{"id":266858,"date":"2020-12-04T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-04T08:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/?p=266858"},"modified":"2021-02-24T18:59:57","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T17:59:57","slug":"interview-agency-vs-in-house-with-nicola-kettell","status":"archive","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/news\/creative\/interview-agency-vs-in-house-with-nicola-kettell","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Agency vs in-house with Nicola Kettell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An interview with Nicola Kettell, Director of Operations at My Future Cloud<\/strong><\/strong>, about working in agency vs in-house in the Creative industry.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this \u2018agency vs in-house\u2019 interview series led by Salt Senior Consultant for Creative, Holley Potts,<\/strong><\/a> we speak to customers from all different sectors within the world of digital to answer the age-old question \u2013 agency or in-house? This series is designed to give you a snapshot of creative career<\/strong><\/a> journeys and insights into what are currently happening in their businesses. Over to Holley\u2026  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My next guest is the wonderful Nicola Kettell, Director of Operations at My Future Cloud.<\/strong> Nicola shares her thoughts on the possibilities the \u2018new norm\u2019 of work could bring and questions what we should be thinking about moving forward… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013 Lovely to have you here, Nicola! I am sure for all the digital nomads out there would love to hear a snapshot of what My Future Cloud is about! <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fAt MFC, we are always looking at how companies are planning to be robustly digital. This is what drew me here having always had a focus on small companies and growing them internally and then building teams up to streamline them.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being at a consultancy, we bridge the gap between consultancy, advisory and the service implementation side of things by assessing what’s going on and implementing business strategy to make sure that digital is more centralised. We\u202fhave our core team then we have a pool of associates to create a team\u202fthat can help us facilitate what we need to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fI have found that many companies have had to adjust to being agile if they weren’t already, have you found this too?\u202f <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013 Indeed. We have had a lot of very interesting clients coming in now and we are looking at a huge number of projects coming through in Autumn, now that people realise that agile is the new norm. We are looking at systems that lead quite nicely into the working from home set ups, things like GDPR and the restrictions around it, which systems you choose and ensuring your flexible work is actually flexible. It’s about managing the set up and producing meaningful outputs.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From speaking to a lot of clients, they thought they were completely agile and so it is making sure that is actually true. It sparked a lot of conversations about not wasting time for your staff so they can actually do their job and allowing them to work anywhere is a big part of that. Client landscapes are changing as well, we work across a lot of different industries so it’s interesting to see the changes across these.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013 With the likes of AI only getting much more advanced, there is more talk that there will be less roles available for people as tech rises, how do you combat this?\u202f <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fPeople seem to be taking these conversations a little more seriously and really bringing these conversations forward. It’s about looking at how you can maximise the time of the people you have, instead of them doing the manual tasks.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest time-eater of these projects is converting the time of the people that work within the system to working in a new way of thinking and overworking that fear aspect from it as there is a lot of talk of “computers will take over my job and I won’t be necessary.”  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has helped us really push the conversation to say what computers are going to do is actually automate the things that you don’t like about your job so then you can be useful, creative and innovative in what you do by adding value to your work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013 How do you see the working dynamic of the team changing now that you can’t meet as much in the studio?\u202f <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fOne thing that will be\u202finteresting\u202fto see is how we can pull all the different teams working in the office together again. We need to think about how we can change things\u202fand ask questions such as will some people go totally remote and whether it will be a long-term consideration. What I will be\u202finterested\u202fto see is the appetite from the teams, what do people\u202fwant? Are they prepared to travel? Are they prepared to go into the office? For us, it won’t be such an issue for the contractors as we work on a project basis but\u202ffor us being a small team, a challenge will be full time hiring and\u202fbuilding\u202fa company culture.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will be\u202finterested\u202fto see how this rolls out with the general\u202fworkforce\u202fappetite; will people be demanding working from home as an option and how will everyone\u202freact\u202fto that\u202fbecause\u202fthat will also impact how we work with our clients. Whether that will pose\u202fdifferent\u202fchallenges,\u202for if it will work, is yet to be seen.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 You guys work within many different sectors, one being property – which recently got hit hard – what difference have you seen between construction and commercial?\u202f\u202f<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fWe work with large property clients so that will be\u202finteresting\u202fto see how that develops. I feel the property\u202fmarket\u202fhas been all over the place, through both positive and\u202fnegatives,\u202fas construction largely\u202fappears\u202fto be\u202funaffected. Commercial property will be very interesting as there are such big changes such as the intentions of companies that don’t appear to be keeping their big\u202foffices\u202fin the city. Most are not talking about going to the offices\u202funtil\u202fJanuary at the earliest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u202fwill\u202fbe\u202finterested\u202fto see how it develops from our client\u2019s point of view, when you look\u202fat shared office spaces like WeWork, they could be much more\u202fpalatable\u202fand useful for a company that only needs an office one day a week. But on the other hand, it is a shared office space with other people so I am not sure where that will go. There has always been a lot of commercial property on offer in the city but whether that becomes such a market flood is to be asked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holley<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013 There have been many digital movements that have come up this year, one being cyberattacks which have accelerated massively, what have you seen around this?\u202f<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicola<\/span><\/strong>\u202f\u2013\u202fI feel people are really going to be looking at their systems and their security. It\u2019s so important because the rise of hacking and cyberattacks over lockdown was massive, around 960% targeted increase month on month, so securing\u202fthe systems they have been using will definitely\u202fbe a trend to tie up everything they were forced into immediately\u202fusing, due to Covid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There we have it – some very delectable food for thought from Nicola! Enticing to hear the propositions posed on how we can look to work towards creating a better and new future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stay tuned for more interviews, coming your way. If you would like to find out more about the series or find out how we can help you with your hiring, get in touch with\u202fHolley\u202fvia\u202fhpotts@welovesalt.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more of our agency vs in-house interviews here.<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interview with Nicola Kettell, Director of Operations at My Future Cloud, about working in agency vs in-house in the Creative industry. In this \u2018agency vs in-house\u2019 interview series led by Salt Senior Consultant for Creative, Holley Potts, we speak to customers from all different sectors within the world of digital to answer the age-old question \u2013…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":266860,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6659],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266858","post","type-post","status-archive","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative","category-agency-vs-in-house"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/welovesalt.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}