WANT A BETTER AGENCY CULTURE? THINK LIKE A PLANNER.

As a career brand planner, I’ve always advised clients not to study what they aren’t willing to change.? About 18 months ago, I had to heed my own advice.?

I worked at the PETERMAYER agency in New Orleans as its chief strategist, and then its president. Ultimately when the owners retired, I bought the agency.? An agency is nothing without its people, so the first priority was a temperature check of employee engagement and satisfaction. I soon found myself staring at the agency’s lackluster Gallup Engagement Study results.

When you ask staff for their opinion, you need to report out the results – or face a loss of faith. So I knew I had to tell people what they already knew: that our culture was in a very tenuous spot. Immediately post COVID, at the start of the Great Resignation, agency personnel were changing chairs faster than I could absorb the reasons why. I could blame it on the massive influx of remote jobs paying a premium as agencies became desperate to fill roles. But that wasn’t the root of the problem.

I had to own up to the reality that our management team wasn’t aligned with each other and, in some cases, their own teams. The company experience came down to a person’s own individual manager, not a driving philosophy at the top. We couldn’t articulate our “why”. We had one foot in a beloved but aging past, and one foot in an uncertain and ill-defined future.

The culture felt untethered. Yet people were still proud to work here. They loved and respected their colleagues, calling them the best they’d ever worked alongside. And they wanted to believe we could and would fix the problems.

What’s more, post-sale, post-covid, post-lockdown we were all tired. Exhausted, even. Exhausted people can’t create inspired work. Their batting average drops. They start to disengage.

If this sounds something like your agency, you can take a little comfort in knowing we aren’t alone. Agency cultures used to take pride in being hustle cultures — intoxicated by the promise of wins and fueled on the adrenalin of non-stop work. People used to brag about how little they saw their homes or even families. ?The new generation entering the workforce wants no part of this. They love work but they also love when they don’t. Post-pandemic, the older generations don’t want it either. Even when they do a global call at 5 a.m., they feel guilt-free waiting a few hours to recoup their time before heading off to (or logging onto) the office.

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I started to feel as if the only way to heal my own agency’s culture was to look at it through the lens of its customers. Yes. I was still a career strategist, only now my target audience wasn’t at the other end of a media delivery. It was at the other end of that Zoom call.

If you’re a senior leader, I suggest you write a culture brief to heal your agency. Use your creative brief form. Likely it asks: who is your audience, and what problem can our brand solve for them?

Your agency, like your clients, are in service of their audiences. Yes. You, dear manager, work for your employees. The sooner you recognize this, the more likely you can make the changes indicated by your data.

If you’re in agency management, you likely never really got any explicit training for this gig. You just did it by watching your own managers and what it took for them to succeed. So you are replicating behaviors that worked a generation ago. You will have to, like your inner planner, wipe the slate clean and embrace a na?ve and open mind. What is it really like working in your agency? Working for you? What should your brand experience be like?

So many agencies are rebel or jester archetypes, existing as provocateurs or culture movers. But very few people are the type to naysay or break things. It’s my belief that this has caused agency cultures to teach people bad behavior (or at least inauthentic behavior). We’ve rewarded it. And now we have it systemically.?

How your particular agency is going to reorient its brand for its customer (no, no, not the client, the employee), I can’t say. That’s the fun of branding: you get to define it and use its authentic root system to produce new fruit. But this is the job if you want to end the cycle of resignation and mistrust.

In our case, our brand is about life improvement. We want to help people craft excellent lives. That goes for our people first. But it applies to our clients and their consumers as well. There’s that adage, if you love your work, you won’t work a day in your life. But that’s not really spot-on. Rather: if work is a pursuit that you genuinely love, then work becomes part of your excellent life. It doesn’t feel good to spend a lot of your waking hours in a situation that? lacks the joy of striving. You just check out intellectually and emotionally.

I understand now that my job is reigniting work love, and I get up every day excited to do it. I’m excited because we don’t know what the future of work looks like. If work was a product, we’re shaping it using human insight as the basis of development.

Is this all roses? No, far from it. I know that Gallup survey is going to be a report card every year, and it’s not all A’s. But it doesn’t reflect the same challenges anymore. We’re solving higher order problems now. We’ve cleared up the confusion and given people a roadmap. They’re still proud to work at the agency and laud their coworkers. But now they’re more excited to come to work and see what’s next. Hopefully we will continue to earn their passion – because now, we’re acting on what we know fuels it.

What have you done to ignite work love? I’m all ears.