Enabling Collaboration to Enable Your Teams

A number of images spring to mind when you’re asked to visualize a workplace that fosters collaboration and supports creativity.

Right now, organizations across the globe are scrambling to find ways to connect their people with their work, their work with their tools, and their tools with their wider teams. But before the COVID-19 pandemic caused many of us to seriously adapt the ways in which we work on a daily basis, the most typical image is of an office environment brought to us through start up culture, complete with a free smoothie fridge, the ubiquitous foosball table, and bean bags in acid brights.

While these certainly add another dimension to the otherwise potentially bland office environment, this is essentially just window dressing. When it comes to fostering a truly creative environment, to building a supportive workplace which really enables employees to connect with each other and do their best work, initiatives must run deeper than “Free Pizza Friday”.

Agencies are usually custodians of the creative muse, and often painted as railing against client restrictions to fully realize their concept’s potential. But even within agencies, the freedom to create can often be limited, constrained by multi agency stakeholder groups, approval layers, scope creep (or contraction) and hierarchical politics that make it difficult to step outside the norms.

Finding ways to break out of these constraints can be difficult. But, by marrying the right tools with the right mindset, it is possible to build a creative hothouse regardless of whether your teams are within physical reach of one another, or a spread out jigsaw of individuals.

Collaboration for Creativity

Creativity dies without collaboration. This is an ideal that was far easier to incorporate into the working day before we found ourselves having to talk to colleagues through screens and intranet channels, and even easier when applied within small, nimble organizations where everyone could congregate in a meeting room, or take part in a spontaneous brainstorming sprint in an open plan office. But for many, global workforces are spread not just across broad, multinational geographies, but also different companies. We work not just in our own siloes (and at the moment you could be forgiven for beginning to worry about the four walls of your home office forming a silo of their own) or organizations, but within a spider’s web of vendors, consultants, partners, and agencies. We want everyone’s input, but it still has to be in real time. And unfortunately, ideas die in queues.

Happily, however, there is a growing range of tools available to help organizations bring everyone together in a truly creative, collaborative environment, be they internal or external parties in your workflow processes.

A stellar example of such a tool put to good use in producing award winning work is Jaguar Land Rover (JLR)’s joint venture agency, Spark44, which uses censhare’s workflow and digital asset management (DAM) system daily to maintain connectivity across its 19 offices, as well as being a system that clients can use as part of their approval process. Its use of its DAM enabled the agency’s teams to produce their high quality work while the company grew at scale and serviced international clients.

As a result, Spark44 has been able to produce some truly ground breaking marketing campaigns for JLR, helping it stand out in a very crowded global market. Its direct mail campaign for the Evoque model, Triggering a Reaction, featured channel busting connected technology, allowing recipients to press a button on the mailer to instantly book a test drive – no Bluetooth, wifi or smartphone required. Unsurprisingly, such boundary expanding thinking earned Spark44 three Data and Marketing Association (DMA) Awards in 2019, including Gold for Best Use of Mail.

To learn more about how censhare supports Spark44 and JLR in streamlining its processes while expanding its collaborative and creative power, your can download Spark44 case study “Blending Technology and Talent” here.