Flexible working with Grant Jennings

Hey all, hope you're having a fantastic week. It's Rob from the Agency Accelerator Podcast here with you today. And this week I'm excited to have my guest with me, Grant Jennings from Creative Blend. And we're talking everything to do with flexible working, which of course has been forced on all of us because of the virus. And we're talking about how to make it work and whether it can be a long term strategy even when we're able to go back to our offices.

So.

So I hope you find this episode useful. And let's get on with today's show.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

So this week we are talking all about remote working and flexible working in this new world that we're living in. I'm really excited to have Grant Jennings with me who runs digital marketing agency Creative Blend. So welcome to the Agency Accelerator podcast.

Grant, hi. Thanks for having me.

Do you want to kick off today by giving a bit of background on who Creative Blend is and what you do and who you serve?

Sure. So I founded Creative Blend many years ago. It was originally a freelance thing between myself and and an old colleague and over the years it's now developed into a full service digital agency. It was very important for me when I started the business that we had some form of ethical line with us and part of that is our charity commitment. So not only do we serve our clients and we've got a range of clients across different sectors, and the other part is very important to us is the charity commitment. So we spend a lot of time working with our local community. And one way we're doing that this month, excitingly, is we are working with Rise, which is obviously a local charity, and supporting them in the whole of August, helping promote their messages.

So can I just put you on the spot a bit really and ask a bit. With Creative Blend, how do you typically differentiate yourself from other sort of full service digital agencies, of which of course, there are many.

So what we always aim to do and when we know we've sort of done a good job is we always look to ingrain ourselves with our clients. So, you know, if anyone's ever read any of our Google reviews, you'll notice there's a bit of a reoccurring trend where people are saying it's like they are an extension of our wider team. We always aim to go in there. Any clients that we work with on a retainer basis, we always try to ingrain Ourselves as much as we can. We, you know, we have never been. Yes. People. So if a client comes to us and says this is what we want to do, we always look at the data, we'll look at the evidence, we'll look at it from a usability and accessibility standpoint and always provide feedback and say, look, you know, it's not necessarily the right call. Even if that means we don't get the job or it means that we don't end up working with that particular client at that time, we know we've sort of hit our ethical line and the element that we like to look at is sort of more of a humanity working with our clients.

Yeah, so that's such a good thing to hear because when people are in a competitive space, like most marketing agencies are, there's a tendency, unless they are very niche, there's a tendency to look like everybody else. And that. The danger about that, of course, is it can be a bit of a race to the bottom and in terms of pricing and clients can see you as a kind of commoditized supplier and then you end up in this very imbalanced customer supplier relationship where they kind of beat you up and, you know, see you as providing a very tactical service. Whereas if, of course, like you're saying you can go in at the beginning and build a very sort of strategic consultative relationship, then it enables you to have a more equal balance. Partner. Partner relationship. Would you say that's kind of. Kind of what your experience is?

Oh, definitely. Majority of our clients now, they know they can talk to us about anything, you know, and it's not a case of they come to us and say, this is what you're going to do now, and we will achieve that, no questions asked. They will come to us with ideas and say, look, what do you think of this? And we'll tear it down. Or we'll say, look, that's not exactly a great idea because of X, Y and Z. But actually, why, why don't you take it down this route? And it's quite an open, honest, respectful conversation almost amongst peers, you know, so it's, yeah, it's, it's, It's a lovely relationship we share.

Good. So let's move on to a very, very, very topical conversation that I know many people are having, I'm having with my clients. And that is about flexible working and remote working. Because I guess before coronavirus, this was sort of a term banded around and some companies might have had some sense of flexible working in terms of the hours, people Coming to the office or whatever, or even working at home one day a week. But then the virus has completely flipped this on its head and forced us all to look at that. And so I'm interested to know what your views are about it and how Creative Blend have focused on that before the virus and during. And now, as we come into the new normal, hopefully on the tail end of the virus. What does that look like? What does a new normal look like for Creative Blend?

Historically, ever since the sort of beginning and the sort of founding of the company, we've never looked to have a business where we have everybody in the office all the time. 9 to 5, 30, you must be here at all times. A lot of the team are developers, so they like their personal space. They don't want to be in a noisy, very busy, you know, disruptive atmosphere. They just want to put the headphones on, get the head down and just get it done. Now, obviously, that is quite a generalization, but we find if offered and if flexible, our developers work better in those environments. We've got, you know, developers who were originally down in Sussex and now they've moved, still work in the team. They're just remotely. And then the way that works is that they will come down for client meetings, kickoffs and all of those type of elements, but the rest of it is all done remote. There's no. You must be in the office every day or four days a week. If they've got a lot to do, then they want to get their head down.

So let me ask you a few questions about that, because obviously that will be a similar situation for many agencies now. But I guess I've got three questions about this. First of all, have you seen people's productivity go up or stay the same or go down during the pandemic? How do you create accountability with team members when they're working remotely? And also, how do you create that sense of community that you get in an office, where you can have the office banter kind of around the virtual coffee machine and you don't have that when we're all working remotely.

The culture thing is, is something that's very important, and obviously you just have to. The way we've dealt with it is just to think about it a little bit differently. So obviously, we live, thankfully, in a very digital world now, so there are so many tools that you can use to keep in contact. And, you know, we have a team Slack, which I think probably most agencies do, and there are channels in there that are nothing to do with work. It Might be that you've saw something really Funny on YouTube the other day and you want to post it in there and then that starts a discussion, or it might just be you've got an event going on or you want people to sort of meet up and go and do something, whatever it might be. The other thing that we've always had in place to try and keep that community and that sense of togetherness, if you like, is having every year two parties. So we always have a summer party and then a winter party. And that is an opportunity for the companies put on a bit of an event for people to come from wherever they are working, all come together, break bread, have a few drinks, have a, you know, enjoy an activity and generally speaking, just chat, just get together and just talk. Can't say during any of those summer parties I've ever heard anyone talking about work. And from a cultural standpoint, that is incredibly important, you know, that they do feel quite comfortable with each other.

How will you go about replicating that at the moment where you obviously can't have a summer party really at the moment, or maybe not even a winter party, or can you still do that in a slightly different way?

It isn't easy because I think with everybody, most people are now getting a little bit jaded with Zoom and Skype and so on and so forth. So early on, you know, we put out the idea of having a team quiz, but a few people got involved and a few people jumped on it. But then others said, you know what, I'm, I'm, I've been in Zoom meetings all day and I'm just sick to the back teeth of it now. Now that was very early days, you know, that was maybe sort of March time. We were looking at doing April. And yeah, I think it was one of those things where we, we attempted to take sort of a digital step, but you can't replace getting together. And I think what, as lockdown is easing now, I think one of the things we're going to look to do is try and do some sort of outdoor activity.

Okay, so that's kind of talked about the sense of community. How do you keep your team accountable when they're working remotely? Obviously if they're in the office, you can sort of look over their shoulders, you can just kind of have a casual catch up with them to see where they're at. But how do you replicate that when people are working remotely so that, you know, work's getting done, deadlines are being hit and so on?

Again, I briefly mentioned it this Idea of having a whole raft of digital tools at your disposal. Now that doesn't mean to say that it took a lot of trial and error for us what digital tools fitted, which ones didn't. And we're now at a place where, you know, we've got a good little selection that the team are quite comfortable with. I'm comfortable with using those tools. Everybody has a deadline. They know they are accountable to deliver that piece of work. Now from a truly flexible working standpoint, if someone has to go and, I don't know, take care of their child in the morning, as long as they achieve that deadline, they are accountable for that being delivered. They're aware of that and they will spend the time and get it done. And as with many agencies, we just have constant check ins. So every week there is, you know, a developer check in where we sit down and have a bit of a chat, go through everything, what's on the agenda and if there are any blockers, are there any problems and move forward from there.

So I think that that's good. And it's, you said that you've been gone through sort of a process of trial and error to work out what tools would work to help create this accountability. I guess give you like a dashboard of what's going on so you know, you know who's working on what, what the deadlines are.

Yeah.

So could you recommend any tools to listeners that you think are good to help achieve this?

One of the biggest tools that we've found really works for us is Trello. A lot of people have probably used Trello for a multitude of reasons. We use that not only sort of internally to look at Creative blend related matters, but also for all of our clients as well. The reason being is it just allows that complete transparency, you know, who is doing what job, when they're going to do it, what the deadlines are and it has a really good audit trail. So if something is stuck, any member of the team can put. Grant, could you please step in here? Because I can't get past this particular element and then that notifies me, it comes through on my email and it's all very nicely joined up. The other thing that I think will change quite a lot is obviously at the moment where people are used to working in offices, they have internal drives, but working remotely now that's going to be very difficult. It's going to become harder and harder with everyone trying to get through on a VPN and it just becoming quite slow. So one of the things we've always had is Dropbox, which obviously is very popular and that allows anybody in the team to access any file so they're not held up in any way.

You talked about Trello and talked about the fact that you'll get your clients to use them. How much do you. Do you ever get any resistance from clients? If you. That's sort of a brand new tool that they've got to use.

We haven't. No. We've certainly got some clients who like it more than others, but those clients who don't use it as frequently are the ones who perhaps just want the job done and they don't necessarily need to know how it got done, they just want it to be done. They don't want to check in, they don't want to see what's going on. They just need to know that this thing was delivered at this time.

In a way, it's a bit of a loaded question for me because we just launched the latest round of our group coaching program, the self running agency. And one of the tools we use for the discussion is Slack. And I've had a couple of people on the program go, I hate using Slack. And they just won't sign up to this, which is a bit frustrating because they end up missing out on part of the sort of value of the program. Sadly, I haven't found a better alternative to create that sort of discussion community than Slack.

It's a tough one, part of a networking group, but you had to download an application in order to join.

Yeah.

And that gives push notifications throughout the day and it is very easy to use. Slack does take a bit of time to get used to, but it is really helpful. But you know, with all of this, you do need to sort of balance this idea of purely using digital with the human side.

Yeah. And of course it's all about how you implement it, isn't it? You know, if you implement it with the right kind of cultural overlay, then people will accept it and use it in the way that it's supposed to be used. But it doesn't replace conversations, does it?

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, a really important step we've taken with all of the tools we've implemented is holding a vote, letting it settle for a little bit, see how people get on and then just generally asking people, you know, how are you getting on with that tool? Is that working for you? If you get a lot of pushback and a lot of people saying no, it doesn't, then yeah, maybe it's time to look at a different option. And we did that a lot. I mean we at the beginning went through, I think we used Monday, we used Asana and they just didn't work for us and they were a bit clunky in places. Then we found Trello and Trello worked and everyone seemed to get on with it. And there was a bit of a learning curve, but once you're past that, you know, I think the learning curve with Trello is quite a mild one, whereas the learning curve, something like Slack, is perhaps a little bit steeper.

It's interesting because a couple of my clients use use Monday and so they include me on their boards. So I get all the notifications, but I find it quite confusing. But I never really taken the time to get to know it. Any other tool recommendations? So you talked about Slack, you talked about Trello. I really like this idea of trying things and getting some feedback from everybody. But have you found any other tools besides the obvious ones like Zoom for working remotely?

Yeah. So another one that I'd really recommend, and I've used it pretty much all of my professional career, is Evernote. So Evernote's fantastic to bridge that gap where you would normally have a creative meeting or some sort of brainstorm or idea generation session. Evernote allows you to do a lot of that using their tools. So you can make up almost like mood boards and sit down together and say, look, you know, this is what I was thinking. And then people can join those boards and play around with them. Becomes quite a community based thing to look at. Now I'm aware there are other tools like that, but I've always used Evernote and found it really useful.

So the last part of my original question was has during the virus and the lockdown and remote working, have you seen productivity go up or go down or stay the same?

I think since we've been doing remote working. So before the outbreak and before the pandemic, remote working has always really worked for us people because my view on it is enough. This has been written about a lot now is getting that work. Life balance is quite difficult and it's something everybody strives for. And when people have the ability to work from home or they can be a bit flexible with their time outside of the core sort of hours, then it does make them happier because they're more comfortable in their environment. They're happier to come into work because the business has allowed them to sort of be quite flexible and treat ultimately treated them like a, like an adult. However, I think with COVID nothing to do with remote working, I think it is the outbreak. I think what I've noticed is there's so much uncertainty at the moment. It will take a bit of a toll on people's efficiency because there's so much going on in the world. I think it's great for businesses to strive to continue to grow and, you know, keep pushing forward. And it certainly is 100% the right thing to do. But I think business owners need to be aware of that.

Yeah, and of course introverts tend to enjoy working from home. Extroverts not so much. So I suppose that's another thing that we have to be mindful of, that we can't just assume that everybody feels the same way we do. Like I have always I've had an office over the years, but most recently over the last few years I've worked from a home office. So not a lot changed, except I stopped going to meet my clients face to face and did it all virtually. But I also found, especially as time went on, I found myself working longer hours and getting that zoom fatigue and missing the opportunity to go and see people face to face. I've kind of concluded that when you are working virtually over zoom with a client, you have to focus an awful lot more and concentrate an awful lot more because you have less of those visual and audio clues that you get when you're sitting face to face with somebody. So I think it's that much more exhausting. A couple of weeks ago, I had six hourly back to back zoom calls in one day and by the end of it my head was ready to explode.

After doing that, where this is something I've noticed and it's a little bit of a side step, but did you feel personally, you felt yourself in a similar sort of mindset who you normally are, did you feel a little bit more perhaps anxious or a little bit more sort of stressed by doing that?

I think probably more stressed, I felt like I didn't have that sort of decompression things, you know, like sitting in the car and driving from a client's offices to home, which is where I would typically listen to a podcast or an audiobook and just decompress. I didn't have that. And so I definitely found it more difficult and probably exhausting because you've got to concentrate that much harder and definitely not sustainable. I that day I learned it was really crazy to book six people back to back calls, each of an hour long in one day. So I won't do that again.

Thing is, I think a lot of business owners I know I certainly did at the beginning of all of this. The view to try and make, make sure the business is okay, make sure that, you know, everything's going to be okay. I really put myself out there a lot more in the initial months trying to meet as many new people as I could, you know, go on as many different events as I could. And quickly you realize actually this is, this is so much harder over Zoom. Naturally I'm quite extrovert, so I like meeting people. I get a lot from people's body language. And obviously you don't get over Zoom. And I think something does get lost. And I think to me there is, I 100% agree that businesses should be looking for this. Flexible working, treating team members as adults and trying to build a culture around that. But I do still feel there is a place for office space. I perhaps see it flipping on its head where people use the office space to collaborate and socialize so they can, so they can get that one to one contact or get that sort of personal interaction which they are, you know, we'll miss after six Zoom meetings.

Exactly. And I think this, this concept of dynamic working where, which, which is a.

Thing that a lot of my clients.

Are looking at, where they have some form of office space where people can hot desk, they can go and work from there if that's better for them than working from home. And they have some way of having a team meeting once a week or once a month or whatever. I think that like you say, that seems to be like what the new way of working is going to be. And I guess all these big serviced offices are going to think factor that in and think about the packages they offer as well.

It's going to be an interesting time. But office or no, you know, the way I think we will be set up will be the same. Allowing or having that as part of your business culture helps you bring in the best talent as well.

So it sounds to me like Creative Blend was already onto this before the virus struck. Whereas a lot of companies who were very office based suddenly and quickly had to work out how to make this work.

We were in a position just through the way I built the business originally, where every member of the team I've known for many, many years, so I think where the hesitation perhaps comes from is some businesses have this idea of, well, if someone works from home, how can I trust what they're doing? How do I know what they're doing? How do I know that they're actually spending that time doing that thing that I've asked them to do. And I think sometimes it comes down to a trust, but also a concern of how clients are going to view the fact that you work remotely or you are flexible. And for us, every member of the team, as I say, I've known for many, many years, I know their values, I know they work in a very similar way to I work or the way I work. So it wasn't a problem.

So last couple of questions, just a bit of a sidetracked question really. How have you found business during Coronavirus for you guys?

What we've noticed is clients that we had on longer term contracts with us and they already have a, you know, very strong relationship with us, they've really pushed hard to get their businesses ready for whatever lies ahead and we've been supporting them through that. So, you know, we've had businesses that have introduced membership schemes or changed how they deliver products and look at the marketing strategy behind that and the feedback loop that goes to clients. We've had clients who, as I mentioned at the beginning, we work with a lot of charities and some of the clients who are in that space have done a lot to try and bring their services that would normally be given one to one or in person online and have gone through a lot of time and effort to plan out how they can still support, support that community, but also the people who rely on them. We've been in a position where we've been quite busy trying to get things working for our clients as quickly as possible. It's been great in that sense. I certainly do think, and I'm sure a lot of agencies have seen this, speaking to a few, that because obviously one part of our business is the retained work, the other part is a lot of it is project based, so building websites or branding pieces and that type of business. The project side of things has gone quite a little bit quieter where people just need a bit more time to deliberate over what they're going to do before they take that step into building a new website or launching that new brand, whatever that might look like.

I suppose the good thing is if, as we were talking about earlier, if you've managed to build this kind of partner, partner consultancy relationship with clients, then you can be part of that process to help them figure out what they need evolving, you know, their proposition or their the way they deliver their work, rather than just being completely hands off and waiting to see, you know, if and when they're ready to start again.

Oh, definitely. And I mean some of the ideas that have come up, you know, have come from us doing our own analysis into their business without them coming to us and saying what's actually happening with everything that's happened. You do notice change in user behavior, you just will. And we've gone back to clients with that, looking at their analytics, looking at their on site recordings, looking at their heat mapping, and just said, you know, people are changing the way they interact with you now, so perhaps think about this as a new area of focus. So we've been able to feed in quite a lot like that, as you say, as part of this partnership.

Yeah, well, that's good to hear. I think I've seen some agencies who have just taken a step back and waiting to see what their clients going to do and others who are being much more proactive, who are being nimble in terms of their offering and also making sure that they keep adding value to their clients, even if their clients are kind of putting things on hold or delaying starts. So that's, that's a good thing to hear. Listen, I'm conscious of time because I try to keep these podcasts to 30 minutes. So let me just ask you the last question which I ask all of my guests on the agency accelerator podcast. And that is if you could go back in time and give your younger self just starting out in business some advice, what would it be?

The piece of advice I would give would just be, remember that people relationships are at the core of any good business. And I don't mean that just by your team are the core of the business, of course they are, but also how you conduct yourself when you are at a networking event, how you speak to people, the fact that you don't have to run a business or to be successful, be sales all the time, just helping people is enough and is a sign of your character sometimes putting people together because you see there's a need and a sort of demand there or some sort of benefit for that individual. I think it's quite common that when businesses start out, they're quite closed and they don't like to share at all. And we were certainly like that at the beginning. And I think just to be a little bit more open, remember people at the heart of this and enjoy it.

Exactly. Goodness. Good, good advice. I think if we could have that, if we all had that abundancy mindset rather than that scarcity mindset, then we would be more open. We would be looking for broader opportunities to connect our network together. And of course in the end that comes back to us. And I think it's funny because I'VE been recording a video this morning about this, and that is that, you know, people need to think about sales as a conversation rather than a hard sell process because it sort of takes the pressure off you. Because in the end, if you're having a conversation with somebody and there's a natural fit, you'll soon figure that out. And that's about building relationships. Right? So that's exactly what you're saying. Grant, if people want to get hold of you or find out more about Creative Blend, where should they go?

So they can visit our website, which is www.creative-blend.co.uk or they can drop me an email at Grantreative-blend.co.UK okay, perfect.

Thank you so much for being a guest today and taking the time out to share your journey to remote working.

Been a pleasure.

Okay, so there you have it. I wonder how your experience of remote working, getting the culture right, working out, ways to communicate effectively with your clients to keep them engaged, and how you found sales. I wonder how what's going on for you relates to what was going on for Grant and Creative Blend. As ever, I hope you found this episode useful. Got lots more exciting content coming up over the next few weeks, so please make sure you hit that subscribe button. Share it with your colleagues, and I would love you to leave a review as well. As you know that helps me get this podcast higher up the rankings. So other than that, I hope you have a brilliant weekend and I will see you next week on the Agency Accelerator podcast.