Perhaps more than other disciplines, creative teams feed off the connections they have and inspiration they get from others. The practice of learning from and being inspired by each other is key to keeping teams motivated, pushing work forward and building world-class creative. This can be a challenge when the team is spread across various offices, geographies and business areas. It gets exponentially more challenging when the team is working remotely. The Capital One Creative Team is embracing this opportunity—learning what works and what needs to change along the way.

Giving everyone permission to experiment. We encourage and empower all associates to experiment with new ideas and ways to stay connected and inspired. These efforts usually begin among a small group of people. If the idea proves successful and viable at a local level, it’s refined and rolled out to the broader team as a standard of practice. The key element is encouraging everyone at all levels and roles to identify opportunities, define solutions and bring their ideas to life. This is core to our team principles.

Generating ideas from the ground up. The common thread across these efforts is that they are organic ideas that come from any member of our creative team. They include a range of topics like:

• Weekly team emails that share the latest in branding, design and creative

• Full-team meetings where individuals present a craft or skill from outside of work

• A fun jam session to look at new creative and share constructive feedback

• Playing Among Us at lunchtime to laugh, plot and connect with coworkers

Nourishing a culture of connectivity. Not every idea will work. But we always learn something new and apply these learnings to what we do and how our teams engage. As a result, we’re seeing the positive results of encouraging everyone to bring ideas forward and experiment, while providing the freedom to think beyond individual roles.

And all of this is happening virtually. We can’t wait to see where this practice will take us when our creative team reunites in person again.