Media agency UM named as Australia’s best place to work with fewer than 100 employees
Media agency UM is Australia’s best workplace with fewer than 100 employees, a survey backed by Fairfax publication BRW has found.
UM topped the “under 100 employees” category of the Best Places To Work survey. Media agency Maxus was 23rd in the category, while technology company Amobee was fifth.
Meanwhile, several media agencies which put forward their national offering were recognised in the “over 100 employees” category. MEC was ninth; OMD was 18th and Mindshare was 19th. Lachlan Murdoch’s radio company Nova Entertainment was 25th.
In order to stay within the under 100 staff category, UM says it put forward only its Sydney office, and did not count staff from centralised services offered by the agency’s parent IPG Mediabrands company,
However Zrinka Lovrencic, MD of Great Places to Work, told Mumbrella the survey covered UM’s national offering. UM recently told the RECMA study that it employs 200 staff and now says it employs around 170 staff across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
She added: “If they had been in the above 100 staff category then most likely would have won anyway.”
Baxter said: “We’ve had to recalibrate our focus to get to where we are. Five years ago we set about creating a great place to work. It’s been a progressive effort each year and we take learnings from the previous year to improve the way we run things. It’s been proven that a happy and engaged workforce gives high performance.”
Nic Christensen and Danielle Sen
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How BRW reports UM’s victory:
“In order to stay within the under 100 staff category, UM says it put forward only its Sydney office.”
So that would make my local Subway a ’boutique sandwich shop’ I guess?
Ridiculous, and even more so for all those small agencies out there that it should have recognised.
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Maybe they meant ‘Under 100 employees who stay for at least 12 months”.
Most of the media agencies could then qualify in the ‘Under ” category.
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After working in 2 media agencies (1 which made it onto this list), I’ll never understand how they make it on there. The culture and people are fun, but the hours and pay are not.
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They do wonderful work on coca-cola. Happy clients = happy agency.
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So BRW evaluated the UM National offering, on the awards detail table, it states UM has 3 ‘sites’ and 78 employees, and allowed them to win Best Under 100 Employees. When confronted with this anomaly, the response is, ‘they probably would have won anyway’, devaluing Atlassian, who did win.
Wow, what a worthy award :/
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I’m the best Under 10 at football. Well, if I only count my left leg as a proportion of my total age I can sort of qualify as an Under 10. My left leg is pretty good though.
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seems the people who were made redundant in Canberra and Sydney office when they lost the federal government account are not a measurement of a good place to work. How can a company that has redundancies and high turnover been the best place to work. Its very odd.
This whole award is very suspect
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Wasn’t it reported that UM are no longer a Media agency?
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