Collaboration is at the forefront of everything we do here at ZeroLight. As one of our core values, we believe that the benefit of bringing people together, face to face, is invaluable. Collaboration has been key when it comes to our most innovative and disruptive ideas.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, ZeroLight, along with most companies in the UK, switched to remote working. When it was safe to return to the office, we decided to adopt a hybrid working model, allowing employees to work from both our studio on Newcastle’s Quayside or from their home office.
Whilst these new ways of working following the pandemic have been successful, we felt like there was more we could do in terms of bringing staff from across the UK together for cross team collaborative sessions. We wanted to ensure that our employees have the opportunity to brainstorm with their teams, develop their understanding of the ZeroLight platform by meeting with others from different departments and socialise with people from other teams, who they might not cross paths with otherwise.
With this in mind we decided to introduce a quarterly collaboration session. A three day event which gives us the opportunity to bring our employees together on-site to take part in a variety of workshops, training sessions and social activities.
We launched this event in December 2022 and held our latest collaboration week in March 2023, and with a jam packed schedule.
We aimed to have a real range of workshops from skills development sessions open to everyone like improving your presentation skills, creating impactful presentations and developing coaching skills, to a variety of discipline, account team and product sessions where giving feedback and developing understanding was key.
We finished the week with a few drinks at one of our many local pubs to celebrate all the successes from that quarter as one team.
Feedback following our latest collaboration week has been incredibly positive, with everyone finding the time on-site with our fellow employees very valuable.
Some of the comments from employees in a recent survey on this:
“It was great to get further insight into the work being done by teams other than mine. Really made me appreciate everything that goes into building a successful team and end product.”
“It was brilliant to see everyone in the office. Skill sharing sessions were very helpful. Great to see the company objectives update. The social event was great too.”
The Talent Team are already busy preparing for our next one, which will be taking place at the end of June 2023. Hopefully we’ll have some sunshine for this one!