Gift of the Gabberer: Jasmine Lansdell
Hey, hey!
G: Culture & People Director isn’t a regular job title. Can you give the Gabberish faithful an insight into what it actually means and what’s involved?
My role is to essentially take the business strategy for the agency and convert that into a people strategy.
We are a people based business. We're a service based industry where people deliver results. If you haven't got the right people and you don't keep them motivated, trained and happy, you're not going to get good results.
For instance, when we launched our business philosophy, which is all around making happy humans, I completed a research piece about what makes happier employees. Revealed were all kind of emotional levers. One of the two major levers were trust and autonomy.
When diving deeper, we found that standardised working hours are a major barrier to trust and autonomy. So the first thing we did was introduce flexible working hours.
Since then we've increased engagement. We've increased people's feelings that they have autonomy, which in turn has boosted their trust in our leadership team.
G: Nice one! It’s no wonder The Works are constantly up for culture awards. How has this award winning culture been instilled in the agency?
Good culture starts with great leadership. Then it's about making a really good environment.
We have really honest and open leadership styles, so we're really open with everyone around business decisions and our financial position.
What's going on with clients when things are tough? What does that look like? And getting people involved.
When you have a community of people who work together and know what's going on, they stick together and it feels like a family. When you dictate and you don't have that inclusive culture, it can feel a little bit like, “oh, I'm just being told what to do.”
We are a creative agency, so how can we make this the best kind of creative environment that we can?
We were the first in the industry to introduce a return to work bonus for returning parents as an incentive to come back. They have so much IP and are so valuable to our business.
Recently we launched a program called ‘Works Well’ which is a range of holistic benefits which support wellbeing, things like yoga and meditation. We’ve also worked with workplace psychologist on how we can use our brains better and better understand creativity.
It's about just keeping people motivated, happy and inspired.
G: Award nominations and wins aside, how do you best measure culture?
I think you best measure culture through engagement.
We do a biannual engagement survey that's completely anonymous and that will give you a really good temperature check on how culture is going.
I also think your exit interviews are invaluable. If people leave because they move countries or they want to change industries or they want to set up something themselves because we've given them a passion to be entrepreneurial, then we've done our job. If people leave to go to another agency, we haven't.
G: Do you think there are misconceptions about what good culture is?
For sure. I think a lot of people think culture is having a few drinks on a Friday night and having some nice benefits. Culture is a fundamental pillar of business strategy. And unless you take it seriously, you'll never have good culture.
G: In what ways does bad culture kill creative?
Bad culture can really affect creative capability because of burnout. A lot of advertising people experience burnout because the pressure on them is so monumental that they're just having to deliver and become almost robotic because they don't have that time to collect their creative thoughts again.
Failing to see burnout as a business problem and not allowing people to have time to think back, have their space and collect their thoughts is how you kill creative.
G: A lot of agencies could be doing more to create a better work culture, what’s the best advice you could give?
Understand what your people actually want. Culture is such a buzz topic at the moment so realistically, you could implement a lot of things that people don’t really want. Things that won't make a difference to them or the business.
Have your ear to the ground and understand what impacts and what affects the people that come to work every day and try to think of things that will help them.
G: What about on the other end of the scale, what advice can you give creatives or accounts who aren’t loving their current workplace?
Go somewhere where you can feel a natural sense of alignment. Does your working style work with that business? Because that's what's going to make you enjoy coming to work every single day.
If you feel like it's a complete contrast, it probably isn't going to be enjoyable for you, so go and find an agency that is because all agencies do very similar things and it's culture that sets them apart.
