Research has proven that people are more motivated, more productive and generally happier if they’re allowed to work in a way that suits them and their lifestyle, as opposed to being restricted to office hours, tied to a desk and confined to a location.
Today, Monday 23rd July, is Smarter Working Initiative Day 2018.
Smarter Working Initiative Day is about bringing together businesses that believe in working smarter to help encourage a cultural change, bringing more UK businesses into the smart working fold. It’s about empowering employees to be as productive as they can be by giving everyone the chance to work in a way that suits them. This could be anything working from home, working different hours, wearing different clothes or even working from Starbucks. It’s about working however, whenever and from wherever, you feel you’re most productive.
To us, it makes perfect sense. We’re perfectly set up for smarter working at 3manfactory. We all work on portable machines and handsets, we store everything on the cloud via Google Drive, we use tools such as Slack and Asana to keep our comms fluid and our office handsets port through to our mobiles.
Being set up to work smart like this has a plethora of benefits for us;
- We have more clients, nationwide: we have clients not just in Lancashire, but across the UK. Being able to work from wherever we need to means we can work alongside them with ease, regardless of our location. This has taken us to places including Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, London, and Cornwall – all without causing disruption to our office in Preston.
- We are more productive: as a team, we’re more productive now than we have ever been. We aren’t in work worrying about who’s picking the kids up or whose signing for that parcel, because we have arrangements in place to suit those. We aren’t in work either, worrying about being too cold under the air con, or hungry because we had to skip breakfast. We all have the chance to work in a time and space that we’re comfortable in.
- We are more creative: our agency demands incredible creativity. We help transform brands and create behavioural change through creative, compelling campaigns. And let me tell you, you can’t do that in a dull office environment, working 9-5. You need to stay in tune with industry events and trends, you need to know the latest tech, you need to have hobbies and interests and you need to be in touch with current affairs. In short, you need your fingers in a lot of pies, and if your fingers are tied to a desk, that can become pretty bloomin’ hard.
Whilst we have the capacity to work smart 365 days a year, on Smarter Working Initiative Day, we make a commitment as an office to put ourselves first and all do what suits us. Last year, some of us were in Cornwall working with clients, this took us from working in an airport lounge to beachside in Newquay. Some of us came into the office but worked our own hours. Others worked from home. Crucially though, we all worked as a team. We were accessible for video calls, phone calls, across Slack and email, and all our deadlines were smashed.
This year, we’re doing more of the same. Some of us are working from home, (which for one of us means getting to do the school run for an 11-year-old going to primary school for the last time, ever, before high school awaits in September), some of us are in the office, and some of us have ventured to coffee shops a little closer to home than the office is.
Keep your eyes peeled on our Twitter and Instagram pages to find out how we work smart not just today, but every day.
