Challenge

A successful digital design consultancy found that their studio-based ways of working weren’t scaling as they’d grown.

• More and more employees were working remotely or didn’t even live within a commutable distance
• Clients who had excellent experiences with one project team were surprised when their next engagement team operated in an entirely different way
• Employees were feeling like they spent all their time in Slack or meetings without time to actually do work
• When they were working, employees found it increasingly hard to find mission-critical files and information

This was a thriving organization with many teams doing great work. They didn’t need new ways of working as much as an underlying structure to unify all their efforts logically.

Solution

Working with key team members, I crafted a communications architecture to help create a framework within which each team could work flexibly but within a unified structure. This approach:

• Provided a shared understanding of what platforms should be used for what kind of information
• Made room for the fast and informal discussions they were used to
• Established a consistent location where project teams could look for assets, reconstruct a decision-making process, and catch up on recent conversations
• Set expectations for how long-term documentation should be written for both client and internal projects

Beyond simply establishing these guidelines, I also helped roll out the approach. This included crafting a team agreements methodology, which gave teams a framework to develop the ground rules and expectations by which they’d work together asynchronously and synchronously.

Outcomes

Upon launching this approach, internal email usage dropped dramatically, reducing a typically noisy channel and moving those conversations to more inclusive channels.

The team agreements also created immediate results. In one instance, it helped a critical strategic team uncover misaligned expectations around response times. Addressing this led to more precise expectation and deadline setting within that team—essential in the company’s strategic planning.

Project teams reported that the use of team agreements led to better meeting practices, including the use of agendas and shared notes. They also helped identify cases where meetings weren’t necessary.

Finally, these practices helped the company more easily incorporate remote employees into their teams and ways of working, effectively growing their potential pool of new hires nationwide.