Communication in our digital, remote world, with Alright Studio, B&B Studio and Happening Studio

Unless you’ve hurled your phone into a well and gone off-grid, it’s incredibly easy for anyone and everyone to contact you. Text, call, email, LinkedIn, Instagram – how do your colleagues and client chat with you? With so many options to choose from, we were interested to know what creatives preferred in their day-to-day working hours. When keeping in touch with everyone, what forms of communication work best for them? B&B Studio’s Shaun Bowen, Happening Studio and Alright Studio provide some insights. Many of the digital communication tools that skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic – Slack, Zoom, Google Meet –  still remain helpful for creative teams today. Still, there’s nothing that quite beats a face-to-face conversation when in need of clarity and understanding. This is the exact reason why Bowen believes key meetings and presentations are most beneficial in person – hosting them in their London studio space. For one, he says, you’re able to read the room and adapt accordingly, which facilitates the flow of conversation. “Body language plays an important part in how humans communicate,” he explains, “and this is lost remotely in the same way the tone of an email can be misconstrued.” It goes without saying, in-person meetings are invaluable for fostering relationships and guaranteeing clear and honest dialogue. However, there are many circumstances or personal reasons that lead to some clients favouring digital communication. “We have to flex and understand what works for people on an individual level,” Bowen adds. “This is the same with colleagues too.” Having adopted a similarly flexible approach, Happening Studio’s Karen and Masato Nakada have tried out several different platforms and tools – in part thanks to each client’s unique preferences and methods. From their experiences, they came to one conclusion: “we have found that all we need for tools to manage a client project would be Google Slides, emails and Zoom.”