How Elephant’s unified group is main the company’s subsequent evolution of progress

As a artistic company, Elephant prides itself on the energy of its work and the folks behind it. However like many businesses, Elephant confronted quite a few main challenges through the pandemic years—each client-facing challenges like large-scale campaigns immediately having to be put collectively remotely and inside woes like Zoom fatigue setting in.

In April 2022, throughout a thoughtfully deliberate out unifying of the corporate, Cara DiNorcia took the helm at Elephant as its new president. After 5 years on the company in varied managerial roles, DiNorcia had an unlimited new job at hand: To revamp the group to be totally distant and borderless whereas optimizing the worker expertise and the choices accessible to shoppers.

Her resolution? An enterprise internally known as “One Elephant.”

Advert Age Studio 30 spoke with DiNorcia about how the transition to a One Elephant mindset reframed the corporate’s narrative, how approaching hiring with a borderless mannequin helped obtain DE&I targets, and why Elephant feels nimbler than ever.

Advert Age Studio 30: You’ve got stated the concept behind your One Elephant restructuring was to unite the corporate’s East and West Coast workplaces in order that they might collaborate extra as a single entity somewhat than as separate outposts. What prompted that transition?

Cara DiNorcia: One Elephant got here out of taking a protracted, arduous have a look at how our work, each internally and externally, was impacted by the pandemic.

Whereas we weren’t gathering in workplaces, we had been nonetheless producing a few of our strongest work for our shoppers. There was now not a must tie staff to a selected bodily location.

Combining operations throughout all our workplaces to work collectively as one cohesive firm made increasingly sense. And turning into fully digital gave us the flexibility to rent throughout the globe and proceed to diversify our expertise. We now have extra flexibility to design the fitting group for our shoppers and our work.

Was the employees enthused by the prospect?

If you drive an organizational change like this, it’s important to actually consider in it and get your management to consider in it as properly. I’m so happy with how everybody has been rallying round One Elephant and getting excited in regards to the work and the group we’ve got in place.

In some methods, there was nearly that feeling of beginning a brand new job, the place you’re studying a brand new group and a brand new collaboration model. And as soon as we had been in a position to deal with logistical kinks like time-change variations and transitioning people onto new shoppers and groups with folks they hadn’t labored with earlier than—it began to come back collectively.