The Digital Skills Summit Lightning Talk #2: Sophie Davies-Patrick (Clearleft)
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Lightning Talk from The Digital Skills Summit: Powered by Wired Sussex on Monday 23rd March 2015 @ Komedia, Brighton
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The Digital Skills Summit Lightning Talk #2: Sophie Davies-Patrick (Clearleft)
- 1. DIGITAL SKILLS SUMMIT Sophie Davies-Patrick, Director of Operations
- 2. Image credit: Paul Arnett
- 5. Image credit: Plaudit Design
- 6. Image credit: Dave Gray, Visual Thinking
- 7. Image credit: Jeremy Keith
- 8. Image credit: Graham Smith
- 11. Image credit: Richard Rutter
- 12. Image credit: Jeremy Keith
- 13. Image credit: Jeremy Keith
- 14. Image credit: the endearing designer
- 15. Image credit: James Box
- 16. Image credit: Richard Rutter
- 17. Image credit: Richard Rutter
Editor's Notes
- Over 8 years ago I was working as a product owner at Yahoo! and was looking for web conferences to sponsor. I came across dConstruct, run by a small User Experience Design startup in my home town of Brighton. The conference was great - really innovative at the time, and I was impressed by the energy and dedication of the Clearleft staff.
- Many years later, I bumped into Clearleft founder Andy Budd in the street and we went for coffee. He was looking for someone to join their growing team, to consolidate the company as it moved towards 20 staff and moved into its new offices.
- Clearleft has always employed senior people, and given them the space to do good work. We recognise that investing in good people is great business practise. Daniel Pink, in his book, Drive, lists three elements of the motivation formula: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In situations where people are paid fairly, this trio drives, engages, and stimulates us to do our best work. These are key values for Clearleft, and as we’ll see, they play out in our approach to motivating and developing our team.
- Right from the early days of the business, Clearleft has always given each staff member a budget of £1,000 per year to be spent as they see fit on their continued professional development. This might be going to conferences or courses, or it may be used for books or even professional coaching. In keeping with our value of Autonomy, this learning is self-directed and we also trust people to track their spend themselves. As long as staff observe professional courtesy towards their clients and colleagues when scheduling in training or event attendance, they are free to go wherever they see fit in the wider goal of being a great employee. So if they choose to blow it all on a trip to Brooklyn Beta, that’s their call.
- We also run our own internal workshops. At our last round of staff reviews, quite a few people expressed a desire to better Master sketching. So we asked our friend Dave Gray to run a masterclass for us when he was next in Europe. It’s tomorrow actually and I’m really looking forward to it! We’ve also recently held a master-class in Public Speaking, run by our very own Jeremy Keith. And of course we give all our team free tickets to the conferences we run.
- As well as bringing in experts, we also place great emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. We try to mix up team members on projects throughout the year, so that everyone has the opportunity to work with, and learn from, everyone else over time. We have weekly Design Reviews - to which all members of the company are invited, where staff have an opportunity to gain feedback and critique from their peers. This culture of collectively raising our game, is professionally satisfying to our practitioners.
- Because we believe in giving back to the community, and we want to do work with a purpose, we also encourage our staff to get out there and speak. It has always been part of Clearleft’s mission to share knowledge. We have informal partnerships with academic institutions such as Ravensbourne College, Greenwich and Manchester Universities. We allow staff time to give Careers talks through organisations such as STEMNet, and support the next generation by mentoring at Young Rewired State.
- As a small company, we’re also keen to bring in outside influence as much as we can. So we have a tradition of running paid internships. We usually offer these to people with some experience in the industry and in fact have gone on to hire quite a few of our interns. The last programme was even more ambitious: we hired a product designer, a hardware specialist and a UX student and gave them the task of delivering a product in 3 months. The result was Chune - a social music player, the prototype of which was featured widely: from Wired to British Airways Highlife magazine. It brought a great new energy to our studio, and we learnt a lot about hardware hacking and product development from the weekly lunchtime presentations the interns gave to the team.
- As we grow, we realise that we can’t hire only at a Senior level forever and we need to think about the next generation of Clearlefties. So we are also starting a practice of mentoring. Whether it’s our new business development person, or our recently hired Front-end developer, we are grappling with the structure and processes we need to put in place to allow new hires to get up to speed quickly in the Clearleft approach to design. This is also Purposeful work - the current team members get satisfaction out of sharing their knowledge.
- But its not all serious! We set aside a monthly budget for Team Fun. We have an ideas wall where anyone can stick a Post It with something they’d like to try with their colleagues. Our office manager kindly organises a day every 6-8 weeks. We’ve recently all taken a Barista course at Small Batch (yes, we’re a bunch of Hipsters) and are currently organising a trip to Bletchley Park (yes we’re also a bunch of Geeks).
- And in the past the team has tried everything from go-karting ….
- … to bread making.
- So what are some of the challenges we’ve found with our approach? Firstly, giving people Autonomy is great, but it needs balancing with Support. People don’t always recognise their own training needs, or know where to go to find them. Secondly, it’s so hard to carve out time for training or days out when you are busy on client work. Thirdly, in a very flat company comprised of mostly Senior staff - where is the long term career path for us all? We don’t necessarily have answers to all of these and I’d love to hear thoughts from other people who’ve struggled with these too.
- Finally, no talk on Clearleft team events would be complete without a word about our annual Hack Farm. Every year, the whole team decamps to a large rural property for a week.
- In between wrestling with the poor wifi, and taking it in turns to cook meals for our colleagues, we divide into small teams with the goal of shipping something by the end of the week.
- Be it a website to encourage blood donation, or a boardgame for helping workshops run smoothly, every team has a daily playback, and is tasked with recording what they did and what they learnt as we go along. This keeps the momentum going. Working closely in these small teams with everyone pitching in, allows us to learn more about each other’s disciplines. Although a tiring week, it’s great to look outside of current client projects and give ourselves the time and space to innovate.
- So that same spirit of engagement and dedication I saw when I first started working with Clearleft back in the early days of dConstruct is still very much baked into our DNA. Retention and upskilling of staff is something we continue put a huge amount of resources into. I hope you’ve found some of these ideas useful in building your own teams and of course just let me know if you have any questions at all.