Dell Technologies has always embraced a "work from home" culture. Even prior to the pandemic, a large portion of the Dell workforce was remote in some capacity. The flexibility created by Dell’s "work from home" culture allowed our team to grow in many areas, improving on our processes and communication.
There’s nothing better than sitting in my edit bay collaborating with clients. It’s truly where the magic happens. Creative ideas are circulated, tested, implemented, and at times, discarded. An unmatched synergy to create something truly impactful happens there.
Before COVID, the activity of everyone sitting in an edit bay for days on end was almost a thing of the past. With busy schedules and multiple projects happening simultaneously, it was difficult to get everyone together in the same room to collaborate and make crucial decisions about the media and messages being created.
Fast-forward to today, and we’ve continued to evolve into new ways of working remotely and collaborating with one another, wherever we are.
Utilizing the streaming capabilities offered by a company called Ever/cast, it doesn’t matter where you’re based. We’re able to participate and communicate effectively and efficiently across the country and around the globe. Successfully developing a story through picture and sound requires strong collaboration among all the parties involved. Sitting in a "virtual room" with creatives and clients, I’m editing in realtime, creating content we are excited to promote and share. Utilizing Ever/cast in our workflow has been essential to accomplishing this.
Additionally, we recently implemented a solution from the company Iconik to assist us with productions within our post production department. Having team members located across the country, in Austin, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle, Iconik is an essential component, enabling our post production team to have access to projects and media files no matter where they are. This alleviates the time and money needed to ship physical drives, so we’re better positioned to finish and deploy our productions – on time and on budget.
The amount of proprietary media we stream through these solutions puts a critical focus on internet bandwidth and stability. I’ve upgraded my home internet to provide the best experience possible for myself and the people I work with, but with so many people shifting to a "work from home" setup, I’m experiencing rolling blackouts due to increased internet usage in my area. This can result in disconnects while streaming live sessions and longer-than-expected file upload times. I’m hopeful internet providers are taking notice of this and working to improve infrastructure to accommodate this shift that’s occurring.
Remote work and working from home are not going away. If anything, it’s accelerating. We can be anywhere in the world and successfully fulfill the needs of our clients, stakeholders and team members. We are more connected than ever before, and technology is leading the way. That being said, it is our responsibility to make sure we're staying in touch with one another, so we don't lose our humanity in all of this.
Jason Uson is Senior Lead Creative Editor at Dell Blue (http://dellblue.com/ ), the Austin, TX-based in-house creative agency for Dell Technologies.