Fanny joined Switch during COVID-19, long after Ernesta had already made the choice to travel around the world. The rest of us knew each other in intermittent meet-ups held since deciding to go fully remote, but there was always someone who couldn’t make a drinks session or had to leave early before others showed up. 

Madrid gave us a chance to all be in the same room together again. 

There’s been a lot said about how you need connection to run a company; you need a physical presence in an office, to see each other twice or three times or four times a week so that you don’t forget how to work together. You need the gel of a fully-stocked office with catered lunch and all the benefits. 

Madrid showed us plenty. 

Mostly, it showed us that being present in the same room together has nothing to do with the way we work. 

We work well together because we work well together. The location doesn’t matter. Whether we see each other physically doesn’t matter. What matters is that we like each other, as friends and as colleagues, and we’re committed to making the best of every situation we’re in.

Friday

People travelling from Malta got to Madrid in a batch. The conversation on the way over: what food we were going to eat once we’re there, how excited we were to see our Madrid transplant, Luke, and whether or not it was hotter in Madrid than it was in Malta (it wasn’t – but it was a different heat, and that meant a different brace of problems, such as rueing the day most of us packed long trousers and jeans instead of shorts and sundresses). 

At an apartment just outside Retiro Park, Maria (who’d moved to Brazil) brought fresh coffee beans and guava sweets straight from a shop in Florianopolis. When the Maltese travellers finally made it, there was coffee waiting for us, and our international team – Maria, Kim, Ernesta, Luke, Laura – ready with hugs. 

A lot of hugs. 

A team lunch at Urogallo followed. Over tiny little plates of tapas and a lot of wine, we clumped up in conversation, talking over each other, on brand and very Maltese, Madrid and what everyone else has been up to. None of these conversations were new – as a team, we talk often both in work and out of it, but they take on new significance when held in person, without the hemmed-in background of a video call.

After a brief stop at the rental apartments to freshen up, we split up into three teams for the first team-building activity of the week: an escape room where Tom, Nella, Ed and Kathleen’s team was eventually crowned victor. 

More food, more conversation, this time Spaniard-late: at 11 o’clock at night, we were in a tiny part of Madrid dining over four separate tables, and the air around us rang with loud Switch conversations. Take us out of any place, and we’ll make it home: that was what Madrid had already started to show us.

Saturday

Team-building is a strange concept to think about. If you’ve worked with each other for long enough, you should automatically be a team – but if that was the case, then the whole idea of office culture and company culture collapses. Making a team that works together takes work and dedication. 

Sometimes, it means knowing how the team thinks. 

On Saturday, we spent the morning in smaller groups: coffee shops, breakfast places, shopping, exploring tiny offshoots of streets fringed and framed underneath an awning of trees. In the afternoon, Luke set us loose in the Prado Museum and told us to find our favourite artwork, and prepare to present it at dinner later. 

Most of us grouped up with people who wanted to see similar things: Goya’s Black Paintings were a popular choice (can you blame us?), but others found solace in people who wanted to go where the signs seemed most promising. 

A good portion of us liked the paintings where dogs featured heavily. 

For others, the experience was transcendental. To each their own.

Over dinner – takeaway at the apartment in front of the Retiro – we argued over the best dog, and saw each others’ presentations on their favourite artwork, their reasoning behind why it appealed to them – based on history, based on whim, based on what caught their eye in the moment.

We tend to fall into the habit of thinking that we’re very similar people; that it’s a big part of what drives the company. We’re all extroverted introverts; we like similar things. 

But when you boil down the way we work to its bare minimum, it varies in different areas: we think mechanically, we think creatively, we think in ways that go at odds with the jobs we do.

Sunday

Those running headed off early to get to the various race start lines as Madrid prepared itself for an onslaught of people in running shoes determined to go great lengths before they wound up in the same place. For most of the morning, the rest of us tracked the runners on the Madrid marathon app from coffee shops and breakfast places, from apartments still grey from the late morning light, tagging each other in locations to give the runners somewhere to aim for. We spent the day in the park otherwise, relaxed and lazy with the light, meeting up at interims to see what the rest were doing. 

In the evening, we talked brand. 

Specifically, we talked about the Switch brand. 

Part of the work we do – for clients, for ourselves – is to watch and influence the way the brand grows, the way it changes: not externally, but internally. A brand that thrives is a brand that speaks and acts in a way that is consistent with the way it thinks. If not, it takes steps to fix that: to either realign the way it works internally, or to change the way it presents externally. 

Since we last took a hard look at the Switch brand, a lot has happened. Our team is international. It is fully remote. The work we do has changed. The partnerships we make have grown.

In Madrid, early evening, the music piped in through the windows from the restaurant below, the Switch brand unfurled: internally, a lot has changed about us as people, and so the brand needs to keep up. Switch, as a brand, has always been built out of different facets of the people who work here. The more we change as people – become runners, look towards a future that’s green and good and better for all – the more Switch has to change to keep up. 

But that’s fine. The more we change, the more we want Switch to change, to reflect who we are as people. 

That’s how it works best for us.

Monday 

Monday saw us at Darwin & Verne, in a historical building still creaking and heavy with the weight of what it was. The Darwin & Verne offices are flooded with natural light, built around a central courtyard that grows wild with green trees. In a lovely room tucked away from the main road, we watched Darwin & Verne introduce themselves to us and talk about their projects; in turn, we talked about Switch, and the work we love doing. That conversation carried us through to lunch, four hours of casual discussion in a basement diner in Madrid, the light low and warm on brass fixtures and old brick.

In the afternoon, while Darwin & Verne went back to their workday, we used their offices for another team-building activity with Up Your Level. 

Here’s what we learned. 

We have very different definitions of certain things. We’re all passionate about what we do, and what we can do. We’re loud: at points, the only thing you could hear in the offices was us, talking over each other. Somehow, we communicate and we communicate well, but not well enough that we can slack on actually saying what we mean. There’s work we can do to communicate better, and we’re setting the steps down. 

We learned that the creativity we thrive on comes from everywhere, no matter what your role is. We learned that you can’t take the management drive out of a project manager (ask Camille about how much it costs to throw a Titanic-themed bash with period-accurate cocktails). 

We learned that we gravitate towards each other, but also to tiny groups that fit our personality best, and that those different personality groups work better as a whole. A table full of go-getters all used to giving orders need a temperament that will listen and follow.

What Madrid Taught Us

Madrid ended bittersweetly. It’ll be another year at least before we all see each other again – fully, without the barriers of video calls and calendar invites.

The office we have is a physical space. It’s beautifully done, and with soft light, and with a dogs-welcome policy that usually means the sound of claws and typing are mixed up often. We bring in coffee from home, and our resident baristas – Ed, Ganna, Lisa – make espressos over client meetings, taking orders like seasoned coffee veterans. 

But we don’t need to be there, day in, and day out, to work well together and to build a company we’re all proud of. 

That’s what Madrid showed us. 

More than working together, more than getting along, it showed us this: Switch is a company that is built by everyone. Everyone has a stake in the way that it runs. Everyone has a say in how it looks forward. Everyone – not just Rik, our CEO, or Ed, co-owner – has a part to play in the direction it goes in.

And it’s hard to beat a company that grows with you.

The post Madrid, Marathons, and Meet Ups: Switch Trip 2023 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The other half will be cheering them on from the sidelines.

The Switch Trip is back. 

Why are we going to Madrid?

We’re a Malta-based company. Our employees (and our clients) come from all over. 

Every year prior to COVID, our Switch trip was purely a way to unwind, get together, and rejuvenate our creativity. We’ve been to Provence, we’ve seen the sites of Lake Garda, and we’ve walked in Amsterdam, and now, our team is going to Madrid – but not just to relax. Like everything else in the company, the purpose for our Switch trip has changed a little. 

We’re lucky that our team building efforts have survived the pandemic. The work that we put into nurturing our company culture has grown, and with it, so has our team – so our trip to Madrid can be focused on more than just team-building and creating a tighter connection between the people that work here. We can look at working with an ICOM agency in Spain, strengthening our connection to the network. We can look at improving ourselves: the race isn’t just a way of filling up the time. 

Most importantly, we can work on making the company adapt to what was initially our biggest challenge: becoming international. 

Why international?

Our clients aren’t the only ones located around the world. We have team members that moved out of Malta and relocated to Finland, Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere (‘Where in the world is Ernesta’ is a fun game to play every so often). To make sure that we can support our team with the same dedication as we put into supporting our Maltese team, we have to know what that support needs to be.

We didn’t set out to go to Spain just because one of our team members is there. It helps to understand the culture that our employees now live in, but the idea of travelling to a different country is to equalise the experience for mostly everyone. Only a single member of the team doesn’t have to travel long distances: the rest of us have a plane trip or two to make our way there. 

What will we do in Madrid?

Mostly: work. 

No, really. 

On ourselves. On our team. On what the company means to us. On how we can become better than what we were last year. This is the kind of work that we take on year-round, with the difference that the entire team hasn’t been together in one room since before the pandemic. In the interim years between then and now, we’ve changed, and that change hasn’t been fully understood. Bringing us all together in one room will help see where our team is going. 

From Luke, our head of marketing: “Since we went fully remote, we needed to figure out how to keep the feeling of community we’d built over the years in our office. The Switch Trip is one obvious solution, but tying in a group goal such as the marathon is really helping us come together and support each other – even those who aren’t actively running. It’s also a bonus that our efforts to reach a 4-day week tie into it – without those Fridays off, a lot of us wouldn’t have the time or energy to train. It feels like a win-win-win.”

Why running?

This started with Rik, who took up running in the pandemic. 

We still don’t know what happened after. Ed started running. Luke started running (again). Laura runs for fun. Thomas, Lisa, Kathleen, Melissa: they all took up running in a bid to join the 10K marathon that would take place during our trip. 

If you haven’t kept up with Rik’s newfound love for running, we suggest you start here. 

And as for our runners in Madrid, here’s what they have to say: 

Camille, on Madrid: You know those Monday-morning conversations you have with colleagues where you chat about what you did over the weekend? In the past my co-workers could never understand why my best weekend memory was waking up at the crack of dawn to participate in a local road race, or spending two hours on a long run. I’ve been running consistently for 10 years and now I can’t believe I’m working with a group of people who enjoy running as much as I do!

For me, the Switch Trip is really special because we’re all working individually on a shared goal. Training for a race is demanding, and it requires dedication, persistence, and drive. Although running is a solo sport, we’re doing it together and I can’t wait to hit the starting line in Madrid with these oddballs. 

Lisa, with a pragmatic view, says: I needed an excuse to get me to start running and hopefully get to the stage where I enjoy running. It’s still a work in progress but I’ve bought very expensive shoes now so there’s no backing out.

In agreement, Tom says, “The promise of group encouragement was too good to refuse. I’m terrible at keeping fitness regimes going so the thought of having to show up in Madrid and run a half-marathon with most of my colleagues was the perfect spark to light that fire under my arse.”

Ed adds, “every step is a surprise. Surprise that this ancient body can still propel itself in a direction for two hours and not fall to bits. Seeing a bunch of people on the Switch team participating is an added incentive to keep piling on the miles and to keep myself in the condition it takes to lace up a pair of shoes and race.”

Ernesta, who’s seen nearly the entirety of South America by the time we go to Spain, says, “signed up in solidarity – might regret it later.”

As for the non-runners, there’s a clear reasoning behind what they’re looking forward to: 

Melissa says, “I have never been as excited for a Switch trip as I have for this one: it’s the first time in 3 years that all the team will get to be together in the same place at the same time. This is also the very first time that some team members will get to see each other in person. And to top it off, some of us are going to run, like, literally run in the form of exercise and not because of a zombie apocalypse.”

Naomi adds, succinctly, that she “does not run. Will not run.” However, she’ll be at the sidelines cheering on the runners, with a coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other. 

Luca states, “I’m just coming for the croquetas,” and Ġanna adds in vermouth and tortilla de patatas. 

Maria, on a sweeter note, says, “the fact that I am going on my first trip after becoming a mother with all of you, I don’t need to say anything else! I can not wait!”

Food and fun has always been the peak of what Switch experiences are like. Now we have running to add to the mix – and a lot of lessons we’ve learned over the years to put to the test. 

But it doesn’t mean we’ll be different people there. 

Switch has always remained, at its core, a company of strange people who tell good stories. Madrid gives us a chance to round-robin those stories in one room, rather than through the hyperconnected leylines of the internet. 

We’re looking forward to it. 

The post Switch Trip 2023: Madrid appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’ve practically always operated as a remote working agency because we truly believe that inspiration and productivity don’t come by looking at the same four walls 9 to 6. Some of us thrive more at odd times of the day (it’s currently 23:51 as I am typing this), whilst others are early birds that love starting their day with a cup of coffee at the office.

So when we had to shift the whole team to working remotely last year, we weren’t worried. The logistics weren’t an issue, as the vast majority of us already work from laptops and were used to the flexibility of working from home.

What our main point of focus was (and still is) is making sure the team remains a team. 

Working remotely can feel lonely very fast. 

When the catch-ups next to the coffee machines, the lunch breaks shared together, the office chatter, brainstorming sessions, and Friday drinks get replaced by quiet home offices and scheduled video calls, it can make people feel very disconnected. The lack of human interaction, and the overall feeling of being part of a team – of something bigger, can make it easy to lose the motivation and determination to work. 

To avoid that, we make it a priority to meet everyone as regularly as possible. We work on a number of weekly, monthly, and quarterly virtual events that include one-to-ones with each member of the team, meetings by departments, and also whole agency ones. The purpose of some is to keep our internal communications up to date, whereas the others are aimed at keeping the team glued together. 

In this blog post, I’ll be focusing on the latter, and how we work on keeping creativity and collaboration alive. 

One of the most common comments we’ve been hearing over the past year is how everyone has been missing the brainstorming sessions at the office. These are a fundamental piece of our process for any of the projects we work on, but besides helping us come up with beautiful stories to tell for our clients, it is also a great exercise for the different departments to collaborate and think creatively together. Some of our best work was the result of agency-wise brainstorming (often accompanied by a beer).

We didn’t want the challenges of working remotely to stop these. So a couple of weeks ago, we decided to opt for a brainstorming session with a twist. 

We ended a regular Wednesday a little earlier, and following the quarterly meeting which updates everyone on what has happened the past quarter and what projects/goals/forecasts we are aiming for in Q2, we split the agency into different groups. Each team was formed by one member from each department (creative, marketing, strategy, and project management). The aim here was to get people to step outside of their teams so they could interact with others they may not deal with daily. 

For the scope of the exercise, we opted for a ‘fantasy’ client that we are all very familiar with: Spotify. The brief was simple: each team had 20 minutes to think of a creative concept for May the 4th: Star Wars Day.

We created breakout rooms, and let the magic happen with each team. Once the 20 minutes were up, they were all automatically brought back into the main call. 

Each team had 5 minutes to pitch their ideas. This resulted in discussions, building off each others’ ideas, a little friendly competition, and ultimately selecting the winning idea (which turned out to be the perfect mix of all the proposed ones). 

Spotify Wrapped for Star Wars characters. 

Our office’s Star Wars geeks had a blast working on writing the content needed to make the Spotify Wrapped as relevant to the franchise as possible. From Darth Vader’s guilty pleasure for Cher, to Luke Skywalker’s favourite Ocean Sound genre, we just had to give the mockups a try. And once we did, we obviously couldn’t not share them.

So here’s our Spotify #Maythefourthbewithyou campaign!

The post Remote working: keeping creativity and collaboration alive appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Her job title says it all: Martina is a busy person. She forms part of the demi-god administration team that keeps the agency running smoothly.
She spends her working hours handling paperwork on her 3 (yes, three) monitors, only popping up for air for sustenance around tea time to unveil her latest baking invention.
So she keeps us in check, and she bakes. As you can imagine, we love her dearly 🙂
Last Friday, it was Tina’s turn to bring something to the boardroom table. Looking for a much-needed break from numbers and figures, she decided it was time to unwind and get to know each other a little better, starting from our early years and leading straight up to the random stories one would tell around a campfire.

Part 1: Oh Baby

Everyone received an envelope with their name on it, which included the pieces to two puzzles: One is a baby photo of an unidentified colleague, the other is a hint to help you figure out who they are. For some, it was obvious (Debbie’s hint was a dancing couple and Roderick’s was a broadsword – no-brainer!)

The others took a little figuring out, but the stories behind each of the photos got the team-bonding going steady. The beer helped too.
Can you guess who’s who? Quite a few of us couldn’t make it that afternoon, so that’ll make things a little harder if you’re expecting a few familiar faces 😉

Part 2: Lucky Dip

Just when we thought things were getting intimate (I mean, three of the photos were bath-time treasures after all) Tina took it to the next level.
1 bowl, full of more folded strips of paper than you could count. Everyone grabs a handful of strips and has a few minutes to read through the questions he or she has picked up. Some were super personal, others has us laughing out loud.
We heard about fears and phobias (note to self: never plan a Switch event at a theme park). The guys shared fond memories of cartoon crushes (remember Fujiko?) We heard about mean taunts from teen years, life in other countries, someone’s history as a child model, first kisses and the superpower that Keith would go for if he had the choice.

There were sweet moments, sad moments and literal LOLs, all within the last hour of the week.
Nice one, Tina – that was definitely a team-bonding session.

The post Last Friday Night: Getting to know you appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Chilled

I stopped to ask this chips vendor in Lima if he minded me taking a photo. His reply was, loosely translated: “Yeah sure, but I’m not going to smile for the photo. I never do.”
Peru remains indelibly stuck in my mind for many reasons, but the fact that there were so many varieties of potatoes must be one of the strangest things I found. There were times when we had 3 or 4 different potatoes in the same dish. This guy was selling normal potato crisps (chips), sweet potato ones, and, quite naturally, popped corn.

Coffee

We visited  farms where a good amount of the world’s coffee and chocolate is grown and processed. It’s quite an eye opener to see how far something we consume on a regular basis has to travel before getting to us. It’s also humbling to see the hard work that goes into it at source (and that we tend to take for granted since it magically appears on a supermarket shelf close to us.

The Mayor

This was the mayor of the community on one of the floating islands in Lake Titikaka, on the border between Peru and Bolivia. She keeps a hand-made rifle to protect her fellow villagers (around 10 of them) when their husbands are out fishing – sometimes for days on end.

Pisco Sours

This is a photo I took in a bar of our hotel in Lima. It’s one of the two or three bars that claim to have invented the Pisco Sour – a delicious cocktail I’ve only ever had in Lima.
I’ll be writing more about my trip over the coming months – hopefully at some point I’ll find the time to put everything together in a format that I’m happy with, but till then you’ll just have to follow my pictorial and anecdotal stories that pop up from time to time on my Facebook page.

The post Last Friday Night: A Trip to Peru appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Enter our latest blog series

Every week, we’ll have a quick round-up of what went on the week before – starting with last Friday and Andrea’s game of Drawception.

The concept is pretty simple, especially if you ever played Chinese Whispers as a kid. Everyone’s given one long sheet of plain paper, a pencil, and a task: you must think of any sentence or phrase and write it at the top of the paper.

At this point everyone’s brain will, of course, blank

Once you’re functioning again and everyone’s written their sentence, you then pass on your sheet to the person on your left. This person reads your phrase and must attempt to draw an interpretation of the phrase. The key work here being “attempt” – please keep in mind that, while we do have a team of hugely talented designers at Switch, the vast majority of us can’t draw a stick man to save our lives.

When you’re done drawing, you fold back the sentence at the top of the paper to hide it from view before passing the sheet over to the person on your left. This person must then interpret the drawing to write out a sentence underneath, before folding the drawing back and out of sight.

This keeps going until everyone gets their sheet back – although most of the time, you wouldn’t recognise it from the end result…

Nice one, Andrea. Ending the week with hysterical laughter is always a good idea.
Until next Friday, folks.

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