W+K London

December 2, 2016

W+K’s trial to work smarter

At W+K London, we’re always pushing ourselves to make sure we’re staying true to the founding ambition of the agency; to provide an environment that inspires people to create the best work of their lives.

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This March, we gave some thought to the way we were working; and how some of the norms of the industry, late nights and long hours, coupled with always-on-technology and days filled with meetings might not necessarily always be helping us get to great work.

We introduced the following guidelines.

No emails between 7pm and 8am, at weekends and during holidays
Encourage a 40 hour week: 4.30pm finishes on a Friday to make this possible
Hold internal meetings between 10am and 4pm
Introduce a formal day in lieu policy

The above guidelines weren’t about working less. They were about protecting our ability to work better. To give ourselves more time to think. To give everyone a chance to have an email free evening; whatever they wanted to do with it. To give greater flexibility to night-owls or early-risers to when they needed to be in the office and to recognise that when we do all need to come in on a weekend; it’s OK to take that time back.

Six months in, we have analysis that shows that the initiative is working and it’s making a difference. We’ve undertaken a survey of all of our employees; in which 91% of respondents felt that they had a better work life balance since the new working guidelines have been implemented. 84% of respondents said they had worked less overtime. This led to people feeling they had an opportunity to think more deeply, manage their own time better and work during the times that suited them best. 86% of respondents felt there had been a perception change overall to how we work in the agency.

We’re still pushing ourselves and some of the changes have been easier to adopt than others; it’s fair to say email guidelines have worked the best and meeting times has been the most challenging, but from the data gathered so far, it looks like overall the experiment has worked.

Last week we spoke with Contagious about how we’ve updated our way of working in the past six months. It’s been published on their website, you can read the article here.

We’re continuing to gather results and look at other data sources to continue to evaluate it.

November 25, 2016

Hacking together Shopageddon.biz

We just launched a weird VR shopping experiment to bring the excitement and terror of Black Friday directly into your home and eyeballs. It’s called Shopageddon.biz. Give it a try, especially if you have a VR headset and don’t get motion sick too easily.

It came about through playing around with various different APIs and frameworks we found interesting, primarily Web VR and Associate Earning programs.

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If you don’t know what an API is, it’s a very quick and simple code interface to do something that would otherwise be very complicated and time consuming. You write some simple code and get back a simple answer, and don’t need to worry about all the complexity that happens in between. Basically you’re standing on the shoulders of people much cleverer than you. Better still, these clever folk often give their work away for free or at very, very low cost. And because they’re all web-based and work in a browser without having to download an app, you can use them all at the same time, mushed together.

To make the VR part, we used a-frame.io which lets you create 3D scenes and objects with standard html code.

For example, here’s how you make a scene: <a-scene id=”scene”>

Here’s how you make a box: <a-box depth=“10” height=“10” width=“10”></a-box>

Easy right? Put on a VR headset and test it – you just made a VR experience! An exceptionally dull one admittedly, but not bad for 1 minute of effort.

We used another API to find random products to sell (and generate affiliate income should anyone actually buy anything). Another called Responsive Voice to read out a description when you look at something. Playing with the pitch, speed and voice type is another 4 lines of code.

Being able to make things so quickly lets you get started straight away and use your time thinking about the fun stuff like animations and crafting the overall experience. Every few hours we could pass a prototype around the team and let everyone have a go, make a few changes and try it out again.

There are tonnes of other APIs out there. Here’s a few we’ve already played with or intend to play with soon.

Image detection APIs like Clarifai.com can tell you the objects in a photo with freakish accuracy. It correctly guessed ‘Blue M&M’ when I tried.
Face detection APIs let you submit a photo and get back information about the age, gender, race, emotion of the people in it, plus pixel-perfect locations of eyes, ears, chins and any other features you feel the need to know.
Twilio is an API for sending and receiving texts and phonecalls. It’s how Airbnb and Uber send you messages.
IBM have an API to access Watson, their artificial intelligence who won Jeopardy.
Google have loads of APIs, obvious stuff like search but also translating between languages, recognising speech and natural language, doing machine learning.
Monzo (new banking startup) have an API to search your transactions.
If This Then That lets you link APIs together with no code.
API.ai let’s you create chatbots and text interfaces really, really easily.

With amazing APIs, and platforms like A Frame, all you need is your imagination and a small portion of practical know-how to start making really compelling experiences in not much time at. What are you waiting for?