How to work effectively with your creative teams remotely
Do you find it hard to brainstorm online with your website designer, graphic designer or social media campaign manager? Are you struggling to create the same ‘magic’ together when you’re not collaborating in the same room as your external creative team?
Most would agree that collaboration is a two-way street and often successfully achieved in person. As the Covid-19 lockdown continues, the remote working landscape has become a new daily reality for most organisations. So, how can you remain effective, and thus productive, when working with your creative teams remotely?
At Concept Culture, as a ‘remote-first’ creative agency; we thrive on collaborative remote working. However this way of work that’s literally “as old as the internet,” isn’t without its challenges. It’s taken a bit of trial and error to iron out the most effective ways of working remotely with our clients. And we have had no complaints so far!
So, if you outsource your creative work, whether it is graphic design for bids and practice brochures, redesigning your website or content creation for digital communications; here are our 3 top tips to work remotely with your external creative teams that you might find useful.
Alongside the usual brief defining, goal setting and measuring advice, the below tips have helped us to collaborate on tasks more effectively remotely whilst staying sane during a pandemic and overall, producing better work.
1. Create a ‘communications strategy’ for keeping in touch
Ironically, communication is one of the most important parts of working in a remote team. Remote working pushes all simple processes such as daily communication into the digital realm, and with the multitude of telecommuting software at our fingertips, communication in the digital realm can look extremely varied.
Gone are the days when you could simply have a two-way conversation over a landline. Now, think group video conferencing calls such as the ever-popular Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, email threads, Slack messages, social media DMs and more.
With multiple ways to communicate, the key is finding the way that works best for you and your creative team. We are partial to a weekly client Skype call checking in on project progress. But that may not work for every client. Agree on a team ‘communications’ strategy and preferred tools to communicate with from the offset. Establish a clear and regular communication pattern for effective remote collaboration, using one or two preferred communication channels to ensure success.
2. Use the right digital tools for remote team workflow
Using reliable digital tools to assist creative workflow is essential when working remotely; making tasks such as defining scope, managing deadlines and deliverables for projects and document sharing much easier.
Instead of leaving tasks forgotten at the bottom of an email thread and attachments unattached, there are a multitude of digital tools to improve workflow available for you to take advantage of.
Cloud storage such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox where you can share files and documents always prove handy. Task management tools where you can check project progress and compile to-do lists to assign tasks such as Trello, Microsoft Teams and Asana have easy-to-use interfaces to communicate individually and in groups. Asana is our favourite.
This moves us nicely onto our final tip…
3. Make brainstorming remote-friendly
Do you wonder how you can brainstorm with all your creative team effectively whilst working remotely? There is no need to let team collaboration slump on digital.
There are digital ‘whiteboard’ tools such as Mural or Miro that allow you and your creative team to collaborate, collate ideas and bounce off one another digitally. We use Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Jamboard at Concept Culture, another cross-functional way to collaborate as a creative team, building and developing ideas on a document simultaneously.
Staying creative- together
We hope that these three tips will help you work alongside your creative teams effectively, long after these strange times, setting you up on the path for remote working success.
We are a remote team of creative consultants, strategists, web-designers and more at Concept Culture and we utilise the above tips to ensure successful collaboration with our clients. Want to find out how we could help your remote team workflow needs?
Get in touch today to schedule a virtual coffee with us. How fitting!