Employees

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 »

Facetime

Many research studies have proven that, unfortunately, when our employees leave, it's not that hard for them to leave us. But what makes it hard, what makes our job sticky, is that they don't want to leave their coworkers. They often have deep relationships with their coworkers that they don't want to sacrifice by taking a new job. Post-Covid, as more of us have gone hybrid or completely virtual, it's really challenging to create the kinds of relationships that feel sticky to your employees, where they feel like they have a vested interest in each other's success, personally and professionally. Watch »

Three kinds of growth goals

In our business, being irrelevant happens quickly. If we are not constantly learning, constantly stretching ourselves, exploring, and experimenting, it's easy to lose our edge and the ability to lead clients. This is why we are such big proponents of a) one-on-one meetings with your employees and b) inside those one-on-one meetings, making sure that the very first topic of conversation every time you meet with them is their quarterly growth goals. And they should have 3 different types of growth goals per quarter. Watch »

How inclusive is your agency?

How can you continue to create a welcoming environment for all kinds of diversity, not just – not just sexual orientation or race or gender or faith, but also the way people think. There's a lot of talk today about neurodivergence and how different people's brains are wired and how they work. And I think there's a huge opportunity for us to think about that and create pathways inside our organization where we can tap into everybody's experiences, strengths, and uniqueness and make those part of what we offer our clients. So as always, I, I hope that we all believe this as people, but certainly as business owners, the more unique and diverse our ecosystem is inside our agency, the more we can connect with and be of service to clients and their audiences, who are also very diverse. Watch »

It’s our fault

See if this feels familiar -- "I'm so frustrated with the younger employees because their expectations and understanding about the work is very different. They set very firm boundaries around sort of their personal life and their personal time, and they're not willing to do the things that I need them to do. For example, I'm frustrated that they won't attend after-hours networking events. I'm frustrated that they won't travel to client meetings. I'm frustrated that they will not invest some of their own time and professional development." Does that sound like how you're feeling? I totally hear you on all of that. But the reality is this is not them. This is us. This is our fault. Watch »