AdNews brings the stories of those working from home (WFH) in the advertising and media industry during the coronavirus crisis.
Tim Brown, ex-Bigfish, SapientNitro and McCann Worldgroup, is head of marketing for brand management platform Outfit:
How are you dealing with the silence?
No silence here. I have two raucous teenage daughters learning from home and a partner in the ad industry working from home. We have the open plan office version of WFH going on, so it can get a bit loud. I get my partner’s agency WIP, my own WIP and the teachers’ WIP every morning. It sometimes feels like I’m trafficking creative again. I love all the activity but I do find myself setting my airpods to noise-cancelling to find some silence.
What’s the upside?
I haven’t worn shoes for quite some time so that’s pretty good. I guess the biggest upside is I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home and I still have a job. I’m also loving having more family time and ‘work family’ time. Ironically, within Outfit, WFH has increased our cross-team interaction and we may well be learning more about each other in a WFH environment than we were in the office. Particularly with our teams in the U.S and U.K. It’s also allowed for some pretty cool product innovations, we just created a little thing for a Red Hat virtual event that was driven by that team interaction. It is pretty clear that it will also fundamentally change how we treat ‘office work’ and ‘WFH’, which is a great thing.
The downside?
I love my family, but some face-to-face contact with non-family members would be great. I haven’t been able to freely drop F-bombs for a while. It would be mature to see this as a good thing, but I do feel that it is detracting from my core self somehow. And, oh my goodness, a trip to the pub would be very welcome.
How are you using the commuting time saved?
Morning commute with the family and evening commute exercising. Mostly. Sometimes it just means the bar at home opens a little earlier than it would otherwise.
I am looking forward to being back in the office because …
It will be a completely different place. We were just about to move offices as we went WFH, and now the plan for the new office has changed. It will be more of a central hub to connect at and work at when it suits than an actual office to mandatorily turn up to every day, so super excited to get into that. Obviously also looking forward to seeing some actual Outfitters’ faces for real again so I know that they actually exist.
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