We’ve been quite busy behind the scenes at Illustrate Digital. With exciting projects being finished up, new projects getting started and plenty to do, we were admittedly surprised to experience little effect as a result of the global pandemic happening around us.
Thankfully we’re in a great position to carry on working from home and have been doing so for the last few weeks now.
Whilst things are still busy, it’s been important to make sure we can still service our clients with excellent care, high quality designs and secure development work. And so it’s exciting as a member of the ID team to be saying hello to a couple of new, friendly faces as they join the team.
Who are the newbies?
Let’s find out a bit more about the two lucky souls who get to join us on the journey…
Lydia Davies – our new Project Manager
Helping to keep things on track and brilliantly well communicated, Lydia joins us as Project Manager on board at team ID. She brings with her a tonne of knowledge, insight and experience from her previous project management roles in both agency and software environments.
Lydia blew us away during the interview process and has been making waves since diving headfirst into understanding and arranging the production diary.
It’s been an interesting process getting to know each team member from a distance, something we’ve not been used to before except from our offices split between Cardiff and Bristol. But it hasn’t taken long to get familiar with the experience and skills of each team member to know what tasks and projects suit them best.
Esma Biyik – joining the Support team
Some recent promotions of existing team members meant an opening in our support team, helping to keep client sites secure, online and up-to-date with the latest software updates.
Esma joins our in-house support team with a well established background in the creative industry and good development experience, a key ingredient for maintaining and upgrading existing websites looked after by Illustrate Digital.
Again, you’d normally get the opportunity to sit next to a new team member and show them the ropes, so it’s been a different experience explaining our support process from a distance. It’s gone a lot better than expected though and Esma is already a whizz at updating, testing and troubleshooting across our clientbase, keeping things running smoothly.
Remote working at Illustrate Digital
Thankfully, having a second office that opened up in Bristol in early 2020, alongside our existing flexible working policy that allowed team members to work from home, we were already in a pretty good position to wave goodbye to our desks in March and adopt a new working environment.
This meant a fairly smooth transition from office life to home life, with the addition of some new ways to keep everyone ‘together’ and keep communication strong.
One thing we’ve not done for a while is add new team members remotely, at least without meeting them for an induction face-to-face. It can’t be easy starting a new role in a pandemic economy, but hats off to Lydia and Esma who have both smashed it and gotten off to a great start as new members of the Illustrate Digital family.
We wish them all the success for the years to come and can’t wait to work on many projects with them in the next few months!
