of my relationship with my client, is no worse and even, arguably, better.
MIT Sloan Management Review gets it. A recent article tells us that “Virtual Collaboration Won’t Be the Death of Creativity” — that, in fact, it actually “has the potential to improve group creativity and ideation, despite diminished in-person communication.” I loved to read it, because that’s stuff I’ve been saying for years now, but people are more likely to believe it when it comes from the mouth of some expert. (I mean, yes, these folks actually are experts, with evidence, and not just A Person working solely from anecdata, but whatever, the important thing is that we agree.)
As much as agencies have successfully worked with fully remote freelancers, and occasionally freed an employee or two to work from home (as long as they stay on leash), remote creative work is something our industry has, until now, never really explored in depth. We haven’t had to — for all that our industry is about innovation, we, like pretty much every other industry, can be slow to adopt innovative business practices when what we’re doing appears to be working.
Then came COVID. Having no other option than to work remote has forced us to examine a new concept we could have been examining this whole time. And… it’s working.
In which I whine about working in offices
In discussions of the benefits of freelancing, the first items mentioned are almost always setting your own hours and working wherever you want. But those benefits, and others, aren’t just about sleeping until ten and working at the beach. For a lot of people — people, not just freelance people — not being in an office is just more conducive to good work.
Respondents to a recent survey cite a number of different motivations for working remote. It’s good to be able to flex hours, to avoid life distractions and focus on work at times of peak productivity. It’s good be able to arrange workspaces for peace, privacy, and productivity in a way that just isn’t possible in even the prettiest of exposed-brick-wall cube farms. It’s good to be able to work without a supervisor popping up to make sure you’re never not on task. Conventional wisdom tells us that anyone deviating from an uninterrupted workday grind is a slack-ass slacker, thus companies’ fetish about in-office work and constant supervision — which is not only unnecessary but actually damaging.
So yeah, freelancers know what’s up.
But you don’t have to be a freelancer to benefit from those benefits. Office-bound creatives are people, too, and many would work well in that kind of environment — and would still be able to do good work, hit deadlines, and communicate responsively all the while. Now that we’ve been forced into a remote-work situation, agencies are starting to discover that fact. And they’re also starting to discover that having creatives working remote doesn’t necessarily affect the quality of the work.
In fact, according to MIT, it can actually make it better.
In which I let the actual experts opine because, y’know, experts
MIT’s study looks at business creativity in general, but advertising creatives are already abundantly familiar with many of their points. We know all about novel and useful ideas — that’s literally the product we provide to our clients, in the form of advertising creative. And we know creativity isn’t purely an inherent talent but is also influenced by things like mindset.
Something we might not know, but that (according to MIT) a lot of studies bear out, is that individuals tend to be more creative than groups. Our industry so often focuses on group creativity, in the form of concepting meetings, to generate ideas, and as someone who’s been in one or a hundred of those, I can testify that they’re effective. But they are, as the article notes, subject to cross-talk and drowning out of certain voices. Providing time (and flexibility) for individual creative-ing, along with the technological constraints that discourage Zoom cross-talk, have the potential to funnel creatives into a more creative (and more productive) working environment.
Some of the “benefits” presented in the article, of course, are more suited to the general business world than to the requirements of the ad industry specifically. Extra time constraints may or may not be helpful, depending on the needs of the project, and a “do not explain ideas” rule is definitely not going to get a creative project to a successful end. But although the article’s business-focused conclusions don’t always track, the actual information can provide guidance.
We can use the limitations of Zoom to make sure every voice and idea can be heard (if it wants to be). We can give people time, flexibility, and un-micromanaged privacy to come up with ideas. We can set up ways to anonymize ideas, to avoid sentences that start with “This might be totally stupid, but…” We can bring in newcomers to spark and inform new discussions. We can be not just as good as we’ve always been, but even better.
Don’t take my word for it. The experts right there just said so.
In which I talk about me again
One thing the article notes in passing is that the ideas it presents can also help improve face-to-face collaboration. Of course, we don’t know when face-to-face collaboration will even be possible again. And even when it is possible, chances are, we’ll have figured out, as an industry, how necessary it often isn’t.
There are things about in-person meetings that you can’t really replicate over Zoom, and that I, at least, do miss from my agency days. Working late and ordering pizza? Being nice and sharing the thinking putty like we learned in kindergarten? Surreptitiously doodling possibly inappropriate things over someone else’s whiteboard doodle? They aren’t completely essential to the creative process, but they’re nice, and they’re bonding, and they’re in-person only.
But there are things that only remote creative collaboration can provide. A fellow creative who has to move away doesn’t have to stop being a part of the team just because they don’t live in town anymore. A baby creative living in an advertising desert doesn’t have to move to The Big City(TM) to be able to get their career started. If new voices are needed (and y’all, new voices are always needed), they can be looped in in an instant, no matter where they are.
(And if you want to, like, hire a freelancer in Birmingham even though you’re way far away from Birmingham, you can do that.)
It’s great to see official, research-backed confirmation of what advertising freelancers have known forever: Remote creative work doesn’t just work — it can even work better. Despite the hardship our industry has been facing for the past year, we can still (safely) get our work done, and do it well. And after this is all over, we’ll have a new tool to continue doing it well. And unlike a table saw, we won’t have to be wearing pants to use it.