Workplace culture is the real barrier to agency productivity
Instead of agencies looking at ideas and solutions that promise to make them more productive tomorrow, they should be looking at the barriers which stop productivity today, argues Siobhan Hayes.
Conversations on productivity tend to be about ways to increase or help boost our productivity levels. Yet the elephant in the room is having a real discussion about the barriers preventing teams from being their most productive today.
The real barrier to agency teams’ productivity is their workplace culture. A culture that allows a last-minute meeting to eat up the remaining hours of your day and prevents you from meeting a project deadline. Or, a culture where you find out via Kim’s OOO that she’s on holiday the same week she’s booked on a shoot, leaving you short on resources. And a culture that (without anything being said) expects you to reply when your boss emails at 9pm, because your work email is on your mobile and the subject line is “URGENT!” (yes, in all caps).
My god,when did it all get so complicated?
What a weird article to have on a media website for what’s clearly a creative agency example.
Do you even Mumbrella Bro?
I think you’ll find plenty of content on this site is about creative agencies & creative work.
Wanna change culture? Start your own business….
What do you think the traffic manager at an agency actually does?
Cor, you seem nice.
I’ll answer your question. A traffic manager is someone who manages creative agency workflow, which this article clearly isn’t about.
A traffic manager is not someone who fixes systemic issues in agency cultures, which this article clearly is about.
If you think a traffic manager can fix systemic cultural issues, do point one out as I’d be interested to hear their thoughts. (I’m hoping it’s not you.)
12 months ago I switched from media agency to client and I noticed almost immediately that I had huge swathes of un-interrupted time that allowed me to work. Crazy huh.
The biggest waste of time(and client budget) is having too many people in a meeting. When I was in agency land I would start every meeting by looking around and calculating how much this meeting was costing the client. If clients actually looked at timesheets the agency would waste less time
Can we chat this in a publisher environment?! 100’s of pointless meetings and 0 flexibility in ‘work from home’ hours.
Agency culture, now that I am long gone from it, is always saddening to reflect back on. But I have a way of calculating how sick an agency culture probably is:
Start by paying some attention to the volume with which the agency talks about its culture, and give it a score from 10. 1 is they never seem to talk about it, 10 being the only thing they talk about.
Take that and divide it by how successful you think they are. Could be awards or client wins, that’s for you to decide. 10, they’re mega successful and 1, well they’re about to close.
Now we’re going to multiply all the way to 1000,000.
Multiply this if the agency operates on tight margins. Ie all holding company owned media agencies and increasingly creative agencies as well. 10 for super tight and 1 for bathed in cash.
Multiply by up to 10 again if the agency has a Head of People and Culture (as distinct from HR) or similar, yet there are fewer than 300 employees and/or the role is a quasi replacement for HR. Ask in your interview if you’re unsure. I now work with more than 600 employees with no role regarding culture exists but plenty of real HR ones do. That’s because we’re not pretending to be something we’re not.
Multiply by 10 again if the CEO or nominal leader does personal puff pieces talking about all the things they care about beyond work in place of pieces with proper opinions upon which you’d reasonably expect them to be expert.
Go again on churn. Only this time it’s 100. Find out how long people stay and at what levels. High churn at all levels for 100, 1 for no one leaves.
If my math is any good, and it probably won’t be, it’s a score out of 1,000,000 for culture sickness. My last agency job: about 300,000 culture sick
Brilliant stuff. It’s easier to get perspective after you’ve left the industry.