Alt Group allowed Zoe Ikin and Tyrone Ohia to fulfil their travel dreams. Pic supplied.
"If you love someone, set them free": it's a hackneyed old chestnut but it sums up the very modern HR style of one Auckland firm.
Alt Group are an award-winning, Grey Lynn based design company who have a philosophy that flies in the face of conventional staff retention practices.
Celebrated for their out-of-the-box design for a wide range of international and local clients, they have extended their exuberant creativity into their management style.
When two of their young designers voiced the desire to travel after a few years on the job, managing director Ben Corban and creative director Dean Poole came up with a plan to keep them on the payroll while letting them spread their wings.
Corban explains that Alt Group has always been international in their outlook. They see the importance of being on-the-ground when it comes to understanding the culture of their international clients and have staff based overseas permanently.
"New Zealand is a great place to be based but it's small and we are used to getting on planes and going places." He says it is part of the growing up process to travel - people tend to finish their degree, then look to spread their wings.
Zoe Ikin and Tyrone Ohia - both talented designers with travel dreams - were in this position a few years back. They loved their junior designer roles at Alt, but wanted to see more of the world.
"I remember saying 'I need to go overseas'," says Ikin. "It wasn't just wanting to, I really needed to do something different."
She spoke to Corban and Poole about her dilemma and they came back to her with a couple of options.
"Ben and Dean basically told me that I could take 12 months off and see what happened when I got back, or take three months off and go to to a studio overseas and remain being paid by Alt."
Unsurprisingly she chose the latter.
Poole is a member of the exclusive Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), an elite international design group comprised of the world's leading designers. He contacted fellow member Dana Arnett from top US design firm VSA Partners and arranged for Ikin to do a three-month working sojourn with the company.
Ikin says the experience was invaluable. She was party to a "different design vernacular in Chicago" - the process of design was less fluid and flexible, with people signing off everything that was created in-house, including emails.
"It made me very aware of the design process," she says.
She also found the design itself more constrained by historical principles than in New Zealand.
She worked most of the time she was in Chicago, taking a week off to travel at the end of her trip. Fittingly she was given the job of rebranding for a company based in the United States upon her return home.
Ohia's Big OE on the Alt Group dollar was slightly different. His partner is a schoolteacher and was keen to move to Japan for a year to experience a different culture. Ohia wanted to join her and Alt allowed him to work remotely from Osaka.
Once again, this arrangement proved mutually beneficial. Ohia says the Alt Group team are Japanese-design mad, the design vernacular being extremely influential on the designers there. Ohia used the time in Japan to soak up the culture and learn a new way of thinking about design.
"The design in Japan is fed by the culture," he says. "I was so fascinated by the architecture and pottery - even the food is design-based."
Ohia is half Maori and half Lebanese, so his upbringing was immersed in culture. He went to a full immersion Kura Kaupapa Maori school and believes this has always naturally fed into his design.
His trip to Japan reinforced how culture can seep into design practices within a country.
He feels that Alt Group's take on staffing is really unique.
"They are playing a long game," he says. "They aren't interested in running a regular design company."
Alan Pettersen, an Auckland-based human resources consultant, says companies in cutting-edge industries such as design are increasingly being flexible with working conditions, and this can be an excellent opportunity for all.
"To allow a highly rated employee who wants to travel, is able to work remotely and is possibly accommodated in some other flexible way, is a win-win for employer and employee."