COVID-19 update from Jonny, KOTA’s Managing Director

Full time remote: Update 23rd June 2020

Wow! How has it been 3 months since we went into lockdown?

We recently announced to our team that we would remain full time remote until the end of 2020. There is no need for our team to go on public transport as the situation is very much unknown. After individual and team discussions, it’s clear that a flexible approach to working really does empower the team and produce our best results. The studio remains accessible for any team member that would like a change of scenery and is in cycling distance. Our management team remain connected to London so that we can have hopefully have face time with clients again moving forward. This Friday, we are meeting with the whole team for a socially distance lunch in the park (it’s 29 degrees in London!!).

During this period, we have managed to continue to onboard inspiring new clients and work effectively with remote kickoffs and sessions, clients joining in Slack channels and we feel more connected than ever.

Another exciting opportunity for KOTA is to grow our talent base from across the world. We now have 2 full-time remote hires and continually looking at this option – watch this space.

To summarise, we remain open for business and producing our best work to date. We are considering new projects from August.

 

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Business as usual at KOTA

For nearly 10 months, our team has embraced WFAW’s (Work From Anywhere Wednesday’s). Initially, this was brought in to break up the week and empower the team but we didn’t know we would be planning for the pandemic that has shocked the world.

Last Friday, we closed the studio permanently and have now been working fully remote since. It is absolutely business as normal for KOTA and our team.

I thought it would be useful to give insight into how we operate when away from the studio.

 

Our Setup

Our day to say set up is cloud-based, meaning we can access them anywhere, at any time. Some of the tools we use are listed below:

• Google (G-Suite): email and documents
• Dropbox: all of our working files are stored and shared via Dropbox
• Slack: internal project communication
• Zoom: client communication
• Harvest: project management resource for timesheets, resource and scheduling
• SmartSheet: every project begins with a Gantt chart and that starts here
• Adobe Creative Cloud: mainly Adobe XD / After Effects and InDesign
• LastPass: sharing secure data and password internally and externally
• GatherContent: complex content projects

 

Existing business

We are in the fortunate position of working with some really exciting clients. All of our projects remain on time, on budget and there is no reason for this to change. We are lucky our clients are spread across various industries and countries. In particular, our concerns are with hospitality and we are doing everything we can to support them through this difficult time.

 

New business

Towards the end of March, we have resources to begin new projects. There are some exciting discussions ongoing behind the scenes. We are also still hiring for a Digital Designer to further complement the team.

The safety of our team is our highest priority so we won’t be attending face to face meetings and they will be replaced with video calls.