On 9 June 2023, we descended on the Cambridge Brew House for our biannual get-together. We were delighted to be joined by our new Project Manager Fiona Spellman. Fiona starts officially on 3 July, but it seemed like a great opportunity for her to meet the whole team in person.
The day started off in the best possible way with pastries from Fitzbillies and a celebration of Ian who has been at Studio 24 for 10 years.
Down to business
Simon kicked off with an agency update from the last six months followed by a look ahead to our priorities for the next six months – including getting ready to start our B Corp journey.
Our mental health first aider, Claire, then took us on a mindfulness journey using Playdoh. It’s amazing how the smell of Playdoh can transport you back to your childhood! We also looked at some new resources that are available from Mind to support mental health at work.
Claire also led a session on how we prioritise work –including how we respond to emails, slack messages, and phone calls and how we manage tasks. On the whole, we agreed that we prioritise work that would be a blocker for someone else. Brillant teamwork!
Lightning talks
The lightning talks give team members 10 minutes to talk about anything and everything. In fact whatever is important to them!
Jamie shared some research he’d done for a personal project on Sanity CMS. It was helpful to look at the pros and cons and compare Sanity to the CMSs we use at the agency.
Nicola talked about the journey to behaviour change using the analogy of the elephant and rider. The rider represents being rational, analytical, and evidence-based. Whereas the elephant is full of emotional energy and works based on feelings and instincts. The idea is how can you get these two sides to work together to reduce friction and to be productive.
And Kate did a talk on Bargain Hunt. We did say the talks could be on anything! And we all know a little bit more about antiques and collectables now.
The highlight of the day
Emma organised a ‘Would I Lie to you?’ style game. Where each team member had submitted two truths and one lie about themselves. We had to work out which was the lie. Amazingly these were all things we didn’t know about each other!
Some of the things we discovered included: being mistaken (and nearly arrested) for being a Beastie Boy, DIY dentistry, and a bacon sandwich incident leading to A&E. Plus breaking dancing, high jumping, contortionist party tricks and scuba diving to an underwater gnome garden in Snowdonia. It was mind-boggling but so much fun!
Studio Day 13
For now, we are heading back to our routine of remote working. But we are all really looking forward to Studio Day 13. Who knows what we’ll discover next time!
