Creating a people-first culture: The key to thriving teams and timely creative output

The heartbeat of success – Agency culture

Clients, pitches, briefs – they all matter. But at the epicentre of every distinguished agency lies a robust and vibrant culture. It's the creative operations that produce outputs, but it's the culture that defines how this work feels and flows.

Workplace culture can feel like an invisible warm glow or a smoky cloying fear. Throughout our careers, we’ve probably all experienced both. But success in the workplace can only be created by people, and it’s people who create the culture.

As a leader, you ignore culture at your peril. You should never be foolish enough to consider that it’s something that just happens. You have to work at it constantly, and hard. I love the disruptive advice in Masters of Scale that you should put your customers second. Counterintuitive to any marketer. But the theory is that if you create a people-first culture, that will lead to customers getting better products and services.

Guests in their house – The in-house challenge

When building in-house teams, you can often have another challenge. One of blending two different cultures. One might be more corporate and the other more creative and informal. The culture may feel constrained by the service relationship that’s in place too. In the Celtra study, 86% of creative teams are asking for more time for ideas. But this is against a cultural backdrop of 91% of clients wanting to get things to market faster.

So, it’s best to be overt. Be clear on your values and allow them to shape a blended manifesto to create an environment for people to thrive. That people-first approach will in turn lead to customer-first creative output.

Building and rebuilding – The culture continuum

By the very nature that people form a culture, so must that culture be able to evolve with different people in it.

When you’re starting from scratch as a start-up, it’s not only financial decisions that shape your first hires. It’s cultural. They’ll set the tone for the workplace you’re building. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says, “Don’t hire someone to work for you unless you would work for them in an alternative universe”. It’s a great test – would you be comfortable working for this person?

But the other end of the spectrum is trickier. When you inherit a culture where the rot may already have set in.

The thing to do here is to make a commitment. A pledge to the team to reshape it together. And do it fast. Don’t hide downstairs in the canteen and hope it fixes itself. Be authentic and vulnerable. Speak openly about how bad it feels for you and make the commitment to rebuild it together.

Twin-track it – Operations meets culture

My experience is that you can’t have one thing without the other. Meaning, you can roll with the punches and rebuild a culture, but you need to twin-track that with building operations, too.

A happy, connected team won’t be able to thrive in organised chaos. You have to find the same focus and energy to also build your operational backbone.

Get the work planned, organised and flowing through the team. And make data your friend. Lead with a human heart but be steely with team-level KPIs being as important as project-level ones.

If you allocate the right time and resources at a project level, this will allow culture and job satisfaction to shine through. Operations are the oil that keeps the machine moving, but it’s also culture’s best friend.

Can you be too close? – The relationships that matter

It’s easy to discount a great culture as not being hard-nosed and commercial enough. But I disagree.

A strong culture will also allow strong conversations to be had. Masters of Scale (have I mentioned this is a great read) quotes Arianna Huffington’s ‘Compassionate directness’ as being the most important cultural value in her company, Thrive Global. Being able to have difficult conversations at every level.

If there’s psychological safety, then you can have open conversations without blame. You’ll be working with people you trust. Covid forced us all to work harder at building personal relationships at work, not just professional ones. And now with hybrid working, we must strive to keep the personal relationships alive to allow culture to flourish too.

Parting thoughts

Agencies synonymous with success are the ones bold enough to allow their people to lead the charge. The undercurrent of mutual respect and understanding generates a tidal wave of creative ventures that not only meet the market but lead it.

Adopting a people-first culture enhances every facet of agency operations, from preventing burnout to fostering innovative workflow structures. It's the secret ingredient that transforms a group of individuals into a tight-knit empowered team, ready to take on the creative challenges of tomorrow.

Cultivate your agency's culture, and watch as not only your teams but also your creative outputs flourish. Because when we put people first, everyone—and everything—thrives.

I’ll leave you with this powerful insight from the LEGO Group. Their managers have a meeting once a week, not about work, but about how you are. And the first meeting with a new joiner asks if they’re happy. How about that for nailing your culture from day one?

Credits:

Celtra, Creative Operations Europe

Martin Coppola, Lego, Creative Operations Europe

Master of Scale, Reid Hoffman

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