Building culture with an operational backbone

Operations and culture. How can these two things coexist equally?

Work always has to come first, right? Deliver more and more volume. Faster, faster, faster. A quick chat over Friday lunch ticks off the culture bit.

My belief and experience tells me they need to be 50/50. 90/10 serves no one.

Okay, so where do you start?

Both might feel urgent, but first, sort the operations out.

Everything will feel better if it's not organised chaos and firefighting every day. We are thinking about hard metrics here and parking our EQ momentarily. 

People equate to resources. Billable hours. We're all resources and commodities, God forbid – we're even 'consumables'. Design the metrics where you can work out how many briefs are possible to be delivered.

This could be hard-nosed. Fill people to the max and still squeeze in some more unplanned work. Or plan with buffers. The best rule of thumb is to allow at least 15% capacity for learning, non-delivery and team connections. 

Operationally it might fit now, but is it without friction?  

Build the MarTech, which allows real people to do their jobs. The fundamentals all need to be in place. Starting with the method for: brief reception, agency workflow, and interface into client workflow - if in-house.

Then consider how to communicate formally and quickfire as a team, book and change shared resources (e.g., creative, film, and production) through to keeping a strong audit and storing/repurposing finished assets at the end.  

I'll always remember a leadership low point when asking a high-calibre performer why they'd resigned after a few months. "It's just the comms," they said, "I can't work like this". 

Having become used to operational inefficiency meant I didn't even understand their plea. Thanks to a daily reality of briefing via email, no workflow, no resource booking, multiple client and agency platforms and 15 (yes, 15) different systems just to deploy a single piece of comms. Crazy.

Be realistic about how long it may take to get the work to start flowing through the system. It could take several years if built from scratch.

So you’ll need to look after your people at the same time.

That’s why Creative Operations is so fascinating because you have to do both at the same time. It intersects between science (the left brain) and art (the right).

The sweet spot is when all the great systems you've built produce even greater work. 

The really difficult question is, how does it feel? 

Most leaders (hopefully) have empathy and embrace the concept of servant leadership.

They've read about our crisis with lacking EQ, post-pandemic burnout, and physiological safety as the most critical factor in growing a high-performing team. 

We have access to the data points and eNPS – feeling proud of our benchmarks and over-indexing.  

The trick is to bring it all together – 50/50 - with equal importance. 

Building the right culture will allow people to feel engaged, have autonomy, be free to express diverse options, and enjoy social as well as work events together. 

Balanced operations allow people to look up from the daily grind. To feel that sense of accomplishment, working towards common goals in an environment where they can thrive. If the operations haven't avoided a work stack bottleneck, management should be there to nurture and step in. 

Thank goodness the news tells us that 2023 is finally the year of well-being at work. All of us in high-volume creative operations, please take note. 

Don't let the business driver 'do quicker, with less' force you to build operations that forget your end users. 

Adopt Agile and have daily stand-ups. But allow time and space to ask the double question. "Are you okay?" I'm fine... "Are you sure?"

Let's use our hearts and our head when building creative operations. 

A solid backbone allows everything to work, be planned and flow through. To deliver high quality with happy humans using the processes, feeling safe, respected, and self-organised to be their best selves.