Creating a ‘café working culture’ with the cloud

A lack of ICT graduates in Europe has led experts to predict that by 2020 there will be 825,000 unfilled digital jobs in the region.

That’s where organisations like Dept come in. Dept is an international network of digital agencies across Europe and the US, specialising in producing digital products and services, to build brands and grow businesses. Ranging from social media specialists, to data-driven marketers, web designers, and production crews, Dept is a one-stop-shop for creative, digital support.

With a team of 600, working across 12 of the company’s digital agencies, we caught up with Adriaan Bakker, IT Manager, Dept to find out how such a large but fragmented organisation stays in sync.

“Marketing is becoming more multi-faceted than any other department in a business. Our digital agency network Dept, is proof of that,” Adriaan says.

When it comes to the why, Adriaan says the discipline is changing so much because client expectations are evolving: “Client expectations are increasing, and to meet them digital teams have to work better together, even when based in different locations. As you grow this can be harder to do, so it’s important you have the foundations in place to scale your business.”

“You don’t realise the impact collaboration tools can have on project teams until you start using them. Since working with Dropbox we have improved productivity and sped up workflows.”

For Adriaan and the growing team at Dept, implementing technology to help streamline workflows across offices was a top priority: “With a team of 600 working on the same projects from multiple locations, our company realised the key to growth was enabling collaboration. As such we needed to invest in a tool that would encourage greater collaboration – for us Dropbox Business was that tool.”

For a digital agency like Dept, the benefits of sharing content and collaborating in the cloud soon became clear. Adriaan says: “You don’t realise the impact collaboration tools can have on project teams until you start using them. Since working with Dropbox we have improved productivity and sped up workflows.”

What did the employees themselves think? Well, according to Adriaan this more collaborative way of working is helping teams, from different offices and on different time zones, work together on client projects more effectively. He says, “Everyone is seeing and feeling the benefits of working in the cloud.”

Finally, we asked Adriaan if being able to collaborate has improved the working culture and employee satisfaction at Dept. He told us there’s a lot more flexible working, a shift away from static desks, and that has actually influenced people to speak more face-to-face: “Our office itself looks more like a coffee shop now. There are corners everywhere where people meet and work together. However, what I’ve noticed is that, despite being able to work anywhere, people now like to meet and discuss projects. That is great for us to see, and helps bring the collaboration we are doing online, back offline.”

To hear more stories about how the cloud has helped reshaped other creative businesses, click here.