Vaccine Policy? You can’t avoid having one with Drew McLellan

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to midsize agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. We’ll show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. We want to help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable. And if you want, down the road, sellable. With 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host Drew McClellan. 

Drew McClellan:

Hey everybody, Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Thanks so much for making the time to hang out with me. This is one of my solo casts. So if you are new to the Build a Better Agency family, then you may not be familiar with that. But basically, every fifth episode is just me and you talking about something that I know is on your mind, because a lot of other agency owners and leaders have asked me about it. So no guests this time, just me and you.

And we’re going to talk about a topic that I think is super timely and not something you can afford to ignore. But before I tell you what we’re going to talk about and before we start talking about it, I want to make a couple announcements and also give you a fair warning.

So if you watching the video version of the solo cast, you can see over my shoulder that my black lab Heather is sleeping on the chair behind me. Heather snores. So you may hear her snoring. It’s not me. I’m hoping it’s not you. It is the dog. And we will just blame it on the dog even if it is you. Because obviously it can’t be me, because I’ll be talking. But anyway, if you hear a weird rumbling, it’s not thunder, it’s not your audio. It is the 90 pound lab taking a mid-afternoon nap.

The other thing I want to tell you about is I want to remind you that the Build a Better Agency Summit, our very first conference built specifically for small to mid-sized agencies, completely focused on helping you run the business of your business better. That is finally coming to fruition. It was supposed to happen in May of 2020, November of 2020. And now, it is on for August of 2021. I would love for you to join us. We have some amazing speakers. I just want to give you a little taste of what the breakout speakers are going to be. 

So we have four different breakout speakers over the course of the two days. So we have a gentlemen named Scott Leff. Scott is an M&A specialist. And all he does is deal with agencies, buying and selling of agencies. What he’s going to talk about is how to get your house in order. How do you build an agency that someone would want to buy someday? And what are the things you need to consider about whether or not you want to build an agency that you would want to put up for sale some day? What are the compromises and the consequences of that choice, and how do you do a better job of getting your agency ready to sell?

Amber Naslund is also going to join us. Amber is midway through writing a book about impostor syndrome. She’s interviewed a ton of people. She’s going to talk about what causes it. And most importantly, sort of normalize it and acknowledge that it is something that we all deal with. And she’s got some great, tangible ways for us to deal with that when it crops up. And we look in the mirror and we think, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to find out I’m a fraud.” So Amber is going to help us with that. She’s an amazing speaker. I’ve seen her several times. 

Sharon Toerek is another breakout speaker. If you’ve been around AMI for a while, many of you are familiar with Sharon. She is an attorney that specializes in working with small to mid-sized agencies. So she lives our world every single day. Many AMI agencies refer to her as their attorney. I know I certainly do. And Sharon’s going to talk specifically about the traps and dangers of social marketing and influencer marketing, and how to create campaigns that will keep you out of hot water. So she’s got a lot of great strategies on what you need to be thinking about, what you need to put in your contracts, what you need to do in terms of disclosures around social and influencer campaigns, and how to get yourself and your client to stay out of trouble.

And then finally, Tamsen Webster is our fourth breakout speaker. And Tamsen, I think by the time the conference is on, I believe her book will be out. And if not, it’ll be shortly after that. But Tamsen is going to talk to us about how we and our team find the strongest idea. So she has a methodology that she calls the simplest way to find the strongest ideas. 

So I’ve heard all of these folks speak before. I have consumed their content. I have referred people to them. These are super smart people who are very engaging. And any one of these breakout speakers is going to help you run your business better. post-conference. So you’re going to get to choose two of the four if you join us at the Build a Better Agency Summit. And I am hoping that you do choose to do that. If you will head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com, right in the top left navigation is BABA Summit click on that. And you can register. You can read about all the other speakers. I’m just scratching the surface with these four. And please come join us. It’s going to be a spectacular event. We are going to learn so much. And we’re going to be together. We’re going to be in rooms together, connecting, networking, telling stories. It’s going to be awesome. And I really hope you join us.

Okay. Last announcement. And then I will get into the solo cast. As you know, every solo cast, or as I hope anyway, every solo cast, we draw a name. And that person wins a free workshop. How do you get in the drawing you ask? All you have to do is go to wherever you download the podcast, wherever you are subscribed to the podcast,. Go there and leave us a rating and a review. Take a screenshot of that rating and review and email it to me at [email protected]. Why do I need the screenshot? Because I can’t tell by your username bambilovesthumper203. I can’t tell by that who you are, or which agency you work at, or own if you’re an owner. So if you will just take a screenshot, send it my way, then you too could be a lucky winner. Your names stays in there forever. So either sooner or later, you’ll win. So go leave us a review and a rating, take a screenshot, email it to me. And you could be as lucky as Lisa [Bragg 00:07:26]. 

Lisa is this month’s winner of the free workshop. Again, our workshops range from 1,600 to $2,000. So taking two minutes to leave a review and send it to me, not a bad deal. Not a bad ROI. So Lisa, I will be reaching out to you to let you know that you won in case she missed this episode, and also to talk to you about which workshop you would like to attend.

All right, let’s dig down into the topic. So I have done a couple videos on this. I’ve talked about this a little bit. But I want to really get your attention. If you have no takeaway from this podcast other than the next sentence I’m about to utter, I feel good. 

You cannot not have a vaccine policy. Every single agency by design or by action is going to have a vaccine policy. So given that that is the case, I want you to think about it, and actually intentionally set your vaccine policy.

So here’s what I mean by that. So you can have a vaccine policy. It can be in your handbook, and that is your official policy. You can also not have a vaccine policy in your handbook, and you can behave a certain way, and that’s going to become your vaccine policy. 

I think it’s super important that number one, you think this through. And number two, that you have in writing what your policy is. Because I promise you, you are going to be asked. You’re going to be asked by your employees. You’re going to be asked by your current clients. You’re going to be asked by prospective clients. And you’re going to be asked by prospective employees. 

Do I think that this is going to be forever? No. As I have said before, I am neither a doctor nor a scientist. But from everything I’ve read, I believe that the COVID vaccine is not a one and done thing. And that for a lot of us, we’re going to be getting a COVID vaccine every year just like we get a flu shot. So will that normalize eventually? Probably. But for the next few years, the heightened fear around COVID … and really, we’ve been indoctrinated for the last year or more to stay away from each other, to not be in each other’s presence, to keep social distance, to be wearing masks. And the vaccine allows us to go back to a more normal lifestyle if you will in both our work and our personal life.

So I think that for a couple years at least, there is going to be this heightened concern about COVID and who am I around? Are they vaccinated? Are they not vaccinated? Again from vendors, employees, and clients. So I want you to really think this through and put a stake in the ground. Whatever you decide, there is not one right vaccine policy for all agencies. But there is a right vaccine policy for you based on a lot of criteria. And that’s what I want to spend this solo cast on is let’s talk through what you need to think about as you start to approach having a vaccine policy.

So you have three choices. Do you mandate the vaccines? Do you encourage the vaccines? Or do you ignore it altogether and never talk about it? Those are your three choices. And they are all viable choices for you. You just have to decide which one is the right fit.

Even an ignore it decision is a policy. If you don’t want to ask your employees if they’re vaccinated or not, if you don’t want to require any sort of documentation or on the other end of the extreme, you don’t want to require that everyone get vaccinated, then that is a policy. The policy is it’s none of our business. It’s your medical information. If anyone asks, we’re simply going to say, “I don’t know, we didn’t think that was our business.” But if that’s your policy, it should be recorded as such. It should be in the handbook. You should have it in writing somewhere So when a prospect or a client asks, or a prospective employee asks, you can show them and say, “this is our policy.” because I’m ignoring it is a decision and is a policy.

So can we require vaccines? Absolutely. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or EEOC as you typically see it referred to here States. So I will caveat this. I’m saying we can are vaccines here in the states. If you are not from the United States, you’re going to want to check with your city or federal government to see what you are allowed. So in the U.S., we are allowed to require a vaccination. The EEOC has issued guidance that says employers may institute a policy that requires employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. So far anyway, has been challenged a few times. Most states and local jurisdictions are just following the EEOC guidance on this issue. So I have not yet heard of anyone that has decided they’re going to mandate vaccines that has gotten any pushback at the city, state, or federal level.

But if you are going to mandate your vaccine, you must meet four criteria. Three of which I think are relevant for us, and one is not so much. And again, this is US-based, but I suspect this is going to be true for most people in most countries. 

Number one, the first criteria is the vaccine has to be available to your employee population. So in some countries, I was talking to an agency owner who lives in Canada. And she was saying that they probably won’t be eligible for a vaccine until this fall. So it doesn’t make any sense for them to require a vaccine before people can actually get a vaccine. So that’s criteria number one.

Criteria number two is you must allow for exceptions for medical or health reasons. So there are some people who are allergic to what’s in the vaccine, or other reasons from a health perspective, why their doctor is saying they shouldn’t get the vaccine. And you need to allow for that exception.

You must also allow for an exception for employees that have, and this is the EEOC language, not mine. A real religious belief. So they’re not just using religion to avoid the vaccine. They have to be able to document that this is a genuine religious belief that they don’t believe in vaccinations.

And the fourth criteria. And again, for most agencies, this is irrelevant. But the fourth criteria based on the EEOC ruling is if your employees are unionized, your collective bargaining agreement may prevent requiring the vaccine.

So again, from the U.S., this is our rules. If you’re from another country, you’re going to want to find out. But I’m betting that the criteria if you’re allowed to mandate vaccines is pretty much the same. 

Okay. Can we encourage vaccines? We absolutely as employers can encourage our employees to get vaccinated. But there are limitations on what we can do to integrate our employees to do that. So in most cases, this would be part of a wellness program. That’s how it would be designated by the EEOC. And under the American Disabilities Act, if the wellness program gets into disability related issues, the wellness program must be voluntary. So we can offer small gifts or tokens, water bottle, stickers, that kind of thing. So think of it as trash and trinkets sort of thing. We can offer that kind of thing for someone to participate in the wellness program. I.e. get the vaccine. But based on what I’ve been reading and seeing, and I have not found anything that is contrary to this, we can’t for example offer employees a bonus if they get vaccinated or some other sort of bigger monetary consideration.

Now if your program is voluntary, there are some things that you can and can’t do. Number one, you can ask them to verify, to prove to you that they’re vaccinated. So that would mean showing you a copy of a photo of a photo of, or their actual vaccination card. And again, they don’t have to show you the real one. But they would have to show you a copy or a photo. But you’re not allowed to ask them for their health records if for some reason they don’t actually have a vaccination card. They again, can get a letter from their doctor or whoever gave them the shot. But you can’t ask for their actual health records. 

Keep in mind too that if they for example, email you a photo of their vaccination card, you’re going to want to delete that email. You don’t want to print out or have a copy of their vaccination card in your employee records. Why? Because the minute you have medical information in their employee records, then you have to protect wherever you store those employee records differently. Because now, it’s a HIPAA thing. It’s a HIPAA factor here in the states, which is you’ve got to keep their health information very private. So you’d have to have it in a locked cabinet. It’s just more onerous. You don’t need to do it. 

What a lot of agencies are doing whether they mandate or encourage is they are basically just putting together either a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet. And they’re noting every employee when they got the date, when they got their second shot if they are getting the Pfizer or the Medina, or when they got their one shot, if they’re getting the Johnson & Johnson. And then they have a column, and we don’t know the answer to this yet. But when is a booster or another shot needed? So they can sort of keep track of how every employee is keeping up with the vaccine. So their name and the date of their last shot if they got two shots, and then they’ll be able to record when they have to go back and get another shot once we know when that.

So some questions to think about as you’re sort of weighing this, I have a lot of questions I want you to think about. So part of the show notes for this episode will be a PDF of all of these questions I’m going to walk you through right now. So if you’re on a treadmill or you’re driving, you don’t need to stop. So you write these down. Just go to the show notes on the AMI website, and you can download these questions. 

So question one is how will you articulate to your team, if you decide to mandate vaccines, how are you going to articulate that decision to your team rather than saying, “We want to encourage them”? So if you cross the line into mandating, how are you going to explain why that’s important to the agency? And keep in mind that this is not about you sticking your nose in people’s business. This is not about you wanting to be the boss of everyone. If you decide that you’re mandating vaccines, what you’re saying is, “I believe I have a business reason for doing this. I believe we put client relationships at risk. We put potential new employee relationships at risk if we are an office where they know they’re only going to be around people who have been vaccinated.” So you just need to figure out how do you talk about that to your team in a way that makes it very clear to them that you’ve thought this through, and that it’s important for the health of the agency that you mandate vaccines. 

So if you decide to mandate vaccines, are you going to mandate that all employees be vaccinated? Or are you going to say, “You know what, if your job can be performed remotely, or social distancing and PPE equipment is going to be challenging on site, you don’t have to get vaccinated.” Let’s say you have a remote employee in another part of the country. Are you going to require that they get vaccinated? And then part of the question of that is do they interact with clients? Do you bring them back to the main office, and do they interact with your other employees? So again, you need to weigh all of that. Is this an all for one, or are you going to make designations based on where people work or the kind of work they do?

Do you want to work environment that is always going to include masks and social distancing? If you don’t mandate and you encourage, and some of your employees say, “Look, I feel really uncomfortable being in an office space, or being out on a shoot or at a trade show with a client if I’m not sure that my coworkers have been vaccinated.” So I want us to always wear masks and continue to social distance. Is that a work environment that you want long term? 

How will you handle employees who must travel out of state or out of the country to perform their jobs? And how does this get impacted if the airlines, or airport authorities, or other municipalities or localities begin to require proof from the vaccination? Now all of a sudden if you encourage or ignore, you’re going to have people on your team that would mean maybe you have a client that says, “Look, the only people who can walk in this building are people who are vaccinated.” So then that’s going to dictate which employees can work on that client’s business. 

So be thinking about that there are going to be outside forces that may put pressure on you to make a decision in one way or the other. And, other people’s decisions may mean that if you have employees that are not vaccinated, what they’re able to do for you as an employee to earn their paycheck may be more limited.

Think about this. What impacts will employees being vaccinated or not have on your business beyond the onsite work considerations? So depending on the client sectors you work in, depending on the vendors you work with, how is that going to impact your business? How is it going to impact your recruiting for new employees? So those are also considerations you need to take in.

How are you going to handle it when, because this is a when, not an if. How are you going to handle it when a client asks who on the team that you’re about to send to like I said, a shoot, a meeting, a trade show, who on the team from the agency has been vaccinated. Or says, “Look, you can only send vaccinated team members to this, that, or the other.” How are you going to handle that if let’s say your lead account executive on that account isn’t vaccinated? What is your annual are going to be? And how comfortable do you feel answering the question if when a job applicant, because again, this is a when, not if. When a job applicant says to you, “What percentage of the team has been vaccinated?” 100%, whatever number in between 100 and zero if you’re encouraging, or if you’re ignoring, I don’t know. Because I don’t feel it’s our business to ask. So thinking through those scenarios may help you land on a decision somewhere along the spectrum.

How long are you anticipating or planning on mandating or encouraging vaccines? What I’m going to suggest is right now, nothing is permanent. We have no idea what’s going to happen in six months or a year. So I think whatever policy you set, it should be good for 2021. And then I think you should revisit it at the end of 2021 and issue your 2022 policy around the COVID-19 vaccine. So I wouldn’t lock it into stone forever. I would just say this is a policy we’re going to review every year and update accordingly. 

So let’s say you decide to mandate vaccines. How much time does an existing employee have once you make the announcement to get vaccinated before you have to dismiss them? Or if you’re hiring a new person, how long before they start? Do they need to be vaccinated? Keep in mind there’s a two week window after either the one Johnson & Johnson vaccine, or the second vaccine of the other two. Where in theory, it’s not fully potent yet. So if they’re giving two weeks notice and you want them to start, do they already have to be vaccinated? Or are you going to be willing to put them on the payroll while they work for home for a week or two, while they wait for the vaccine to be fully potent inside their body? All of these things are things you have to think about. 

How can you create a policy? Here’s another question. How are you going to create a policy that protects you from discriminating against applicants based on disability, religion, pregnancy, all of those sort of things? So of course, we want to be someone who is an equal opportunity employer. But will our COVID vaccine mean that we are discriminating in some way? The answer is if you were to encourage or ignore, no, because you’re not making anything mandatory. If you mandate the vaccine, then again, you would need to just make sure that in the policy it makes it clear that there are medical exceptions and religious exceptions that will be honored. So you just need to cover your bases on that.

All right. More questions for you to think about. So they’re saying that pregnant and breastfeeding women should not get the vaccine. So will you give your female employees who are either pregnant or currently breastfeeding a baby a temporary pass? Will they have to work remotely until they can get vaccinated? And what’s the timeframe of that? How long? Let’s say somebody wants to breastfeed their baby until the baby is off to kindergarten. Are you going to tolerate them being unvaccinated for four or five years? More things to think about.

How are you going to handle if an existing employee, let’s say you mandate the vaccine and an existing place says, “Absolutely not. I am not getting a vaccine”? How long are you going to allow them to stay before you end the relationship? And what if they’re your rock star? How are you going to feel if your superstar says, you’ve come out and said, “We’re mandating vaccines. I want everybody on the team to be vaccinated.” And your rockstar says, “Yeah, I’m not taking that vaccine.” Now what do you do? How are you going to handle that?

Again, no right or wrong answer. But these are the things I want you to think about now so you are prepared for all of the stuff that is going to be coming at us in the next few months as more and more people get vaccinated.

If you don’t mandate vaccines but you bring everyone back to the office. Even if it’s a day a week or just for episodic meetings, what liability are you assuming? So you probably, if you’re not going to mandate vaccines, you probably need to reach out to your insurance company and find out how are you covered for that liability of saying, “Look, everybody’s got to come in for a team meeting or a brainstorming meeting. We’re only working live in the office two days a week.” What is the liability you have, and how do you mitigate that liability if you don’t mandate vaccines?

All right, we’re going to take a quick break. Because I know your head is reeling right now. We’re going to take a quick break, and then I want to come back and pose some other questions that I want you to think about.

Hey there, do you have an up and comer inside your agency who’s become your right-hand person? How are you investing in them? Who are they surrounding themselves with? And who are they learning from? You might be interested in taking a look at our key executive network. It’s built to help you groom the leaders in your agency. It’s designed to surround them with other AMI taught agency leaders, and it’s facilitated by one of AMI’s top coaches Craig Barnes. They meet twice a year and they stay connected in between meetings with calls, Zoom get togethers, and email. AMI agency owners call it one of the best professional development investments they’ve ever made. Head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com and look under the membership tab for key executive network. All right, let’s get back to the interview. 

All right. We are back. And as you know, we are talking about how to think about your agency’s vaccine policy. Because whether you put it in the handbook or not, your actions are going to dictate that you do have a vaccine policy, whether it’s mandate, encourage, or ignore. So I want you A, to think through, and B, to be prepared. So more questions I want you to think about.

If you are not mandating the vaccine, so if you’re in the encouraging or ignore camp, are you going to ask every employee to disclose or prove to you if they’ve been vaccinated? And if you’re not going to do that, then when a client or a prospective employee asks you about it, how are you going to answer the question when they say, “How many people have been vaccinated? Or is my team vaccinated?” Or whatever they ask you .How are you going to respond to that and admit that you have chosen not to ask, so you just don’t know. The other thing to think about how does mandating encouraging or ignoring the vaccine align with your company culture? If you look at your core values, what does that tell you about this decision, and how does it sort of drive you in one way or another?

Something I want to caution you about is agency have a tendency when they have to make hard to decisions that honestly they wish they didn’t have to make, they often will survey their staff. So one of the questions I want you to think about is, is it appropriate to make this a group decision given that the odds of having 100% alignment over everyone on your team team is not very good? The only agencies that I am finding that have 100% alignment are the agencies where everybody has decided to get a vaccine. But that’s the only place. I’ve never seen an agency where everybody’s like, “Nope, I’m not getting one.” I haven’t seen anybody where everyone in the agency is like, “You can encourage it, but I’m not going to answer your question. I’m going to keep it private.” I haven’t seen any of that. 

So I want you to be a little careful about the survey thing. I think we tend to lean on that. I know a lot of you have been surveying your employees about work from home and all of that. And what you set yourself up to do is somebody’s going to be unhappy. Because you’re going to get such a variance of opinions, that you can’t land on something and feel like you’ve answered everyone’s concerns and you’ve aligned with what everyone wants you to do. So now you’ve got to explain to the entire staff, “We did this survey, we got answers from A to Z, and I picked K. Why did I pick K? Because XYZ.” But unless somebody picked K, no one’s going to feel particularly heard in that survey because they didn’t get what they wanted. So be careful about going down that road, given the fact that there’s so many varying opinions about whether or not people are getting vaccinated and how they feel about the vaccine.

Another thing I would like you to think about is if you’re going to require vaccines, you have some obligation to educate your employees about the vaccines, point them to resources that are going to give them good, truthful information, but in an unbiased way. So you have some responsibility if you’re going to say, “Look, you have to do this or you’re going to lose is your job.” To be able to help them educate themselves so they can make a good decision about if they aren’t going to get vaccinated.

You need to think through how you’re going to keep the records. Again, most agencies that I’ve talked to so far that are further along in this decision are really just recording on a Google Sheet or an Excel document. If somebody got vaccinated and the date of their last vaccination. So you can sort of begin to project out when people are going to have to get boosters if that is the case.

I think this is a decision of the head and heart together. So I think you really have to stop and think in your heart of hearts, when you really sort of project, and again, this is all conjecture. We don’t really know how this is going to play out. But in your heart of hearts, what is the best decision for you, for the agency, for your team, and for your clients? And when you’re trying to decide for that many different entities if you will, obviously it’s going to be more beneficial for some than others. But you really have to think about from a business perspective, how is the vaccine policy of choice going to impact my agency? How is it going to put me at risk? How’s it going to protect me from risk? And what does it say about us? How does it align with our values? And when I’m out and about, and I’m talking to our prospect and they say, “Tell me about your vaccine policy.” What does our vaccine policy say to other people about us as well? So again, wrestling that down to the ground and finding the answer to that is super important.

And the other thing I want you to acknowledge and think about is no matter what you decide, you are going to be at risk of losing something. Whether that’s employees, clients, money, someone’s life. If they get infected at your office. The freedom to work in the office without masks and social distancing. There is a price to be paid no matter what you decide. So again, part of the heart of hearts decision is what am I willing to lose because of this decision? And what am I willing to endure, whether it’s flack from the employees, or clients walking out the door because they disagree with whatever you decided. Potential employees deciding not to come work at your place because of what you’ve decided. Whatever it is, which things am I willing to lose ? And which things am I willing to be very firm about? Which things am I willing to be flexible about? But what ultimately is going to serve the business best? 

I believe that for most of you, no matter what policy you set, you are going to lose an employee or two, and you’re going to lose potentially a client or two, where people are just not on the same track that you are. But you have to be careful not to let that risk jumble around in your head and get you to decide something that isn’t actually in the best interest of your agency.

Bottom line, the entity you need to worry about is the agency. How do I keep my employees safe? How do I make them feel comfortable coming back to the office? But also, how do I deal with client questions, or vendor questions or concerns? And how am I going to best serve the agency while of course taking into account the employees, the clients, and you?

So this is not an easy decision. This is a tough one. And if you’ve heard me talk about a level one, two, and three decisions, you’ll remember that a level three decision is where you survey everybody and everybody gets to vote. And whichever option wins, the popular vote, that’s what you decide. So that’s a, “Hey, we’re trying to decide if we’re going to go bowling, or do karaoke for the holiday party. Everybody vote. And whichever one wins, wins. That’s a level three decision.”

A level two decision is you gather around some of your key players, typically your leadership team. You say to them, “Hey, I need to make a decision, but I’d like some input from you.” So you tell them what your choices are. And then you say, “Okay, give me some feedback or some input. But at the end of the day, I’m going to make the decision.”

A level one decision is when you walk in the room and you say, “Hey you guys, I made a decision. Here’s what it is.” I’m not suggesting it’s a level one decision. Although for some of you, it may be. You may know exactly what you believe the agency needs to do, and you’re ready to do it. For most of you, this is going to be a level two decision where you talk about it amongst some of the leadership folks on your team. You crunch the numbers, you get some data, and then you have to make the decision ultimately. This is why you get paid the big bucks. This is why the mantle of command is resting firmly on your shoulders. Unfortunately, this is a decision that really does have to be made by the agency owner and leader. And you have to not only be able to make the decision, you have to be able to articulate the why you made the decision.

So I’m hoping these questions were helpful in at least getting you to think through what you have to anticipate and what you have to extrapolate out of these questions to get to the right answer for you. Because again as I said, there is a right answer for everybody, but it’s not the same answer. All right? I’m hoping that was helpful. I’m hoping that’s giving you a chance to think and soak on this for a little bit. But I’m telling you, you can’t wait too long. This is something, as people are getting vaccinated wherever you are in the world, this is something that has to be decided and shared before everybody’s vaccinated and just assumes X, Y, or Z is about to happen. You need to preempt that and say, “Hey, while we are all in the season of getting vaccinated, I want to communicate to all of you here is our policy. And if you have any concern or questions, you need to come see me. But this is going to be the agency’s policy on this. And here’s how we’re going to handle it.” You need to be able to roll all of that out. So don’t wait too long, all right?

Before I let you go, I want to remind you that we are right now, we’re just getting ready to wrap it up so you don’t have a lot of time. But we are right now still in the field to get the data in for our annual salary and benefits survey. We added some questions this year around work from home and vaccine policies. So the survey is timely with our conversation today. 

We normally charge $99 for the report. It’s usually a 35 or 40 page report. If you remember, if you’ve seen one, the salary and benefits survey is broken out by, the salary part is broken out by size of agency, region of the country. If you’re in the U.S., otherwise by country. And then also, by the size of your market. So you are able to look and say, “We’re a five person agency in a small market. So what’s the average salary for a copywriter?” Or whatever. So we cover salary, we cover benefits. And now we’re digging into work from home. What’s work going to look like for you? And the vaccine policy.

And again, if you take the survey and you complete it all the way to the end, the very last thing is asking for your contact information. If you partake in the survey and you share your data, then we will gladly and happily send you a copy of the report for free so that you can save yourself 100 bucks simply by participating, which would be great. The more people we get, the more robust the data. We’re normally at seven, 800 agencies participating, and we would like to get there.

So here’s where you go to complete the survey. Go to surveymonkey.com/r, the letter R like rooster /amisalary21. Don’t worry. I’m going to give that to you again. And by the way, it’ll be in the show notes as well. Surveymonkey.com/r like rooster, /amisalary21. No spaces between any of that.

Just go, it’s going to take you a 10 or 15 minutes probably to do it. So we really appreciate you sharing and your data. It’s a way for us to really be able to provide great guidance to agency owners as they’re trying to set salaries or salary bands. And I think this is our 17th year of doing this. So we’ve been doing it awhile. I always write something in the back of the report talking about the trends that I’m seeing, what’s changing in the way we’re paying our people or rewarding our people. And a lot of folks find that a little bit helpful.

So anyway, that wraps up today’s episode. I hope that I got you thinking. If you have made a already, I am hoping this episode either solidified that decision for you or gave you some food for thought, and maybe you need to go back and think about it a little bit before you do get definitive in what policy you’re going to have. If you haven’t thought about it at all, I’m hoping that I gave you some food for thought and some questions to ponder so you make sure you make the right decision for your agency.

And as always, I love bringing you episodes that get you not only thinking, but doing. So I’m hoping this episode did that. I’ll be back next week with a guest. So it will not be just me next time. I will be back with a guest who’s going to get you to think a little differently about how you run your business and give you some tangible, helpful tips and tricks to take action on the conversation that you’re going to listen to.

As always, I want to thank our friends at White Label IQ. They are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So do white label dev, design, and PPC for agencies all over the world. And many AMI agencies swear by them that they are a great resource either because they don’t want to have that in the house at all, or because they need an extra set of hands because the people they do have in-house are buried. Either way, they’re a great resource. If you want to learn more about them and to see the special deal they have for you as a podcast listener, go to whitelabeliq.com/ami, and you will find a special deal there for you.

As always, super grateful for your time. And I love that you allow me to step into your business with you every week and think a little bit about how you can tweak it to make it even better than it is right now. So thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, if you need me, you know how to track me down. You can find me at agencymanagementinstitute.com or [email protected]. Thanks for listening. 

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today. Don’t miss an episode.