Six months ago, a flexible work policy included working from home a few times a month, but now for many companies, that policy means working full-time from anywhere in the world. The pandemic forced many companies and organizations to quickly pivot to a more agile workstyle nearly overnight. Going to a work-from-home structure left some offices scrambling to make sometimes difficult adjustments, leaving employees struggling with low productivity and lower morale.
While our own experience at Kite Hill PR was not without hiccups, the fact that, years ago, our agency adopted an agile workflow — the same used by the world’s most innovative technology companies — made our own transition a bit more seamless. Using Slack and constant communication made not physically being in the office just as productive and collaborative. In early March, our leadership made the call to work from home and acted fast to ensure our team had all the tools needed for success, no matter what zip code we were logging in from each day.
Being agile is a core value at Kite Hill. In fact, a few years ago, our agency pioneered the agile approach to PR by creating the PR Sprint™ Workflow playbook to accomplish goals for our clients. But in our WFH transition, we needed to adopt what had been an in-person process to a virtual one. We began using Monday.com to supercharge our Sprint meetings, which had the added benefit of being a tool for project management, managing editorial and social calendars and more. Our virtual sprint process has made us even more collaborative and enables us to train the collective brainpower of the agency on our client’s goals.
I relish the collaborative and agile energy that these Sprint aka “stand-up” meetings provide. While virtual office reality has put our agility to the test, I am happy to report, we’re passing with flying colors. While there are certain aspects that a physical office environment provides such as passing conversations in the breakroom, we owe much of our success to the digital practices we already had in place.
Agility has allowed us to move forward as an agency (our Founder and CEO, Tiffany Guarnaccia, recently shared more on this subject with agility experts Agilify). It was a critical element to our ability to move quickly on behalf of our clients during this disruptive time. In fact, we even wrote a playbook on navigating disruption via agile communications, and today, it’s why we successfully deliver wins for clients, day to day, entirely online across multiple time zones. We even had our recent annual company retreat via Zoom, complete with training sessions on digital body language led by Erica Dhawan and an ergonomic training session from Barbara Tourtellott topped off with a guided virtual team painting class thanks to Priscilla Moreno.
While the timeframe of returning to our office remains unclear, the future of our agency and work for clients is stronger than ever thanks to our agile workstyle and culture.
- Kyle Murray, Senior Account Executive