‘We’re no good at saying no’: How adland’s overwork culture is dragging us down
Mumbrella's Josie Tutty speaks to leaders from across Australia's advertising landscape about shifting the culture of endless hours and weekend emails to something more sustainable.
In May 2013, 24-year-old Li Yuan, an Ogilvy & Mather China employee, collapsed at his desk in Beijing from an apparent cardiac arrest. Although the company has since denied any wrongdoing, Yuan had been working until 11 pm every day for a month.
Later the same year, Young & Rubicam Indonesia copywriter Mita Diran died after working continuously for three days straight.
On Christmas Day 2015, 24 year-old Dentsu employee Matsuri Takahashi jumped to her death from a company dormitory in Japan. She had worked over 100 hours of overtime in one month.
Matsuri Takahashi, the Dentsu employee who leapt to her death
Japan even has its own word for the phenomenon: Karōshi, or ‘death by overwork’.
In 2017, things don’t appear to be getting any better – and it’s not just an Asian problem. A recent Adweek article listed examples of employees getting called back into the office at 10pm, a woman who worked 36 days straight until 3am, and a father who recorded videos of himself from his office so his kids wouldn’t go so long without seeing him.
So how do Australia’s advertising and PR industries size up to the rest of the world when it comes to achieving a work-life balance? And more importantly, are its leaders in a position to turn things around?
According to Kimberlee Wells, CEO TBWA\Melbourne, the nature of the agency model can often be to blame for high working hours. “The strong deadline orientation through our work means that if somebody says jump, agencies turn around and say ‘sure, how high?’… we’re no good at saying no. We haven’t trained ourselves to say ‘wait a minute – how vital is this?'”, she says.
Wells: ‘We’re no good at saying no’
When it comes to tackling a culture of overwork embedded deep into a company’s core, strong leadership is essential to stymieing the problem. In the case of Dentsu employee Matsuri Takahashi, that leadership wasn’t in place.
Just two weeks ago, Dentsu’s president Toshihiro Yamamoto released a statement in which he highlighted the PR agency’s failure “to fulfil the social responsibility of a company”. Back in December, Dentsu CEO Tadashi Ishii said he felt “deep responsibility as a person for overseeing the management of the company”.
According to Wells, “there’s definitely a requirement for managers to identify those individuals who are not taking leave and to force some leave on them. That’s where forced leave around Christmas becomes an enormous productivity benefit to the individual.”
Research from the PRCA and PRWeek has shown that over one third of the PR industry has suffered from mental health problems. The respondents listed stress, pressure from clients and workload as some of the key factors which impacted their mental health.
“The mental health aspect is critical, because if we haven’t got that in our people, we in all honesty haven’t got a business,” said Wells.
The belief that a worker should battle on no matter what is, from her perspective, a serious problem: “Encouraging someone when they call up and say ‘I’m not feeling well I’m going to work from home’ today, to say to them ‘no, if you’re not feeling well, don’t work. Turn everything off.'”
“We’ve fallen into this belief that things will stop if we do, and they don’t. They keep going,” she adds.
Compared to the rest of the world, Wells says, Australia is certainly not the worst. “We’ve got one of our team working in the agency at the moment from Tokyo, and they can’t believe the time that we finish, because they ordinarily would be working until 11.00pm, midnight, 1.00am everyday,” she said.
Wells points to her head of art, Eric Benitez, who recently joined the company from Brazil. He told her: “In Brazil we would work as if we were pitching every single day.”
“In the pitches of the past, you’d bribe your people to be there with shitty takeaway food, pull out the red wine, and the white wine, and try and make a bit of a party out of the fact that they were working hard.
“We try and keep everyone just on water. And that’s to help them build their reserves for a really intense period. And once that period is over, then it’s an encouragement to have some sleep, take a break, recover your mental energy.”
Matt Tindale, MD Linkedin also believes health is a necessary factor in avoiding burn out: “If you’ve got a happy, healthy, balanced workforce, they’re going to be so much more productive and way happier in what they do. I think this is something that the leaders of pretty much all companies need to lead by example.”
“We’ve got running clubs during the day, we’ve got a gym that we encourage people to go to,” he says.
“Little things really help – no weekend emails, no late night emails, no calling on holiday – it just shouldn’t be done. That might be your decision, because that’s when you feel most productive, but you should never assume those sort of things to people outside of office hours, because it just sinks into the culture.”
“It’s important to promote flexible working hours.”
Emma Heath, founder of copywriting agency Words by Nuance has close to a decade of first-hand experience on the front line at some of Australia’s biggest agencies.
She defines burn out as “when you’ve got nothing left in your tank, and sometimes you don’t know that you’re running on fumes until you absolutely crash.”
Heath: ‘It’s got this illusion of glamour’
Heath points out that the very nature of the agency model means there’s no inbuilt time for reflection because there are always deadlines to meet, new pitches to make: “It’s down to that pace and pressure, and that constant need for newness.”
And when it comes to job safety, advertising agencies have something of a Devil Wears Prada problem. “It’s got this illusion of glamour. Everyone wants to do it. You know that if you’re not going to do your job someone else will just come and do it,” Heath says.
“It’s actually really impossible to pretend that your employees don’t have a personal life. I think increasingly, by recognising the role work plays into someone’s bigger picture, that’s really important to help keep them happy and well and productive.”
“If someone’s having a meltdown, is it okay to say ‘hey, are you alright?’ and even if it’s not affecting their work yet, preventing things is easier than reacting.”
A damning report on the entertainment and creative industries in Australia, which detailed how drug and alcohol abuse along with suicide attempts are far higher in the entertainment industry than in the general population. Speaking to Susan Cooper, general manager of Entertainment Assist, it’s clear that many of the findings can also be applied to creative industries in general.
“From a societal perspective, it’s a challenge across the board, because we have tools that will allow us to work crazy hours now,” she says. “We’re contactable 24/7, so we’ve developed this complex where if we’re not working and not contributing, we’re not being the best we can be, which is a real challenge.”
“If someone’s not able to perform or present well all the time, then sadly there are always going to be 100 people standing behind them who can do their job, because supply always outweighs demand.”
For Cooper, sustainability is key to keeping a business afloat, and yet overwork is sustainability’s antithesis.
“We’re like gophers on a wheel, madly treading, just trying to keep the pace without first stopping and going ‘how can we do this and make it sustainable?’ and that’s the key.”
“How can you have a sustainable industry when you haven’t got well people working in it?”
As a creative, I’ve seen the opportunity to make as much work as we used to dry up over the last 5 years. The budgets are smaller. More conservative and creatively opposed clients than ever before. And you’re only a client loss away from being fired.
Then when you find out the better money your friends make in other industries, and the reasonable hours they work – it makes you wonder what reasons you’d have to even be in advertising any more.
It’s going to take more than a ping pong table and yoga classes to keep talent from draining away.
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Clients and procuement also need to realise that they have a big part to play in the growing problem of ageny workplace stress due to a culture of increased workloads, longer hours and shorter deadlines.
Complaints about agency churn is nothing new but when agencies are constantly being pressured to reduce their fees otherwise clients threaten to go elsewhere, despite increased scopes of work and shorter leadtimes, what do you think is honestly going to happen?
Agency people should not be treated like a commodity. There is benefit in looking beyond just numbers and actually reflect on the human element when entering into negotiations with agencies.
For the most part, people in this industry are in it for the right reasons ( the ones that I’ve met anyway) in that they just want to do good work for clients but like anyone else they need time to think and have access to available resources to do so (and yes, that costs money).
It’s all well and good to say ” just say no”, but in a competitive industry like ours, I don’t think all the blame can be placed purely on agency culture.
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I agree that agency people work hours that are not sustainable. When I was an MD of a Media Independent, I was having a conversation with a sales director, from a major media owner, and he was bemoaning the fact that agency people were paid more. I asked him if he had ever gone several years without working a weekend? I asked him if he had ever worked all night at the office to pitch the next day? The answers were in the negative. Bleeding hearts aside, that was the reality of working in, or for, an agency. The answer is that agencies need to become less predatory in discounting to get new clients and receive adequate remuneration to service the business. It is up to the leaders of agencies to make it happen.
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Every person working in adland should take time over the summer to read Madison Avenue Manslaughter by Michael Farmer. It’ll really open your eyes to why agencies are like they are today.
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Totally agree. I worked in agency for a short time and it was enough to turn me off. It was a small business and the expectation was to be ‘on’ all the time even though there were no big clients to work for. But it was totally ok for the boss to take off early or not turn up at all because they had to pick up the kids/ship the kids off to sport/social events while the rest of the team sat in the office unable to move because of this mentality. Gone internal now and won’t be back.
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I spent about 10 years in a variety of PR agencies before deciding to work for myself earlier this year. I loved the chase and the pitching at the time, but it takes its toll and is the number one reason for overwork, in my opinion. It’s by no means scientific, but I am seeing more and more senior people go freelance/work for themselves as the agency demands have just become unrealistic – and as a freelancer you get paid to be part of a pitch!
How do you fix it? Stop pitching for clients you’ve no hope of winning, or who have no money, build capacity in the business so you can give your star pitchers a genuine break and find a way to reward (no matter how small) everyone on the pitch team. And of course, remembering it’s PR, not ER!
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This is a very real problem caused by clients who fail to pay their way, just cherry picking ideas and strategy ‘for free’ and agencies who underpay and overwork staff and fail to extract a fair income from clients. The pitch process is broken and creates an entire level of stress, as clients think they can just shop-around regardless of the effort required. The entire model is broken. I just wonder how the major consultant groups will manage this process. Clients need to value agencies as partnets and agencies need to value their staff: currently neither do. It’s a problem that a few days off over Christmas willl not fix.
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Perhaps overwork is why television ads are so bad
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The change has to come from the bottom up, because the people in charge have lost empathy due to the hours they’ve done to reach there positions. Maybe we need a union, but yeah, definitely too many lives have been wasted making 30second spots most people wish didn’t exist.
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It’s humourless clients and marketing people who don’t know how to approve interesting work anymore. The agencies are doing it, it’s just not getting through. 15 rounds of concepts later and a shopping list of parameters and boxes it needs to tick – it becomes a boring manifesto dog’s breakfast.
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This would have to be one of the most silly blame-the-victim quotes I’ve ever read”. People don’t do those hours voluntarily, they do it because their manager expects/cajoles/bullies them to do it.
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According to Wells, “there’s definitely a requirement for managers to identify those individuals who are not taking leave and to force some leave on them. “
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I worked in advertising agencies and graphic design studios for 25 years, in a variety of rules on the studio and production side. Some places pay lip service to work-life balance, but then a pitch comes up and they want you to put your life on hold for a week.
Big agencies are by far the worst offenders. I worked in Melbourne’s largest agency for under a year… until I got tired of finishing at 10pm-midnight at least 3 days a week, plus pulling all nighters far more frequently than I’d like. For a boss who offered nothing in the way of thanks.
I cut out of adland and am now working in a comms department for a not-for-profit. A step down from my adland wage but on the flip side I leave at 5pm every night, start work at 9.15 after I drop my son at school, and no one emails or calls me outside of work hours. Plus the projects I work on make a difference to people and give me great satisfaction, rather than just line a client’s pockets.
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