The social distancing recommendations we’re now under to tame the spread of COVID-19 are challenging many workers and workplaces to embrace teleworking for the first time. When the need inevitably arises to speak with team members or larger groups, conference calls can be a useful tool. Most people in the creative economy are familiar with conference calls, but what does it take for you to run an effective call?

These days, it’s easy to take conference calls for granted. We can communicate with colleagues in other parts of the city or world and in real time. But conference calls are also ridiculed for technological challenges, poor facilitation, or being an inefficient use of time. Here are some tips to run an effective conference call from seasoned remote workers.

Set an Agenda

Take the time to determine what it is you’re trying to accomplish and why a conference call is necessary to meet your objectives. If you can discuss something by email or in a phone call, do that instead. But there are times, especially when managing a team or working collaboratively, that conference calls are necessary.

Christina Schiavoni, an independent researcher and remote worker based in Bangkok, spends a significant amount of time on conference calls. She suggests creating an agenda with set times for each agenda item. Facilitators should “be realistic,” she adds, about how long each discussion will take and what can be accomplished in a single conference call.

Cyrus Zulkarnaïan Kazi, CEO and co-founder of Quantibly.com, a global SaaS solution for the social sector, limits conference calls to 15 people and 30 minutes. He gives participants a grace period of two minutes to join the call, and then the meeting begins. Working from New York with staff in multiple time zones and countries, he’s mindful that calls are productive, especially if someone has to get out of bed to participate.

Joann Lo is a longtime labor organizer based in Los Angeles who has mostly worked remotely for more than a decade. She prefers to dig into critical updates or priorities “at the beginning, when we’re all fresh, and we have everyone before anyone jumps off.” Then, each program area gives an update. Her advice is to keep calls to less than an hour and a half; after that, it’s hard to concentrate. Without a tight agenda, people can easily lose focus during a conference call, scanning emails or distracted by kids or pets at home (which is all the more relevant these days).

Allow Time for Personal Check-ins

Schiavoni suggests that facilitators build in time for hellos and personal check-ins at the start of a call. “It’s going to happen anyway,” she notes, “so let people connect on a human level.” This is perhaps even more critical now, with anxiety running high and people feeling isolated in light of COVID-19.

Lo also starts conference calls with time and space for interpersonal connection. Intended to both celebrate good things or express difficulties, this kind of team building and emotional support sets the tone for the rest of the call.

Get it in Writing

Have a designated notetaker — who is not the facilitator — during the call. Be sure to capture any action items and recap them at the end of the call. Share meeting notes with participants in a timely manner.

Lo prefers to take shared notes in Google docs, in real time, which helps “if you get distracted and need to catch up.” It also assists those with different learning styles and makes notetaking a shared responsibility.

Most conference call applications have the option to record a meeting and send a link to participants and folks who were unable to join the call. But not everyone will make the time to listen to a recorded version, so written notes are also useful.
Find Ways to Include People

Video conferencing options are also effective at including people in discussions. Participants can raise their hands and the moderator can create a stack for comments. Or they can mute participants and put questions in the comments.

On large calls, small group discussions with separate video chats are an option. Then, they can return and report back to the larger group, similar to group work during an in-person meeting. Lo points out that people who are not comfortable speaking to the larger group can be included in this way.

On large voice calls with fewer technology options, remind people to set their phones on mute at the start of the call and explain how to mute and unmute the line before speaking. You can give people an opportunity to speak according to their physical location or alphabetically by name or department to prevent crosstalk.

Remember to Pause

There is a learning curve for people unaccustomed to new conference call technology or in organizations without a standard way of operating on these calls. As a moderator, don’t forget to take a pause. Not everyone will arrive on time, things may not go smoothly every time, but overall, people will have an opportunity to communicate and collaborate.

Participants can practice pausing before speaking and consider whether a question or comment is necessary at this moment. Moderators can agree to respond to unaddressed questions by email after the call.

COVID-19 and social distancing are challenging many of us to work in unfamiliar ways. But hosting an effective conference call can be easy if you follow these guidelines.

About the author.
Jess Powers writes about marketing, food, and wellness. She has experience in nonprofit communications and emergency management. Follow her @foodandfury.

For designers, this is more important than a fat paycheck

The #1 criteria for product designers is actually a strong design culture. That’s right. It’s not a higher salary or oodles of vacation time. Rather, employees want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than their 9 to 5. They want exciting, meaningful work, and the freedom and agency to solve it in their own way. I mean, at the end of the day, don’t we all?

“You can’t be a successful unicorn hunter if you’re going to bring people into a horrible culture. You have to create an environment that creatives want to be a part of.”

Rachel Kobetz, SVP Head of Experience Design at Bank of America

Cultivating a strong design culture

So how do you know if you have one? Or if you don’t, how do you create one? The answer isn’t hard to grasp, but actually putting it into practice requires a steady flow of intention, because the unfortunate truth is: Most companies unwittingly stifle creativity by prioritizing process and politics over people and passions.

Let’s start with what it is. IDEO describes culture as “an environment that makes it possible for people to work together to come up with innovative products and ideas.” In other words, it’s a human-centered approach that sparks collaboration and invites innovation, or, you know, the creative vibe.

So a strong design culture must understand and respect the needs of the people who work there — beyond what they contribute to the company’s bottom line.

Good UX is good culture

Most of us are familiar with how good UX can bring satisfaction, and maybe even delight us along the way. Or a bad one (hello Ikea store layouts?) can conjure up dread and dismay.

So even though companies focus on building products and creating design that provide an intuitive and friendly UX, many fail to apply that same methodology to their own organization.

How does the employee as the user navigate through the experience of working at your company? These considerations should encompass:

1. The physical environment. Is the lighting and furniture thoughtfully considered? Is the path between desks or to the coffee machine intuitive and pleasant? Can designers choose the sound level they’re subjected to? Because how the office is designed can directly influence:
2. Personal interactions. Are there dedicated spaces for collaboration or serendipitous conversations? Can employees escape to a quiet room to work if they need to?
3. The company’s values. For this, I defer to the top five behaviors IDEO values in design-driven organizations:

• • Curiosity. Individuals at a human-centered company can ask lots of questions, and should. So it’s important to have a system in place that captures and analyzes those questions, so they, in turn, can inform the design process.
  • Frequent experimentation. IDEO discovered that “teams that explore and iterate five or more solutions at once produce 50 percent more successful launches.” So it’s critical to let designers test several ideas at the same time.
  • Cross-team collaboration. Creating teams across disciplines can help employees address the same problem from different, and unexpected angles.
  • Build storytelling into the practice. Ideas can get lost in the back and forth shuffle between teams. But when a project or design lead can take ownership of an idea and develop its narrative to generate momentum and excitement, more ideas make it to launch.
  • More is more. Generating a multitude of ideas is a daily habit at the organization. This lets teams iterate prototypes and respond to feedback quickly, so more products can enter the market stream and have a chance to succeed.

Amplify your organization’s culture

We all know what happens when there’s all work and no play. For designers, designing is play, but what they do for work isn’t often the only thing that defines them. To this end, companies might consider launching “culture amplification projects” to showcase the unique talents of their employees. Whether it’s a storytelling night, a niche podcast, a company zine, or a special event that lets employees feel seen, heard, and validated.

These can also help employees to know each other better, or identify other talents that may inform their work.

Connect with the design world

Creatives (just like non-creatives) need community for inspiration, validation, and emotional support.

At work, this can come in the form of Slack or informal meetups. Offline, leadership communities like Design Leadership Forum (DLF), Within (for women in design), and Design Leadership Camp can help designers tap into the wider community and advance their design practice.

Start with the right people

Of course, a good design culture in its essence comes down to the people involved. Getting the right people means hiring already motivated people who resonate with the company’s values and are invested in the company’s success.

“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them. They hire already motivated people and inspire them.”

Simon Sinek, Author of Start With Why

Looking to find the right people for your teams? Well, we might have a name or hundred. Give us a call or shoot us an email. We’ve already started the search for you.

About the author.
Héloïse Chung is writing the great American science fiction blockbuster in the moments between her day job as a copywriter and creative director. Non-screen activities include rock-climbing and making ceramics.

website: heloisechung.com
twitter: @hzla_de_encanta
instagram: @heloise_chung

In a competitive job market, it’s become commonplace for companies to pad job offers with perks like gym memberships, meditation rooms, and free food — trappings that have little to do with the job at hand but are increasingly seen as necessary to attract and land top talent.

The jury’s still out though on how effective these perks are in retaining that talent.  Creating a comfortable and supportive office culture certainly helps to enhance employee satisfaction and motivation day-to-day. But what about down the road, once the snacks grow stale, or your competitor across the way just did you one better by installing a spa on-site?

Perks can be fickle, and change in-step with the latest trends. The padded extras that are desirable to new hires one year can be old hat by the next. What doesn’t change is the desire to learn and advance. Underwriting that luxury gym membership might help to land the best, but that investment can be undercut if the final offer doesn’t also come with additional opportunities for advancement or development.

Costs of a Short-term Workforce

Long-term training might seem like a risky investment for a new hire or early stage talent, especially for Millennial talent who, as a group, value flexibility over fidelity, and have made “job-hopping” a new norm. (A recent Gallup poll revealed that 21% of Millennials changed jobs within the past year—more than three times the rate of prior generations.)

This can lead companies to shy away from spending resources on the growth and development of their future workforce. Many choose instead to invest in immediate strategies like pipeline recruiting, to have an already-vetted pool of candidates on hand to draw from quickly when vacancies arise.

Those strategies can also involve significant outlays, to acquire resources that might not ever even be used. And, as much as retention may appear to cost (especially from the outset), replacement can cost even more. Apart from time and money spent recruiting and onboarding new employees, there is also a cost associated with losing the old one. That can vary by industry and role, but many measurements place it in the range of tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5-2X the former employee’s annual salary.

On top of the financial loss, there are also “psychic” costs from losing an employee which are often immeasurable. Disrupted team dynamics, gaps in institutional memory, erosion of trust: these can take an emotional toll on co-workers who are left behind and have a negative impact on productivity that can’t easily be captured in a standard balance sheet.

Training to Convert the “Job-Hoppers”

Despite evidence that today’s talent is more prone to hop, statistical trends can’t measure the full arc of a career. Every employee grows up eventually, and as the top end of the generation nears 40,  there is mounting evidence that older Millennials are starting to stay put. The 40s are also an age when employees begin to cash in on the technical and intellectual capital they’ve already accumulated, and those who’ve had access to ongoing training tend to give back more in terms of increased productivity and leadership.

Also bucking the job-hopping trend are studies that show this group does perceive the value of loyalty — as long as it’s returned in kind. After all, Millennials, for the most part, entered the workforce during a time of corporate cutbacks, with the impression that businesses considered their employees an expendable resource. So, all things considering, it’s understandable they evolved into a generation that was hesitant to commit.

But regular training is a sure-fire way for employers to overcome that hesitation—and easily gain some hard-won loyalty in the process. In the recently-published Motivating Millennials, 90% of those polled said they would stick with a job if they knew that steady raises and career advancement were part of the package.  And, sure, not every employee can advance to the C-Suite. But provided with access to opportunities to learn, improve and grow, every employee can still progress.

Of course, it’s not a smart strategy to cover the cost of an MBA for brand new hires, but a business class or two in the first year wouldn’t hurt. There are also plenty of reputable and cost-effective online or onsite education options that, from an investment standpoint, would likely still cost less than that gym membership.

Kate is a Creative Circle candidate, a senior copywriter, and a seasoned corporate communications consultant based in New York. If you want to work with Kate, contact Creative Circle New York.

You never forget your first boss. Especially if that boss was a frog…

Ok, full disclosure: the frog was actually made of cloth. But does it help if I said his name was Kermit?

Early in my career, armed with a degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California, I was hired by Marvel Studios to work as an Associate Producer on the brand new TV series Muppet Babies. The concept was inspired by the beloved characters sprung from the mind of Jim Henson, the visionary artist/puppeteer who birthed Kermit more than 60 years ago from little more than scraps of his mother’s old coat and two discarded ping pong balls.

So, sure, maybe it’s a bit of a, um, “leap” to say that Kermit was my first boss. But anyone who ever had the privilege of working with Jim knows that the distinction was irrelevant. When Kermit was in the room, Jim let him own it — even when being grilled by the great Johnny Carson!

Jim’s willingness to play second fiddle to a frog was part of his charm, as well as the key to his tremendous genius. Like all good parents, Jim empowered his puppet progeny — and their human caretakers — to explore, even if along a path that might ultimately hit a brick wall… (Sort of like Kermit and Miss Piggy’s relationship, right?)

Jim’s success did not just stem from his skills as an artist, but also to the unobtrusive ease with which he was able to breathe a distinct energy and personality into each Muppet character, and then step back to allow them to, in a sense, find their own voice.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 40 years since I worked for Jim. Entertainment was an entirely different industry back then, and the fact that Jim’s handmade cloth characters are as popular as ever in a post-Pixar landscape is a testament to his legacy — and to his leadership.

If it weren’t for Jim’s influence, I doubt the arc of my own career would have been half as interesting. Emboldened by his lessons — taught directly and by example — I’ve gone on to launch iconic lighted shoes, install the first Jumbotron on Sunset Blvd, run my own advertising agency…and even place TVs on gas pumps (you’re welcome)!

Jim left many lessons on leadership, a few of which I’ve outlined here. Now, in my current role as CMO for the nation’s leading creative recruiting and consulting firm, I’m in a place where I can put into practice Jim’s most memorable lesson of all: The key to creative success lies in how well you trust and treat your team.

Be Open to All Ideas

With Jim, there was never a bad idea — just concepts that needed to evolve. He was a master at creating a collaborative environment that allowed a safe space for evaluation and growth. At all levels, Jim encouraged openness and what I’d like to call “radical consideration,” a willingness to include everyone in the creative process from the most junior associate to the buttoned-up executive whose job was to keep production on track and on budget.

This gift of Jim’s was apparent to me from the earliest storyline ideation sessions for Muppet Babies. Whenever a writer pitched something containing even just a kernel of interesting, Jim would push it down the schedule to allow more time for incubation. If the idea never quite made it to script, Jim would simply say, “Let’s keep it for next year,” never making the writer feel judged or that time had been wasted. Jim always went out of his way to make things work — and more often than not they did.

Allow Space for Creativity

Early in the series’ development, a debate was raging around the idea of combining animation with live action scenes — a technical challenge that, at the time (early 1980s), had never been done at the volume and speed required for weekly TV. Most business staff balked at the cost, but Jim was persistent — then looked at me to find the solution. This was certainly not a skill set I had learned in college, but Jim shielded me from the bottom-line pressures of the “suits” in the room, and granted me the permission and the space to figure it out.

And, as any child of the 80s who can recall the show’s catchy opening credits will know, in the end, it worked out rather seamlessly…

Don’t Settle

After the Muppet Babies successfully launched in 1984, I sometimes found myself playing the naysayer — and Jim would turn it into a teaching moment. Once, during season two, Jim wanted to include footage from Star Wars, and I expressed concern that clips from the most popular film ever released might not quite fit our budget. (This was pre-internet when Hollywood studios still controlled copyright with an iron fist.)

I should’ve known better though than to underestimate Jim’s tenacity, and also how admired he was in the industry. Without skipping a beat, he responded, “Hmmm, let me just call George and ask…” And that did the trick. With one call, I learned not to take no for an answer – there’s always a way. George Lucas gifted us clips from his blockbuster, and we used them in multiple episodes — at the time the best stock footage deal in the history of Hollywood!

Embrace Resiliency

My tenure with Jim ended not long before his unexpected death in 1990, and perhaps the timing of that event did serve to internalize his lessons even more powerfully. But it wasn’t just me. Everyone was blindsided by Jim’s loss; even the eternally optimistic Fozzie Bear wondered if the family could go on.

But, just like Jim, the Muppets persisted. To this day, the franchise remains as entrenched as ever in the national imagination, and continues to thrive by adhering to its founding ideals of leaving no angle unexplored, yet still evolving with the times to entertain and inspire an entirely new generation.

Kermit was onto something when he said it’s not easy being green. It’s not always easy leading a team either. In the end, though, the greatest ideas and dreams persevere and eventually find their own path. And the adventure that comes from nurturing an idea and helping it grow is what makes it all worth it.

Adam Bleibtreu is an award-winning producer, creative director, entrepreneur and marketing executive. Adam’s eclectic career dates back to the analog age and has evolved over three decades to touch upon almost every aspect of media, advertising, and creative services.

Since 2013, Adam has applied his talents and inspirational leadership as Chief Marketing Officer for ASGN Incorporated, a global recruiting firm, and Creative Circle, the leading provider of skilled creative professionals and consulting services nationwide. As a result of his storied career and first-hand perspective of a historic era of media innovation, Adam is also a sought-after speaker and well-respected thought leader throughout the industry.

We rely on technology to make everything in our lives more efficient. Need food? Get it now. Need a date? Swipe right. Need a job? There’s an app for that too!

In making things more efficient, however, we’ve lost that which connects us to each other – especially when it comes to the job search and hiring process. With companies like Google getting upwards of 50,000 applications per week from all over the world, we’ve started to rely on automated hiring systems to keep up. But these automated hiring systems only work with a finite number of keywords. If candidates don’t describe their professional experience with the exact words needed, the system might not recognize their value, and you might lose out on a viable candidate.

Online recruitment tools make it easier for people to apply to jobs, but they do not make it easier to discern who actually has the human qualities necessary to thrive in a work environment. In fact, the impersonal nature of online recruitment systems can deter quality candidates who succeed in nurturing environments, seek long-term growth, and add to dynamic cultures. A human touch is needed to find candidates like these, and to bring them to the front of the queue.

So how can you sort through hundreds or thousands of resumes? Keep your hiring human.

Minimize reliance on job posting sites.

82% of potential hires say their ideal interaction with a company is primarily human-to-human, with tech operating behind-the-scenes.

Practice responding one-to-one versus one-to-many.

With over 63% of open roles being newly created roles, hiring managers need to find nuanced ways of communicating what they need so avoid templated emails or auto-replies. Use the phone. Talk it out.

Use your network.

As the saying goes, it’s about “who you know.” Employee referrals make up the top source of new hires, but are often not thought of as the first line of recruitment. Pay attention to the humans you already love to work with to find more like them.

If you find that you need hiring help now, expand your network to include staffing agencies like Creative Circle. To meet the most talented humans, you need a network of them and with an already established network of creatives, automated hiring robots need not apply.

Ryan is a Creative Circle candidate and freelance Content Director who enjoys reading menus. He got his start at BuzzFeed NY, and since has led content initiatives for startups, TV shows, and crowdfunding platforms. He’s now based in LA—but not in a suspicious way. If you want to work with Ryan, contact Creative Circle Los Angeles.