Employees

Protect yourself

If you do not have no solicitation and confidentiality agreements signed and in place with every employee, you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk. We hold a lot of confidential information about our clients and about the agency inside our agency, and share it with our employees, and we want to make sure that that stays sacred and safe. If you have those in place, I want you to consider renewing them every year with every employee. Why? A couple of things. Number one, sometimes language has to be updated. Number two, it's a really great reminder for those long-term employees who signed those documents years and years ago that they're still in place and they're still being held accountable to them. I have seen many agencies successfully defend against a former employee who violated a no-solicit agreement. I've seen many employers, agency owners, be able to course correct an employee with a confidentiality agreement reminder, whether they fired them or not, they were able to sort of put their behavior in place when they had that document to refer to and to remind them that they had signed that that document, and there are consequences. This is something you're going to want to have done in advance before the problem bites you. Seen lots of agency owners, very grateful that they had them, or very sad that they didn't have them. Don't be one of the sad agency owners. Go ahead and get that in place today and renew it every year. Watch »

Comp should be personal

How should we reward employees of our agencies? Of course, you want to pay them fairly. You want to give them good benefits. You want them to have a flexible work schedule, all of that. We often erroneously assume that everyone wants to be compensated number one, by money, or number two, based on what we want to be compensated by, which for many agency owners and leaders, is driven by monetary success. But for many of your employees, that may not actually be the thing that they value the most. They may value time off, they may value a bonus or a raise. They may value perks like plane tickets or theater tickets or a spa day. They may benefit or love the idea of having the opportunity to have a new educational experience that maybe is a little more expensive than they can afford, or that you would normally invest in. It is worth the time and energy to explore with each of your team members what motivates them and what actually matters the most to them which allows them to help you build at least part of their compensation plan in a custom way that serves them and their family, whatever that may be. I think you're going to be surprised that it actually is oftentimes less expensive to the agency what they want versus what you are going to give them. And so it's worth the conversation. And if nothing else, it makes them feel seen and heard and thought of as an individual and that you care about what makes them happy. So it is a win win win all the way around and is worth having that conversation. Watch »

How do agencies “do” strategy

Is being good at strategy innate, or is it something that can be learned? The reality is that where we landed was the answer is both. There are absolutely some people, and odds are most of you if you own or are a leader in an agency, who are innately strategic. You just naturally know where to lean in and what questions to ask. You are curious about business and your clients, making you a very strategic thinker. Often, this also makes you the bottleneck inside your agency because you're the only strategic thinker. Many agency owners will tell us how frustrated they are that they can't get the rest of their team, whether it's account service folks, subject matter experts, or creatives, to think as strategically as you would like them to. So that gets us to the other side of the equation: can strategy be taught? Watch »

Bonus Criteria

As agency owners, we make a couple critical mistakes when it comes to giving bonuses. The first one is that we just give out money in the fourth quarter because we have money left over. And so we “reward” people. But we haven't done anything to change their behavior throughout the year, to get them to earn that money and to understand how they can help the agency have even more money at the end of the year. And number two, we structure bonus programs based on longevity rather than tying it to KPIs that are something that everyone in your organization can achieve. Watch »

What’s missing from your job descriptions?

We're working on a set of job description templates for members. One of the things that we're realizing is that one of the elements that most job descriptions are missing, which I think is actually one of the most critical elements of a job description, is KPIs. Measurable, attainable, objective ways for you and your employees to measure their performance. It shouldn't be a huge, long list. It doesn't need to be 10 or 15 KPIs, but 5 to 6 KPIs that are very specific to their job that will be a way for you and them to keep score. One of the things we know about today's employees is that they're very anxious to sort of have a checklist of what doing a good job means. What it looks like and your job description is your first opportunity to give them that sort of template or checklist of how to show up as a great AE or a great copywriter or whatever their role is. But 95% of the job descriptions we see coming from all of you don't have specific KPIs. It may have vague language around listing their responsibilities, but it doesn't say how you will measure their performance. And for you and the employee, one of the realizations is that today's employees want specifics, and then they will work very hard to hit those specifics. Watch »

Continual Improvement

For most of us, one of our goals is to keep our employees for a long time. When we have a great team member, we want them to stick around. There are significant economic and emotional and sort of systemic reasons why we wish long-term employees. But what we also want from our long-term employees is that they keep getting better. We work in an industry where if we don't keep learning and we don't keep improving, we very quickly can become obsolete. So one of the things you need to do inside your agency is build in the reinforcement that no matter how good you are today, you need to keep getting better. And the best way to do that is in your one-on-one meetings with every single employee. We shouldn't be rewarding employees for longevity. We should be rewarding employees for the contributions they make to the agency. And part of the contribution we need every single team member to make is that they keep getting better. So you need to build in systems and process inside your organization to not only encourage improvement, but to reward improvement. So don't leave it to chance. Build a program into your agency so that every employee keeps getting better and better over time. Watch »

I Spy

Reach out to everybody, and either while you're all on Zoom in a team meeting or prep them in advance, or do it by email or Slack. Say to them, I spy something meaningful in your office. Tell me about one thing. Show it to me. Tell me one thing in your office that has special meaning to you and why you keep it near you during the workday. I think you're going to learn some fascinating things about your employees. And start it off by sharing something that you keep in your office that is near and dear to you. That's very meaningful. Try and avoid the cliche of it's a picture of my family or something like that. Find something that is going to reveal something about you that maybe they didn't know, or they didn't know was as important to you as it is. But set the tone and then invite them to share as well. I think it's a great way to close out the year. Connect with everybody. Get to know everybody a little bit better, and share a little of yourselves with each other. Watch »

What do you want your team to feel?

As agency owners and leaders, we are the messengers. We set the tone and tenor of how people feel about working in the agency. I don't think we spend enough time thinking about how we want to kick off our all-team or state-of-the-agency meetings and how we want them to walk away from those meetings. What do we want them to know? And, more importantly, what do we want them to feel? So before your next all-team meeting, think carefully about the chaos of all the messages you have to deliver because you have 30 minutes an hour or 90 minutes of stuff to tell them. But how do you bookend that with how you want them to feel? Watch »

Work ethics

There are many assumptions about our employees, the way they work, and their understanding of work. First, I think we assume that they know how we want them to work. Second, I think we assume that they know how we work. Third, I think we assume that there is no wiggle room in their perception of work. Want to know the fix? Keep listening. Watch »