Championing work from anywhere culture: Schbang bridges geography and time zones with Slack

For creative professionals, nothing beats the joy of a good brainstorming session: the group is abuzz with ideas, the energy is high, everyone interrupts everyone else (in the best way!) and side conversations seamlessly flow into the whole, each addition enriching the previous till you finally have an idea/solution/product/pitch that is just right.

Now imagine that brainstorming, only it's happening across text and email. Text and email threads are out of control: everyone is having a conversation with everyone else; they're referring to conversations you weren't a part of, someone asks for a document that was shared a little while ago and while you scramble to find the right version, someone beats you to it… and shares a document that is at least two versions old. Before you can let the group know, someone else raises a question that was answered and shelved last week.

As stressful as it sounds, this is the reality of how many creative agencies worked, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Teams talked over text and email because it was near impossible to get everyone into a call at the same time - calendars packed with client calls and vendor meetings prevented that. Of course, the problem grew circular in nature: this level of chaos led to mistakes and rework, repeated conversations, and wasted time - both internally, and with clients and vendors. Since it is considered 'the nature of the beast', most people adjusted by working longer.

Of course, burnout was common. A recent Slack study, Leadership and the war for talent,  corroborates this. Emerging from the pandemic into an increasingly volatile world, more than half (54%) of India’s knowledge workers have felt burned out in the past year. The situation is worse in organisations with up to 199 employees, where 59% of knowledge workers have felt overwhelmed.

Not everyone is in the same boat though. As with everything else they do, Schbang took the communication and collaboration bull by the horns and turned the situation into an exemplary success story; powered by Slack.

Schbang is a creative and technology transformation company delivering growth-driven end-to-end solutions across creative development, strategic advisory, film production, web, design, data science, and media planning & buying verticals. Which means they're reaching across each other's cubicles - virtually or otherwise - all the time. They needed a solution that lets them do just that, across locations and time zones.

The first big change at Schbang was the ease with which people could converse in groups, asynchronously, without losing the thread of conversations. Slack provides secure channel-based messaging, which inherently helps streamline conversations in channels, and within channels, into threads. All while giving every member of the channel the ability to view all threads and all documents shared.

The second big change was the amount of time they saved looking for documents/links/assets. Now, everything was on Slack, and completely searchable. Moreover, it was easy to add external parties like clients and vendors to conversations as needed, while managing security clearances because Slack has enterprise-grade security built into every layer. In fact, Schbang now uses Slack Connect with around half of its clients, which offers a faster way to remotely collaborate with outside organisations.

Moreover, after putting in a gruelling day of work, employees could switch off. No more dinging cellphones. As Harshil Karia, Schbang founder, said, “Work remains work and life remains life. To make that distinction in a digital-first world was important.”

By streamlining creative briefing using Slack's Workflow Builder, the team was able to design customisable, no-code workflows to automate routine tasks into repeatable processes. Collaboration improved as people knew the next steps in advance, and nothing was left unclear. According to Anshul Sharma, Head of Culture, Communication & PR at Schbang, “We're using Slack workflows to improve our creative process and coordination between internal teams and clients. Our creative delivery is streamlined to deliver impactful creative work at scale."

Moreover, the team used Slack Huddles, a lightweight, audio-first way to start live conversations without having to schedule meetings, to discuss client feedback or problem-solve in real-time. This also had a very positive impact on their turnaround times.

Schbang has found that using Slack has been a game-changer for building connections across different offices. Company-wide communication is now on Slack, which means that they finally have one single channel for reaching everyone. By automating onboarding, newcomers to Schbang find it easier to slide into the culture and conversations. Orientation now involves induction podcasts featuring team leaders.

Questions are responded to quickly because anyone from the channel can jump in and answer. Conversations can evolve, and people don't need to be brought up to speed by someone else, because it's all there on Slack. Most importantly, the incessant buzz of cell phones has died down, as the volume of conversation and coordination needed to get to the same place has died down.

Collaboration, especially in the 'new normal' following the Covid-19 lockdowns, and especially in creative workplaces, can turn into an unwieldy, sticky mess. However, it doesn't need to be. Organisations were thrust into the work-from-home culture without warning, and many didn't have the infrastructure needed to support their employees in the best way. Content management, communication, and collaboration suffered.

We are, however, two years in. The world of work has changed, and we're never going to go back to the way we were in early 2020. Organisations that recognise this are taking appropriate action to create ease in our new, distributed workplaces. That ease is critical to retaining our best talent. If our people are too busy putting out fires, what they're unable to do is build strong foundations for tomorrow. That's worth thinking about.