We love hearing how Leave Dates helps teams of all kinds stay organised, so we were delighted when Fiona Day got in touch. Her team of creatives is using Leave Dates in an unusual niche sector.
Fusion Animation make videos that explain complex medical and pharmaceutical processes visually. We chatted to Fiona about how Leave Dates is helping improve forward-planning as her team works to meet deadlines.
Table of Contents
- Beautiful animations, crucial work
- A diverse team and audience
- Juggling leave for creatives on tight deadlines
- No bells and whistles, thanks!
- Leave Dates: doing leave management really well
- Managing leave around creative deadlines
- The verdict: making life easier for a creative business
Beautiful animations, crucial work
Founded 15 years ago, Fusion’s team specialise in creating animations of biological processes. Their clients include medical, pharmaceutical and biotech companies who want to explain their science more clearly.
Watching these animations takes you on a journey deep into the human body. They show processes such as white blood cells chasing bacteria and neurons misfiring in the brain during a migraine.
It’s visually stunning, but also crucial for education and information. The videos are used to train medical professionals, promote new medical products and educate patients.
A diverse team and audience
Director Fiona Day told us that her team fuses medical knowledge with creative talent. She completed a degree in neuroendocrinology, then worked in an advertising agency before coming to Fusion. And her eclectic skillset is typical of the company.
“Some of the team have gone through a creative-led degree, fully immersed in graphic design and animation. Others have started out with a science degree and moved into the medical visualization field. It's an interesting skill set”
Not only are the Fusion team a diverse mix, but their clients are too.
“All our clients work across different therapeutic areas,” Fiona told us. “We might be working with a biotech startup using machine learning to accelerate drug development. At the same time we might make an animation of the mechanism of disease for vitiligo, showing what's happening underneath the surface of the skin. I love that variety and interest; learning about the latest science and then explaining it to other people.”
The team must balance creative visualization with medical accuracy. “The world we work in is highly regulated, so what we do has to be accurate. An eyeball has to look like an eyeball! But we also have to visualize things which you can't see with the naked eye.
And quite often the reality is more complex than what we show. But if you showed everything, the viewer would understand nothing. So a lot of it is problem solving, an agile approach to visualisation.”
Juggling leave for creatives on tight deadlines
Fusion work on frequent delivery deadlines, so managing team leave efficiently is crucial. But Fiona was struggling to find a good solution, which was having a negative impact on the business.
For us, there are certain combinations of people that, if they're off on holiday at the same time, it's difficult to work around. So our leave management system needs to be super visible. You don’t want a situation when everyone is on holiday, and you've got a big deadline coming up.
Fiona tried a bunch of solutions for managing leave - everything from the good old spreadsheet to large team management platforms. But nothing was quite the right fit.
“Those solutions always had a flaw. I could never get a clear picture of how much holiday people had taken, or how much they had left, or who was off when.”
No bells and whistles, thanks!
Fiona was frustrated with the cost and complexity of larger HR platforms.
“I didn't need all the other things. I just wanted something that made it clear for everyone. It had to be super easy to use, because the second that you make it complicated, people don't use it.”
And even though Fusion only had a small team, a simple spreadsheet also wasn’t the solution for them. “For a smaller team, leave management is not something you really want to spend a lot of money on when you know deep down you could be doing it on a spreadsheet. But I also wanted something with a good user experience and clear design, so you can know what’s going on at a glance.”
Leave Dates: doing leave management really well
When Fiona discovered Leave Dates, what she liked most about it was its focus on solving just one specific admin headache. And that’s great to hear, because our philosophy is to do what we do brilliantly, rather than diluting it as part of a complex offering.
Fiona told us, “Leave Dates just works; everything from getting people set up and using it, to the reporting, to the calendar. And it syncs with Slack to give us a notification of who’s out of the office today. So we don’t have that situation of sitting on a meeting waiting for someone to join because you've forgotten that they're actually off.”
Fiona began with a team of four on Leave Dates, and since then has added new members as the studio has grown.
Managing leave around creative deadlines
Fusion works with multinational companies presenting videos at large events, so tight deadlines are a daily fact of life. Fiona has found that Leave Dates helps the whole team meet those deadlines.
“I genuinely think Leave Dates has made it easier to plan. If you know when your deadlines are, and you look at your holiday board, it's easier to make sure you don't have big gaps. It's useful to know this person's off between this time and this time; we can plan around it, because the visibility is there. All of those little things incrementally build up to make life just a bit easier.”
In fact, Fiona thinks that the way Leave Dates is designed and laid out is ideal for a creative business.
“Leave Dates is a very visual solution, which is great for visual people. The information you need is easy and visible, and it's a quick and painless process that people don't mind using.”
Fiona has gone on to recommend Leave Dates to other digital agencies in her network. “I’m never normally excited by stuff like this! But if it makes your life easier, it’s got to be better for everybody.”
The verdict: making life easier for a creative business
In creative industries, admin chores like managing leave can often feel secondary to the creative work – and we totally get that! No one wants to be wasting creative time wrestling with the holiday spreadsheet.
But effective leave management is essential for getting the most out of a creative team who are dependent on each other.
Problems with basic admin processes can lead to problems with staff coordination. This can impact the ability to deliver high-end creative work on time and on budget.
And of course, supporting employees to take the leave they want is crucial, keeping those creative batteries charged.
Leave Dates provides Fusion Animation with an at-a-glance visual representation of who’s on leave when, updating in real time. Everyone can see at a glance if their holiday clashes with key colleagues, and Fiona can stay in control of scheduling so deadlines are met.
We’re delighted to be able to support Fusion Animation as they help to communicate crucial science to the world. And of course giving their amazing team the time off they deserve!
If you want to see some of Fusion Animation’s work visit their website and you can connect with Fiona on Linkedin.
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