Athletics company-wide offsite. Joshua Tree, 2023
Navigating Change and Empowering Teams: A Brand Studio's Journey Towards a Remote-First Culture
There is a certain adaptability required in the field of design. At Athletics, we’ve prided ourselves for years on having a nimble, versatile team that can pivot quickly when conditions change. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 and we were forced onto Zoom, that same scrappiness could have allowed us to maintain something like business as usual, just online.
We didn’t have to change. We could have probably soldiered through, doubling down on practices we knew had worked for us in the past. But that would have kept the onus on our team. With strong core values that push us to be ever-curious, unapologetically optimistic for the future, and focused on the humanity of our team and our world, we decided to look inward instead, and harness the moment to find new opportunities.
In those uncertain pandemic times, team wellbeing was the north star for our decision-making. As a leadership team, we were optimistic that if we led with empathy and vulnerability, ensuring that no one was left behind, that we would not only survive the moment as individuals, but we as a company were going to thrive.
It was scary to think of undoing processes that had gotten us to where we were, but ultimately, taking a more vulnerable approach with our team allowed us to usher in big shifts in the way we work. In the end these shifts served to only deepen our relationships with one another, and bring the people who were on the outside closer in.
Turning Pain Points into Opportunities
In the past three and a half years, we saw a period of success and agency growth that coincided with a radical shift in the way we work, brought about by the pandemic. Like countless businesses across the globe, we pivoted to remote work overnight in March 2020, and have been redefining our new working norms ever since. Evolving the business to adapt to growth in the wake of the pandemic, while also keeping our now larger team motivated and happy, was a unique challenge.
To us, our core value of optimism means that we approach every situation with fresh eyes and enthusiasm, and stay positive in the face of difficult circumstances. One silver lining of those otherwise challenging times is that they afforded us a certain luxury that many businesses never have — that is, the opportunity to turn ourselves inside out, to strip back the layers of process and ritual that make up a company culture, and rebuild, with a vision toward the future.
We knew that some of our old habits, ones that had worked so well for a small and scrappy team of 15 or 20, no longer served us as a growing agency approaching 40 team members, and would only get in the way of our future success. However, old habits die hard, and entrenched patterns are difficult to reverse.
Furthermore, we had a growing team of incredibly talented practitioners, all striving to do their best work every day. We owed it to them to find new solutions, to create more shared understanding and alignment between disciplines, and to address the feedback we heard from employees across the business.
Athletics company-wide offsite. Joshua Tree, 2023
Creating a Safe Space for Learning
The results of our regular team feedback surveys validated some of the assumptions leadership had about where we needed to prioritize our efforts, but they also shed light on some new areas of focus, uncovering some hard truths about our agency and ways of working.
For example, we learned that not everyone actually understood our working process as clearly as we had assumed. Also, there were some fundamental knowledge gaps between disciplines that we had been unaware of. We made it our mission to create a safe space for learning, to create more alignment and understanding across the entire company.
This required vulnerability on the part of everyone in the team, including leadership. Leadership had taken the important first step to ask questions and get feedback. But from there the real work began, to really listen, and take in everything we heard. The leadership team then worked together to forge the best path forward, ensuring that each individual had what they needed to be a successful, happy, contributing member of the team, regardless of their location, role, or level at the organization.
Part of our work was creating an open and welcoming space for the team to acknowledge the things they don’t understand, and normalizing any awkwardness or embarrassment that comes from that acknowledgement. Ultimately, this empowered the team to take ownership of the learning they still needed to do, which in turn increased shared understanding and better collaboration across the board.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
After a period of pandemic growth, we also quickly recognized that our existing team possessed untapped potential. Rather than further expanding our workforce to meet growing demands, we decided to supercharge our existing team, by investing in agency skills and learning, and introducing new tools and processes that would empower them to not only do their best work, but also mitigate the risk of burnout and improve their overall employee experience.
This investment aimed to foster more alignment across disciplines and project teams. By creating a shared understanding of processes and workflows, we could bridge knowledge gaps, cut out unnecessary noise, reduce meeting time, and increase the time and space available for deep thinking and creative collaboration.
To achieve this goal of supercharging our team, we explored and introduced a combination of new tools and technology, tapping into our team of creative technologists when we wanted to further tailor tools to our specific needs. We also brought in seasoned experts to train us in techniques and principles that had been tried and tested. Ultimately this curation of methodologies laddered up to a radical shift in how we spend our time.
Among the experts we engaged to help us move our mission forward were the team behind AgencyAgile, an approach to organizational change that uses hands-on, high-intensity team trainings, coupled with leadership education and coaching.
Going into the trainings, we had one overarching provocation top of mind: if we’re not going back to business as usual, we need to be open to real change.
The trainings consisted of three, multi-day, in-person sessions with our entire team (including our remote staff, who traveled to join us for the sessions). We learned techniques that allowed us to radically rethink how we get our work done, most importantly to create more time and space for deep thinking and experimentation.
Going remote three years earlier, we had unintentionally allowed for an explosion of meetings. People on our team had complained of Zoom fatigue, and not having enough non-meeting time to get their work done. We revisited how knowledge is transferred across distributed teams, and tackled head-on the impact of day structure.
We finished our final training on a Friday, and by Monday we had ripped off the Band-Aid, and were working on the new techniques for an entirely different type of day structure. We were able to reduce the volume of internal recurring meetings by around 20%, and the team has embraced the changes in unexpected ways. Like with any new practices, we strive to allow ourselves time to listen, recalibrate, and then continue to improve.
Athletics company-wide offsite. Joshua Tree, 2023
Defining New Norms for a Remote-First Team
By February 2022, we were a remote-first team. Our studio in Brooklyn had reopened and was fully-functional, but we didn’t want to return to business as usual. We enjoyed the flexibility and freedom that remote-first work afforded each person, regardless of their life circumstances, to tend to their lives on their own terms. Feedback we received from the team confirmed that this was indeed a welcome change, and one they wanted to hold onto.
As our team settled into the new reality working from multiple locations, and we also added some fully-remote employees to our growing roster of talent, we quickly realized we need to set some new standards for how we engage with each other. We needed to ensure that remote employees were offered the same access to opportunities and advancement, and didn’t feel left out. At the same time, we wanted our NYC-based employees to enjoy the same level of autonomy that our remote employees were afforded.
We took two key steps to ensure inclusivity and equity among our now hybrid team. First, we developed a Communications Playbook for Hybrid Work, that established the norms and expectations that would help us work all together happily. The playbook defines the “Athletics way” of doing hybrid well, across a variety of areas — video conferencing norms, how to run a hybrid meeting, guidance for collaboration sessions, inclusion for remote workers, standard information flow for company-wide comms, team engagement and bonding, and a channel map laying out when to use which channels and expected response times.
Second, we engaged another expert, an HR consultant who specializes in building career frameworks, to help us design our own leveling system that would define a clear set of expectations for each career level in the organization, ultimately laying out a path for growth for each person on the team. This was a critical step in ensuring equity across a distributed team, and allowing people to envision themselves growing their careers long-term at Athletics.
With a career framework in place, we are able to mitigate bias by basing evaluation of performance on job criteria, not on someone’s personality or a perceived notion of their performance. As a leadership team, we push forward efforts of equity and transparency for the team by using the framework to help us hire, assess, develop, and reward employees fairly and consistently.
Athletics company-wide offsite. Joshua Tree, 2023
Designing Our Own Future
There were not, and are still not, any clear answers on what “the future of work” should look like. Sure, there have been countless articles and social media posts, but there were no blueprints, no primers, no best practice to follow. The past few years have taught us that rather than follow the herd toward whatever the future of work will be, we are choosing to design our future to work for us.
As 2023 winds to a close, we’re still a small but mighty studio, actively making space to do our best work every day. We’re growing, with incredible talent joining our ranks, but we remain determined to preserve the tight-knit culture and values that made us who we are. And despite change, our people remain our north star.
Looking back, it was the effects of the pandemic, and the shift to remote work, that was the catalyst for us to push past our comfort zone to make fundamental changes to how we work. Instead of setting policies and norms and hoping for change, we looked inward and let ourselves be vulnerable, clearing the way for some new practices that are reshaping our culture, for the better.
In the process, leadership learned a lasting lesson. Sometimes getting uncomfortable, and stopping to truly listen to your teams, will prove to be the most worthy of investments. We are incredibly proud of our team and their faith in us throughout this period of change, not just in our business but in the world. Ultimately, it is their courage to grow and evolve along with us, that, to us, is the true success story.
