Every month we celebrate our culture heroes. Culture heroes are awarded by their peers during our fortnightly team meeting.
Then, each month on the blog we give them a shoutout and ask them a few questions about what it’s like working remotely for In Marketing We Trust.
Today we are celebrating just 1 awesome team member, James Bardsley! We are celebrating James for his Curiosity & Creativity, one of our core values. Read on for James’ very honest advice on working from home and how to juggle responsibilities and deadlines.
Our Values
James
Today we are celebrating James for his Curiosity & Creativity, one of our values that James always excels in. James was nominated “for successfully putting on his Sales & Marketing hat and writing some really great new content for our new IMWT-Bot and IMWT-Links landing pages. I know marketing his own awesome products is something James can struggle with at times and he absolutely knocked it out of the park!”
James was also nominated because he is “always looking for new ways to do things and always comes up with a solution to my problems even if I give him terrible briefs.”
What is your best advice for being curious and creative in the workplace (to the point of being recognised for this superpower)?
I was shocked to learn recently that there are jobs other than engineering (who knew?)
And almost every job has elements to it that are interesting and that you don’t know anything about.
I’m in a fortunate position of getting to deal directly with lots of different people doing lots of different jobs. That means I get a chance to take the engineering mindset of solving problems that (on the surface) don’t seem to be engineering problems. That creates a lot of opportunity for creativity!
So my advice? Keep your ears open and listen to the problems other people are having in their day-to-day work. Your unique mindset may help you approach those problems in novel ways.
Any tips for keeping yourself focused and delivering great results while working from home?
I feel like every time I answer this my response is some variation of “make a list, work through the list” and “accept you’ll have unfocused days and lean into the good days”.
To be honest, though, I’ve actually moved into a shared office because I found I was able to focus on work so much better outside of home. I also need the commute as a way to switch from “home mode” to “work mode”.
So I guess these days my advice would be: be honest with yourself about what’s working. Working from home 100% of the time isn’t for everyone and that’s just fine! If it’s not working for you then find a new environment that does put you in a work mindset. You’ll be happier for it.
Could you briefly describe your main tasks and responsibilities?
I’m the lead of the Data and Engineering team so a lot of nerdy things come through me. 🙂
I spend a lot of time thinking about the tools or processes that we could be using to solve client problems (and sometimes our own internal problems), then I oversee and participate in the implementation of these tools/processes.
The kinds of things we build could range from bespoke programs to collect data, ML models, dashboards in BI tools and really anything that can help in creating efficiency!
How do you manage to juggle so many responsibilities and deadlines?
With difficulty, sometimes!
I really like to sink my teeth into problems and often I’ll find I’m so engaged in what I’m doing I’m ignoring other things that need to be done.
When this happens I need to ask myself: does what I’m doing really need to be done right now, or can I come back to it later? I often find myself forcibly pulling my attention away from a particular piece of work to work on something else that may be less engaging but is ultimately more important.
Why do you like working at In Marketing We Trust?
There are a lot of things!
It’s a great team of people who I genuinely enjoy talking to and (when the opportunity arises) spending time with. That’s one of the most important things for me in a workplace.
There are interesting problems to solve and freedom to try new things in order to solve those problems.
When the world is normal it also provides an opportunity to travel!
