iDHL: How hybrid working at Blackfriars House reinforces culture and collaboration
By Bruntwood SciTech
How iDHL fosters collaboration and growth
iDHL is a digital growth partner bringing together more than 500 specialists across performance marketing, web and commerce, data, creative and applied AI. Operating as a hybrid business, it has been considering what its people need from the workplace when much of their individual work can be done elsewhere.
Bringing expertise together
Through iDHL Labs and a £1.5 million investment in proprietary tools, the business is using AI across areas such as research, reporting, analysis and content adaptation. This allows its specialists to spend more time on work that depends on their experience, from diagnosing client challenges and shaping strategy to developing creative ideas.
It also puts greater emphasis on how that expertise comes together. As iDHL has grown to more than 500 people, the challenge has been to retain specialist knowledge while making it easier for different disciplines to work around the same client problem. Systems and shared objectives help, but so does trust. People need to feel comfortable bringing colleagues into conversations early, sharing unfinished thinking and working through problems together.
As Sharon Palmer, Director of Group Accounts and Client Success at iDHL, puts it, the aim is not to flatten expertise but to make it easier for that expertise to compound.
“Being digital-first doesn't mean being place-less. Remote working is excellent for flexibility, but there are certain high-value moments that are simply better face to face: solving a difficult problem, shaping an idea, mentoring someone or bringing several disciplines around the same client challenge.”
Sharon Palmer, Director of Group Accounts and Client Success, iDHL
A workplace with a purpose
iDHL operates a hybrid model, so the purpose of its office isn't to recreate work that can be done effectively from home. Instead, it provides a centre point for the interactions where being together adds value, from collaborative workshops and client sessions to mentoring, knowledge-sharing and the informal conversations that happen outside scheduled meetings.
Its office at Blackfriars House in Manchester provides a mix of quiet areas, collaborative spaces, meeting rooms and private booths, giving people a choice of settings depending on what they need to do.
For iDHL, the office also has to earn the commute. That doesn't mean workspace alone determines whether people want to join or stay with a business. Meaningful work, career development, flexibility and culture come first. The workplace can, however, reinforce those things by giving people access to colleagues, better opportunities to collaborate and experiences that are difficult to reproduce remotely.
“Meaningful work, career development, flexibility and a strong culture all matter when attracting and retaining people, and an attractive workplace can amplify them.”
Sharon Palmer, Director of Group Accounts and Client Success, iDHL
iDHL's experience points to a broader shift in workspace strategy. As AI takes on more routine and repeatable activity, the question isn't simply how often people should come into an office. It's what bringing them together enables them to do better.
That means thinking about workspace less as somewhere work happens and more as infrastructure for the things that depend on people: sharing expertise, developing talent, building relationships, solving complex problems and turning individual knowledge into collective capability.
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iDHL is a digital growth partner for our clients. We're a team of 500, so we span the UK and the US, working across the entire kind of digital ecosystem. All of our clients are looking for outcomes faster, smarter, more efficiently than ever. We need to make sure that we're set up to deliver against that, but still have the measurement and the expertise that is required of a business such of ourselves, so that we're using technology in a way that allows us to get the outcomes faster, but not by shortcutting, and still allowing our people to think and to breathe and to offer the expertise that quite rightly our clients are asking for.
For us as a business and for our clients, we definitely see AI as something that is enabling our people. But I think what's key to that is some real fundamentals around understanding our clients, understanding their business, and putting the right kind of foundations in place. That's around people and talent, and then layering AI on top of that. You know, I don't think it's an AI-first approach; it's certainly about getting the foundations right and bringing AI in at the right time to essentially accelerate that.
We're looking for people that are adopters, that embrace change and technology and are comfortable with that change, because this is only going to evolve and develop as time goes on. So whilst we're not expecting people to be at the forefront, we are definitely expecting our talent to have a hunger and a curiosity to learn. And with that, we know that we can foster the right type of environment where we've a culture of learners and people that are naturally going to lean into the technology and ensure that it enhances everything that we do in the workplace and for our clients.
We've proven we can work effectively remotely, but we've also really embraced coming back together and knowing when it's right to come to a workspace that can enhance your thinking and your approach. So that's about collaboration, that's about listening and learning, that's about those coffee machine moments where you overhear or somebody sparks an idea or some thoughts. So connections, you know, mentoring, training—all really, really important and very, very difficult to do if you don't have a great workplace to work within.
So for us, the most important thing is talent. We'll always say we're a talent-first business. Ensuring that we are creating an environment that brings out the best of our talent is exactly where we want to be, and the workspace is critical to that.
