Working at AS&K

Today we reopened our offices in London after almost 18 months. However, our team decided to follow the data not the dates, and just two people came in.  

We don’t blame them. With COVID numbers still high (though starting to come down again) we want everyone to feel safe at work. We are happy for people to continue to work from home for as long as they want to.  

We also know that our people are keen to get back together. A recent poll found the top five things that we’ve missed about actually working together in the office are: 

Anthony Coulson, our Creative Head of Design Implementation, recently celebrated 10 years of working at AS&K. We asked him about the highlights. 

You celebrated 10 years at AS&K recently. A decade is a long time – what have been your highlights? 

The AS&K team has been reaping the mental health benefits of the great outdoors

The 10–16 May is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, and this year’s theme is ‘Nature.’

How long have you worked in Med Comms?

I have been working in the healthcare industry for ~4 years, after completing my MSc in Biomedical Science. In a former life, I worked for pharmaceutical companies in clinical research departments. I’ve spent the last ~2 years working as a Medical Writer at Med Comms agencies.

How long have you worked at AS&K?

“The Creative Director likes your portfolio but doesn’t hire girls,” was my introduction to an internship at one of London’s trendy consumer advertising agencies of the time.  

Two weeks later the Creative Director “did hire girls”. (Or a woman to be precise.) 

Working and Wellness

It’s now been a full year since we began our pandemic-enforced working from home experience. We left the office with a rather optimistic note that “this might last several weeks or more, so remember to take all your gear home with you!”. But apart from a couple of weeks before the UK’s second wave in October, we’ve been at home ever since.  

One virus, countless variants, 3 lockdowns, 12 months, and the entire office working from home. But what have we been up to? 

Half the UK population are unable to name one famous woman scientist, according to a report from education charity Teach First. How many can you name? Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace – that’s my lot. My teenage daughters weren’t much better: ‘Marie Curie and the woman who worked on DNA that no one remembers’ (Rosalind Franklin!).  

The jury is still out on the world vision of office working once the pandemic restrictions subside. Twitter have announced that their employees can work from home ‘forever’, whereas the view from Netflix is that homeworking is ‘a pure negative’.¹ 

But, unlike AS&K, these big corporations have completely different considerations. We are being guided by listening to the needs of our staff.  

It’s been an understandably subdued start to the year. As we look forward to the rest of 2021, we have a couple of big, and related, New Years’ resolutions for the agency.