Digitas Singapore creates ‘On Mute Cos’ visuals for your working from home virtual meetings

Digitas Singapore has launched a new toolkit, ‘On Mute Cos’ to help better understand and empathise with common work-from-home situations during video calls.

While working from home has become the new norm today, Digitas understood that most people are still struggling to create an ideal work-from-home conditions.

Joaquim Laurel, Executive Creative Director of Digitas, said: “Over the past few months, the team has spent a tremendous amount of time on work calls online. We started to realize, not everyone had spaces to work in their own homes. Some of our teammates were sharing spaces with siblings or grandparents. Others had children and pets interrupting calls. So, we wanted to create something we could use ourselves and share with everyone else we get on calls with. At the heart of it, I think the team just wanted to make people realize that not everyone has a nice private home office and others just have to contend with whatever living spaces they have.”

Whether it’s a playful pet, a child throwing tantrums, or a family member waltzing in the background more often than not this means “camera and sound off”. While the intention can be considerate, it could also be misunderstood as uncollaborative and disinterested.

DIGITAS created “On Mute Cos” or “OMC” a creative way to help set expectations during video calls that enable less judgement and more empathy. OMC is a series of profile pictures that lets people on the video call know why your video or audio is disabled. Each image is based on the most common work-from-home inconveniences that could affect your important office call. The images can be used on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other video call services as well.

Rika Sharma, Managing Director of Digitas Singapore and ASEAN, said: “At Digitas, we are always trying to find ways to develop effective creative that is relevant. On Mute Cos has been a labour of love by the team as everyone has had their fair share of ups and downs navigating working from home and with the acknowledgement that not everyone’s work space is ideal when working from home. It’s a nod to being empathetic to employees work environment especially for those who live with family, roommates, children, pets or even noisy neighbours.”

DIGITAS plans to uncover more of the top living situation hassles by using data and convert them into even more OMC content for people to use.