How has a function like design survived remote working?

Andrew Barraclough, vice-president of design at GSK discusses how designers in pharma have had to adapt to remote working conditions and why collaboration is still key.

From marketers to accountants, analysts to solicitors, office-based workers have had to up sticks from their open plan offices, ditch their commutes, and embrace home-working on a scale never before witnessed. The universality of coronavirus has meant that a myriad of professions, across continents and sectors, have been required to shift to remote working. Key workers and situation-based roles aside, our homes have become our workspaces for the past six months. 

For my organisation, this has been a global mass trial of home working – a pilot on an unimaginable scale of 20,000 people working from home. 

While to the casual observer some positions appear easier to continue at home than others, this revolution in remote working has meant – regardless of one’s expertise – enduring the joys of Zoom, navigating the email barrage and determining a new structure to the working day has affected us all.

But what about those of us whose jobs are about creativity, where design – artistic, physical, functional and collaborative – is the heart of our working day? And in an industry such as pharmaceuticals, a significant proportion of that design work is centred on physical objects, items that need to be moulded, tested, opened and touched. We work with prototypes, assessing subtle variations and applying constant iterations of usability.

So, it might surprise you that I’d say 80% of what designers do in their day-to-day jobs, can be done just as effectively at home. Before Covid, I’d often spend most of my working day on my own – and spend three hours a day driving to and from the office for that privilege. That can be done just as effectively remotely.

For the element of the job that requires creative minds to be in the same room, or to be in stores, we’ve turned to technology and been inventive.

The answer to our collaboration needs has come in the form of Miro. It’s a massive, never-ending whiteboard that multiple people can work in it at the same time. You can draw on it, add comments, navigate around it, zoom in and out – it’s proven to be an excellent tool. It allows you to vote on ideas and thoughts, so rather than going round a room and asking if people like something or not, everyone can input their opinions. Creativity generally is a team sport where you are all building on each other’s thoughts and comments. 

The best ideas come from many people and with Miro we can leverage the global nature of our business better. We can start a project in Australia, pass it over to the US and almost achieve 24-hour working. 

So, project turnaround can be quicker – previously it would have been started in an office, in a more analogue way. We’re no longer working on our own PCs and then shifting larger files around the world via WeTransfer. There’s not the same need to brief colleagues on what’s happening because they can go in live and see it in action all the time. 

People sometimes mistakenly assume all creatives are extroverts, but quite often they are introverts and the advantage of working on collaborative software is it removes the performative element of the designer’s job which can be a blessing for some.

It can also be democratising – people are more disciplined on a screen with nine people. Everyone tends to get an opportunity to talk without having to shout over a more verbose member of the team, so we hear from more people.

Of course, there are cons with the pros. The downside is it can be a cold way of doing things, even when you’re working with colleagues you know well or have worked with for a long time. You can’t feel the emotion in the same way across a screen, it’s hard to get warmth across.

Our design work does span both the analogue and the digital and while initial design can be done on software, there comes a point where prototypes need to be made and product testing must be carried out. So, when we’re moving prototypes around, we have to rely on the post office and DHL. It’s back to old school as we move parcels around the country to share things, so people can physically hold, see and touch things. 

For customer product testing we’ve had to add a layer of protocols and ways of working to be responsible and protect people testing our products. This has involved working through the thought process of how people will pick something up and use it before they even get to the testing stage. So when the box is delivered to their doors, it includes a pair of gloves and hand sanitiser, so they can use them before taking the samples out in their homes, testing them, and filling in the questionnaire. 

When we create a product we develop a user journey – you go into a story, you pick it, you buy it, you go home, you squeeze it onto your toothbrush. Now we have had to think about the journey to get our products to users to test, in a way that’s safe. We’ve effectively extended the journey.

One of the starkest advantages of remote working is the time you save – that gained efficiency – along with the ability to be more focussed. The 20% of the job that is hard to do remotely is generally when something’s gone wrong and you need to come together to fix it, or when you just need to have all the creative minds together in person. The other element that can’t be replicated is that more ethereal aspect of creativity and design, of just getting a feel for what’s hot and what’s not, by exploring stores and mixing with different people. 

Adjusting to the change in our working patterns takes time. A few months of Covid has not yet given us the muscle memory that we built up from working the same way for 30 years. It takes time to be working at the same speed and we all must learn how to prepare differently, work differently and gain some new skills. 

As we move forward and a more hybrid working model is adopted, I suspect offices will start to look quite different. Banks of desks won’t be needed as the workplace become more of a collaboration space. An area where employees can come together to share thoughts and ideas and respond to each other in that way that is only possible, with an energy and entertainment, when people are physically close.