Transparency
How we operate in the world
Lasted updated: 6th June 2026 by Sophie Rucker.
These are not legal documents dressed up as values. They are honest descriptions of how we work, what we believe, and what we are trying to do (written for the people we work with, not for a compliance team.)
Our AI Policy
What we use it for. What we don't and why the distinction matters.
We will be direct about this: AI did not write your brief, your strategy or your story. The copywriting, the positioning, the campaign thinking, the questions we ask in a pre-interview — all of that comes from human minds that have spent years learning how to do it well. We believe the craft of communication is too important to be delegated to a machine that has never felt anything.
That said, we are not precious about the tools we use. AI has genuine utility in specific parts of our work, and we use it where it earns its place.
Where we do use AI: To mock up visual concepts and creative territories in pitches...so clients can see a direction before significant resource is committed. To process and analyse large volumes of research data, stakeholder interviews, qualitative feedback and finding patterns in material that would take weeks to review manually. To stress-test ideas and surface angles we may not have considered.
"We use AI the way a good researcher uses a library — to find things faster, not to think for us."
AI does not write our copy. Not for clients. Not for ourselves. Every word that goes out under Common Field or under a client's name was written by a human being with something to say.
AI does not replace research. It helps us process it. The interviews, the stakeholder conversations, the qualitative insight-gathering — that is always human-led.
AI does not make strategic decisions. It can surface options. The judgement about which direction to take, and why, belongs to us — and ultimately to the organisations we work with.
We are transparent about when AI has been used. If a visual mockup in a pitch was generated with AI assistance, we say so. We do not present machine output as human craft.
We hold this position because we believe we are in a critical moment for trust in communication. As AI-generated content floods the internet, the value of genuinely human writing (uncertain, imperfect, authored) is rising. We intend to be on the right side of that shift. Human Decency Policy
How we treat people. The floor we hold ourselves to and hold others to.
This is not an HR document. It is a statement of the minimum standard of humanity we expect in every interaction at Common Field — with clients, with collaborators, with communities we work alongside, and with each other. We do not believe this should be unusual. We believe it should be normal. We write it down because we think it matters to say these things out loud.
We do not work with people who demean others. Not in meetings, not in briefings, not in passing. Disrespect — however subtle — has no place in how we operate.
We take capacity seriously. We do not expect people to work beyond what is sustainable. We do not send messages at 11pm and expect responses. We do not build cultures where exhaustion signals commitment.
We credit people properly. If someone contributed to a piece of work, they are named. We do not absorb other people's thinking without attribution.
We listen before we talk. Especially when working with communities who are not like us. The person closest to the problem understands it best. We act accordingly.
We do not punch down. Not in our work, not in our humour, not in our campaigns. Our approach to behaviour change is grounded in relatability and understanding — never in shame or condescension.
We pay fairly and promptly. Freelancers, contributors, and collaborators are paid on time. We do not treat payment as a favour. "Decency is not a policy. It is a practice, something you either do or you don't, in every small interaction."
We also recognise that we will not always get this right. When we fall short, we want to know. We would rather be told directly and have the chance to correct ourselves than operate under the illusion that we have nothing to learn about how we treat people.
Our Grief Policy
On loss, on time, and on what we actually owe each other when life intervenes.
We have a grief policy because grief is real, it is inevitable, and most workplaces handle it very badly. The standard approach — a fixed number of days off, followed by the implicit expectation that you return to full capacity — treats grief as a logistical problem with a known duration. It is neither of those things.
Grief does not follow a schedule. It does not finish at the end of bereavement leave. It comes back in unexpected moments, weeks or months after the fact, when a piece of work or a conversation or a smell catches you off guard. Anyone who has experienced significant loss knows this. We design for the reality of grief, not the convenient fiction of it.
What this means in practice: When someone in our community — team member, close collaborator, or client contact — experiences a significant loss, we do not set a deadline on their return to full engagement. We ask what they need. We adjust. We do not treat the work as more important than the person. We communicate honestly with anyone affected about timelines, and we absorb the disruption rather than passing it to the person who is grieving.
"We do not believe that a person's value is their output. Especially not when they are in pain."
There is no fixed bereavement leave limit. We assess each situation individually and give the time that is actually needed.
Grief extends beyond death. We recognise grief for relationship endings, for miscarriage, for diagnosis, for the loss of a life someone thought they were going to have. These are real losses and they deserve real acknowledgement.
We do not require explanation. No one should have to justify the magnitude of their grief to access support.
We check in. Not once, performatively, but with the kind of sustained, quiet attention that loss actually requires from the people around us.
This policy exists because we are human beings before we are a studio. And because we believe that organisations which take care of people in their worst moments create the conditions for people to do their best work in their good ones.Environmental Impact
What we do, what we don't, and where we are still figuring it out.
We work on environmental campaigns. We write about the land. We build our whole identity around the idea of common ground and shared responsibility for the world we inhabit. That means we cannot be vague about our own environmental footprint. We owe the people we work with more than that — and we owe ourselves more than the comfortable ambiguity of good intentions without honest accounting.
"We are not a finished thing. We are still becoming and this is one of the places we are still becoming in."
We work remotely by default. Our team is distributed, which means we do not maintain a physical office with the heating, cooling, and energy consumption that implies. Travel is the exception, not the default.
We travel by train where viable. For filming days and client meetings in the UK, we choose rail over air wherever it is feasible. For international projects we are more honest: we currently do not have a formal carbon offsetting practice, and we are working on what an honest version of that looks like for a small studio.
We do not work with fossil fuel companies. This is non-negotiable. We are a studio with a clear position on the climate emergency — we will not take money to obscure it.
We use suppliers who share our values where possible. From our hosting to our printing to the food at shoots — we try to make choices that are consistent with what we say publicly.
We are working towards B Corp certification. We believe in the rigour of third-party accountability for these commitments. We are not there yet. We intend to be.
We include this section not because it is perfect — it isn't — but because we think the habit of honest, imperfect transparency is more valuable than silence or polish. We will update this as our practices change. If you notice a gap between what we say here and what we do, we genuinely want to know.Financial Structures
How we charge, how we share, and what we do with money we make.
We are a small, independent studio. We do not have investors, we do not have shareholders, and we do not have a growth target that requires us to take on work we don't believe in. That independence is something we protect deliberately because we think it is the thing that makes the quality of our work possible.
We are also aware that financial opacity in creative agencies is one of the things that erodes trust between studios and the clients who work with them. We want to operate differently, which means being more open than is typical about how money works here.
Transparent scoping
Every project is quoted with a clear breakdown of where budget goes — research, strategy, creative, production, management. We do not hide margin in vague line items.
Fair collaborator rates
Freelancers and specialist collaborators are paid at rates we would be comfortable publishing. We do not build our margins on the back of underpaying people.
No speculative pitching without pay
We do not do unpaid pitch work beyond an initial conversation. Our thinking has value. We do not give it away to prove ourselves.
Sliding scale for mission-critical work
We hold a proportion of our capacity each year for organisations doing work we believe in, at rates that reflect their reality rather than the market rate. This is not charity — it is a deliberate allocation of resource.
Profit sharing
When Common Field is profitable beyond operational needs, that surplus is shared with the team and invested in projects we choose to support. We are building this structure as we grow.
Payment terms
We invoice on 30-day terms as standard and ask for the same from clients. We pay our suppliers within 14 days. We do not use delayed payment as a cash-flow tool.
We are a studio, not a movement — which means we need to be financially sustainable to be anything at all. We are honest about that. We charge fairly for our work because undercharging damages the quality of what we can do, the people we can afford to work with, and the longevity of the studio. But we do not chase profit as an end in itself. We chase the work that matters, and we build the financial structures that make that possible.Our Worldly Wishes
Not a manifesto. Not a mission statement. Just the things we actually think — written down.
This section is different from the others. It is not a policy in the procedural sense. It is a declaration of the beliefs that sit underneath everything we do — the view of the world that explains why Common Field exists, what we are trying to contribute to, and how we think about the problems that matter most.
"We believe that most of the world's problems are, at root, communication problems. And that most of its solutions are, at root, cooperation problems."
We live in a time of extraordinary fracture — between communities, between nations, between human beings who share the same land and have somehow become strangers to each other. We believe this fracture is not inevitable. It has been built, through choices about how we communicate, what we amplify, whose voices get platforms, and whose get ignored. What is built can be unbuilt. Not easily. But practically, step by step, with the right tools and enough patience.
Get closer to the people who feed us
We need to close the gap between those who grow our food and those who eat it. Growers understand the land in ways no policy document captures. Before we communicate anything about the natural world, we should be listening to the people tending it.
Nourish the land to nourish us all
The health of the soil is not an environmental concern separate from our economic or social ones — it is the foundation they all sit on. When the land is depleted, it does not ask who voted for what. Everyone goes hungry together.
Build community before building campaigns
The most resilient responses to crisis in history have been community-led. Not top-down. Not broadcast. Rooted, local, mutual. We want to help build the communication infrastructure for that kind of community.
Focus on what will actually move things
Not the most dramatic action, not the most viral campaign — the most practical intervention, chosen carefully, applied with skill and patience. We are interested in the compounding effects of small, well-aimed efforts over time.On the question of how to practically solve the problems that feel most intractable — climate, inequality, the collapse of shared truth — we do not have a grand theory. We have a set of observations. That change in institutions never comes from moral awakening alone. It comes from the right information reaching the right person at the right moment, through a channel they trust, in language that meets them where they are. It comes from reducing the perceived risk of doing the right thing, and increasing the social permission to act on what people already privately believe.
That is what we build. And we believe it is one of the most important things that can be built right now.
We do not believe in hierarchy. We do not believe in division. We believe in active, practical, patient responsibility — in choosing the work that matters and doing it with the full weight of our skill and care. We are a small studio with a large sense of what communication can do when it is done well.
We intend to prove it, one piece of work at a time.