Lars is alone in the office. As always, first up is the daily round-up: Sarah against a Malibu backdrop, Vali in front of the Romanian bamboo forest room divider, Simone half-hidden in the open wardrobe. A cat’s tail brushes against Martina’s nose, whilst Michi is talking to the bottom-right corner. No chit-chat by the coffee machine again today. No “Chrissi, seven white sausages again?” shouted across the room. Instead, focused work without headphones. Lunchtime has arrived, and with it, a rumbling stomach. I pick up my landline. The first three suggestions on the redial list: ‘Saigon Imbiss’, ‘Ekam Indisch’, ‘Pizza Mozzamo’.
Not a single client among them.
In fourth place: Andreas, a marketing manager at one of our clients; I’d tried to reach him by phone three weeks ago. How naive of me. Of course, it never got beyond the attempt. He called me back via a video call on Teams before I’d even had a chance to put the landline back on its charger. There he was, sitting in his St. Pauli shirt, with his son next to him doing home schooling on a second computer.
I love the insights that all these video conferences provide. A sales manager standing in front of his children’s paddling pool, proudly panning the camera around his garden. A marketing executive sitting on her double bed, recounting in disbelief how her meticulously planned wedding last summer ended up being postponed. A senior consultant whose seven-year-old briefly wants to sit on his dad’s lap and asks when he’ll finally be playing along again. A managing director with acoustic guitars in his living room, enthusiastically talking about his barré chords. A young start-up founder who is handed a slice of cake by an arm through the crack in the door and just manages to save it from his dog, who bursts in.
There must be a deeper message hidden in all this. What is life trying to show me? Perhaps authenticity in our digitalised everyday lives. The people behind the veil of professionalism.
Closeness in a time of distance.
I remember one of the video conferences particularly well. Namely because an HR lady left her camera on, prompting the amusing speculation in the room that she was still wearing her Snoopy pyjamas. The Snoopy pyjamas became a running gag. At one point, she messaged me on Teams whilst she was in the middle of a first-aid training course for workplace first aiders. It was just to arrange an appointment, but at the end of our exchange she joked herself that we’d probably only be able to hear each other during the meeting… ‘Snoopy and all that,’ she said.
All the bedrooms, basements and pets in the world cannot make up for the loss of face-to-face contact. The handshake, the hug, the direct eye contact. The ‘smell of the workplace’ at the companies we’re lucky enough to visit. The familiar ‘Hey’ from clients who pop round to see us for a quick meeting. The curious glances from guests visiting us for the first time. The cigarette-break chats of the last few brave souls. The question: ‘How do you like your coffee?’ Holing up together, zoning out, pondering. All sorts of people in one room, laughing together, without Teams allowing even a single audio track.
And yet.
I’ve also gained something. By that I don’t mean the obvious benefits like working from home, time saved on commuting, or the invisible tracksuit bottoms hidden from the camera’s view. Nor do I mean the red/yellow/green indicators in Teams, which are supposed to show how willing a colleague is to chat at any given moment. I mean something else: trust. Trust in the customers out there — and the customers out there trusting me. It can’t be any other way. But it works really well.
Trust that everyone has something to offer and everyone has something they want to achieve. And that everyone comes up with ideas to keep things moving forward. We’ve adapted some of our workshop methods into forms ourselves. For example, at the start of a brand development project, our clients can tick the relevant boxes at home, and that gives us an excellent basis for our work. For targeted discussions, for in-depth analyses of competitive positioning, and for drawing up design criteria.
I’m already looking forward to ‘afterwards’. To the postmodern era of agency life. When the old professionalism is loosened up by a new courage to embrace the personal. When it’s normal for children to peer curiously into the camera. When the boundary of perception shifts a little from role to person, and I find myself facing more whole people.
What do you think: should I give the HR lady a pair of Snoopy pyjamas? Just for the sake of a shared laugh. Or would that be a bit too personal, even with the boundary having shifted?
