It’s amazing how eating a bat (or whatever it was) can be so disruptive to our lives.

Today marks 16 days that our team has worked from home. Amazingly we haven’t gone crazy, lost all of our files, gone into melt down or completely lost contact with everyone.

Ness, our design director, sat in a 20-something-way chat with a bunch of designers yesterday via Zoom. They spoke about the industry and how we’ve all been effected – those with clients in the music and hospitality industry hit hardest. Of course it’s not just the design industry feeling the pressure to stay afloat. It’s an eye opener to see how fragile the economy can be and how much we all need each other to survive. But this is not going to be a depressing post about doom and gloom and COVID-19 – i’m sure you’ve all read enough about that crap and who wants to be sad on day 16 of isolation? In the wise words of that woman we can’t remember the name of and who is now immortalised as a meme ‘ain’t no body got time for that’!

Let’s look at some positives out of all this…

Like many, the work coming into the studio has slowed (for now), but the functional side of our design studio is still motoring along quite well. We still have our morning WIPs via Google Hangouts, we still chat all day about things we’re working on (thanks Slack) and we still seem to be connected to our server (Google Drive saving the day…). On a personal note we’ve got more time for our kids (ahhh kids and working from home, what a magical combo…), we’ve cut our travel time down to literally nothing and we’re saving a fortune on take away coffee, lunches and petrol. Positive, positive, positive!

So how is being ‘isolated’ from your team going to positively benefit an office environment?

As a business we’re quite risk adverse. All of the decisions that grew our business came from a need to adapt to a situation we found ourselves in. ‘Situations’ forced us to employ legends, seek advice from legends and do amazing things. Let’s look at this ‘crisis’ as another opportunity. Already we’re seeing the benefits from being forced to embrace a different way of working. Given all of the online tools we have available to us (and human contact aside), being isolated has taken on an entirely different meaning. Although there is still something irreplaceable about face to face collaboration, especially in the design industry, the fact that remote working as a team (not just an individual) can be practical and functional as another option is exciting. Forcing industries to look at delivering their services and products creatively is exciting.

The only thing left to do is find a way to deal with being cooped up at home and keep an air of normalcy during the working day. Here are our tips on how to do that. If you’d like a copy of this to use or pass along to your team, email us or fill out the form below and we’ll send you a copy you can print.

Stay safe and connected everyone!