If you live and work in parts of the world that experience dramatic seasonality, that weather change can impact your creativity whether you like it or not. Depending on your own outdoor habits, your passions, and even your personality, it’s plausible that you may look at the harshness of the winter months where you live with dread. That negative attitude will affect your energy for producing ideas — no matter how creative you are.
Some warm-blooded creatures find a cozy spot to hibernate throughout these wintry months — bears, bats, groundhogs, and skunks all physically slow down their respiration, heart, and metabolic rates — and mostly snooze until the environment around them explodes back to life under the warm spring sun. Most humans, though, especially those of us in creative service industries, certainly do not have that luxury. Our world of creating brand experiences is dictated by the incessant beat of our always-on economy, which is rarely affected at the macro level by cold temps and inconvenient storm conditions.
Because the “winter blues,” or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), is real AF and can slow anyone down both physically and mentally throughout the winter, a significant body of winter coping strategies has been researched and developed by medical and mental health professionals and self-help gurus. We’re constantly bombarded by tips to dress appropriately and get outside despite less-than-ideal conditions, keep up an exercise regimen, and eat well to encourage wellness and fight off sickness when our immune systems are challenged during the short days but long months of winter.
All great advice — but what specifically can be done to keep creative professionals and entire creative departments sharp November through April? There is plenty of organic encouragement among our team to use the increased indoor time during winter to catch up on creative movies, stream bingeworthy shows, host crafting and game nights, and visit area museums to nurture our curiosities and creative souls. But we have also developed several initiatives to keep our team sharp, motivated, and their engagement humming even when a steel resolve, bulky coats, and unwieldy boots are all required just to get to the office each morning.
Inspiration
The winter months — when people may not be jonesin’ to be out on morning runs and bike rides or at evening sports leagues — can be a great time to stay better tuned-in to the broader industry news sources. While monitoring newsletters, trade pubs, and email updates are all fine ways to keep a pulse on the industry, our team developed a regular “Worklove” meeting where we present work examples from outside our company with a point of view of why the work being shown is innovative or culturally relevant. We push ourselves to understand the strategies, concepts, storytelling techniques, and craft from this work that can be within categories we operate or elsewhere.
We also formalized a book club within our company where groups of three to five people read the same book. So far, we’ve focused on titles dealing with the origin of ideas. Once the group gets together to discuss the material and exchange notes, they swap books for a new cycle, keeping the learnings fresh. We also encourage entertaining reading since all reading and time away from screens can help keep you sharp. We have developed a library composed of all our employees’ favorite books, ranging from fiction and nonfiction to a few graphic novels. Whenever new staffers are onboarded, they present their addition to the library at one of our weekly standup meetings. The books are available for loan to our entire team throughout the year. Building team chemistry is an incredible by-product of these self-guided activities.
Training
We offer varied training opportunities to our team throughout the year. Some are direct results of our performance management processes, where required skills are identified for improvement or complementary skills are sought through individual improvement plans. So when the days are shorter and the motivation to be out and about enjoying the spring, summer, and early autumn sun is less of a distraction, we encourage getting self-guided training through subscriptions to online courses such as Skillshare and MasterClass, and even support continuing education at area colleges and universities in some cases.
Since our own business and client experience can also be a great foundation for cross-training opportunities, we created an agency meeting series called “Workshare.” Once new client work is in market, we get the entire staff together, not only to share that client team’s output for recognition purposes (well, yeah, celebration does serve an important cultural role within any company), but also to truly focus the meeting on key learnings from the project. Past Workshares have focused on specific challenges and their unique solutions or the new techniques, technologies, and brand experiences used to bring an idea to life and how they may benefit more of our clients’ businesses. Those experiences and newly developed expertise then become better understood throughout the company. We get more adept at anticipating issues and being more proactive when that knowledge is shared and more us can become subject-matter experts across teams.
Operational Improvements
Before the hiking and biking trails dry out, the kickball, ultimate frisbee, soccer, and softball leagues crank up, and the sessionable summer beers and hard seltzers start flowing, use what could be the doldrums of winter to look hard at your business and create change to address any real or perceived weak spots in your structure, processes, and offerings. Seek systemic improvement and include your entire organization in that process. Sound daunting? It can be. But there are resources available to create impactful change throughout your company. We are partial to the Entrepreneur Operating System. EOS has provided a proven framework and a new way to communicate throughout our company that has reinvented how we approach our roles and our business every day. For example, we have used EOS this winter to do everything from relaunching our leadership team and focusing our community impact efforts, to revamping our recruiting and project/resource management systems. We’re a better company for creating traction around those issues, and we’ll be ready to enjoy spring with more exuberance knowing we have made our business more durable and productive over the past few months.
Opportunity
Often winter survival tips include motivational tidbits like, “Set goals” and “Tackle projects with defined timelines.” Everything from making gym goals to picking up new hobbies is fair game. For companies and creative teams, the same principles can be applied to create new opportunities for team members, build our own brand, and enhance the shop’s capabilities.
Assigning team members self-promotional work allows them to stretch their concepts and execution style beyond the demands of their client work. That’s always a great way to keep creative juices flowing through the department. Even producing new case studies and redesigning presentation tools can provide creative staffers with new ways to express themselves. But you can take the notion further and bolster your company’s competencies as a goal too.
Since we pride ourselves on serving ambitious marketers with their brand needs, we set aggressive winter goals to produce more content that would be valued by our clients and other brand marketers. Yes, this Medium publication is a direct result, but we also added podcasting and the publication of a printed tabloid magazine (more to come on that later since it’s just shipping to the printer) to our portfolio in Q1 2020. So while local snow totals crept up, we gained status not just as a service provider of brand experiences for clients, but also as a transformed, legitimate, multichannel publisher producing more opportunity for our team to do what they love: being makers every day. Self-publishing has created real energy in our company, from the newest team members through the leadership ranks.
Let us know how you combat the winter blues in your own department or role. Would love to put more strategies into practice. But right now I’m going to check my local mountain’s trail report. My snowboard is calling.
