Prolonged work stress and burnout are on the rise in employees according to a study conducted last year by Indeed. The findings showed that over half of those that took the study (52%) had experienced burnout in 2021 and that burnout is affecting employees of all ages and types of workers in 2022.
Encouraging and supporting employee wellbeing is becoming more of a concern for management and those in positions of leadership. Having happy and healthy employees is good for productivity, talent retention, and for the long term success of a business- but it’s also a concern on a very human level. For those managing and caring for a team of people, it’s hard to watch anyone struggle.
But how do you ensure that you are making the right steps for employee wellbeing? There are many solutions, but it all depends on the nature of your organisation and the people working within it. Companies such as Bumble and Nike have made headlines by giving their staff a week off to re-energise and others such as Google have wellness programmes that allow staff to spend more time with their families, choose how they best recharge, and allow them to pursue fulfilment outside of the office.
You don’t have to be a massive, global company to implement staff wellness practices. In fact, many small businesses and start-ups that rely on the efforts of a small, dedicated team have found the benefits of having a rewards package that looks after employee mental health.
At Yuup, we offer businesses the opportunity to purchase experience vouchers as rewards for their employees or to book group wellness sessions to refresh and rejuvenate their team. With a diverse range of lifestyle and wellness hosts and experiences on Yuup, we have something to suit and support any team.
One of the biggest issues plaguing the office is the lack of a decent night’s sleep. Irregular sleeping patterns, bad sleep habits, and disrupted sleep can cause fatigue, burnout, stress, and illness.
Working together with our host Giles, you’ll embark on a journey to demystify sleep and discover solutions to this nightly battle. As a coach, mentor, and author of ‘Positive Sleep – A Holistic Approach to Resolve Sleep Issues and Transform Your Life’, Giles has overcome his own obstacles with sleep and insomnia and is prepared to guide you through your own recovery.
After the session you will receive a copy of his book to take home and continue your journey.
We have a number of experiences to enjoy with Breathe Meditation, both for individuals and groups. This experience, in particular, is an excellent idea for team-building with a difference. Instead of after-work drinks or a challenge to get the cogs going, it might make a refreshing change to go for something that boosts everyone’s mood and gives you all time to connect on a deeper level.
Encourage harmony and peace among coworkers with a work lunch like no other.
Clare is an artist currently studying to become an art therapist. With a wealth of knowledge in emotional healing and de-stressing, Clare will guide you and your team through unwinding through both creativity and nature.
Set against the peaceful backdrop of Bridge Farm, their workshops centre around wellbeing and communication and their experience is a great way of creating a safe and open space for colleagues to open up about any internal difficulties they might be experiencing.
We’ve all lost our confidence at one time or another. Self-doubt, low-self esteem, and impostor syndrome can all creep in- especially if we aren’t feeling our best shiny selves. It’s hard to admit if you are lacking or have lost confidence in yourself, and it can seriously affect your performance at work.
Confidence is not all about being good at public speaking or being the loudest voice in the room, it’s about trusting in yourself and your abilities. If you have noticed an employee or colleague that seems to be wavering in their self-belief, offering support in this area could completely change their life and stop them from heading towards burnout or mental distress. Similarly, you might feel that you need to develop your inner cheerleader and would benefit from this one-on-one masterclass in confidence.
Creativity and Community: a Love Story
Calling the laptop cafe junkie, the kitchen table connoisseur and the battle-weary spare room crew. There’s a new way. A way with the flexibility, community and creativity you need at its centre. And the coffee is (probably) way better.
Shared office spaces have been popping up since San Fran paved the way and a generation of freelancers and startups are flourishing. Offices split across cities and a new approach to flexible working from modern start-ups mean that co-working is here to stay.
The benefits of joining a co-working space are as long as your to-do list;
Increased productivity
Spaces designed for your working day and with focus and efficiency in mind. A relaxing, comfortable space to break for a coffee is as important as a heads-down quiet space for deep thinking.
Peers
The inspiration of like-minded souls around you and a friend always on hand to give feedback.
Connections
Co-working spaces can’t promise lifelong friendships, but they do have chats over coffee and someone to share lunchtime with.
A work-life balance to be proud of
You get to go home! A different place to where you work! Such a novelty!
Networking
A whole load of independent, creative businesses looking to work with independent, creative businesses (just like you).
Cost Efficiency
Pay only for the space you need, with the flexibility you need as your business grows into a huge, massive, gigantic billionaire corporation.
Bristol’s favourite co-working space Gather Round know all about the benefits of co-working, and they know exactly what makes the perfect space. The team there couldn’t find what they were looking for so they decided to create their own; a space designed by creatives, for creatives.
After meeting Fiasco Design and Pixelfish at Gather Round and seeing the incredible work they were capable of, working with them on our launch was a natural choice. They helped the vision for Twelve, our sustainability strategy and communications consultancy, become a reality. – Jess Ferrow, Founder of Twelve
Gather Round; Community, Creativity, Collaboration
Bristol is a city long-known for its celebration of creativity. Tastemaking musicians, culture aplenty and a love of art found from the pavements of Clifton to the patched grass of Turbo Island (if you know, you know).
The decision to build a creative business here was a simple one for founders Ben and Jason. After a successful start, their design studio Fiasco Design grew quickly and they found themselves moving studios as they expanded. After struggling to find a workspace that wasn’t a corporate office with extortionate rates and a long term contract, the idea of Gather Round was born.
The Southville residence at the old Cigar Factory proudly hosts creative thinkers and doers that call it home. Morning coffee chats, lunchtime collabs and a deep understanding and respect of one another is something that has happened naturally. They’ve created a space that allows that all to thrive. They’re soon to be heading north of the river to Brunswick Square to hold court for another incredible bunch of creatives.
Why Gather Round?
I met Amelie of Duo Hue when she joined Gather Round. She was looking for some imagery to further her brand, it felt like the perfect collaboration. Sharing a space made the planning and creative process easy and the work we produced featured in national press. – Nic Kane, Photographer/Director
Body
The Gather Round team have a few simple rules; no indoor caravans, tardis-style meeting rooms or beanbags; just beautiful spaces and good design. They’ve got all shapes and sizes covered with roomy co-working areas, permanent desk spaces for freelancers and separate offices for micro-businesses. There are spaces for collaboration, whether you’re musing over an idea, chatting out a project or need a full-blown meeting room to launch your world-takeover plan.
Mind
With Flexi desks, Resi memberships and dedicated studios for small businesses, there are flexible memberships for business needs.
For solo entrepreneurs, micro-businesses or small startups the support of peers is invaluable. Within the community at Gather Round, you’ll find support from like-minded people. Our campfire talks, morning workouts and members breakfasts, fuel the mind and body of all that attend. A day that starts with a croissant amongst friends and ends with a creative discussion on businesses in the climate emergency – is a day well spent.
Soul
Here at Gather Round, they take design seriously. Their buildings are chosen because of their character and soul. You won’t find grey walls, no-spill carpets and budget-friendly lighting. Beauty breeds beauty, and Gather Round have created a space that feels like home. If your home has deep velvet sofas, bespoke shelving and enough plants to start a greenery obsession.
The latest offering in the beautiful Brunswick Square is almost at the ribbon-cutting stage. An almost perfect location with Bristol greats such as Circomedia, Farro Bakery and Yoga on The Square, all just a stone’s throw away. Temple Meads station can be reached in 15 minutes and you can (almost, but not quite) hear the thrum of the city centre close by. They’ve created a slice of creativity in a building steeped in it and it awaits Bristol’s brightest and best.
What’s the one thing Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant have in common?
In short, they’re all female.
At first, this may seem a harmless coincidence, but if we scratch the surface, the domination of the female voice in AI is far more problematic than it may appear.
Today, almost 3 billion people are currently using voice automated software to assist with daily tasks such as setting alarms, checking the weather, or even texting a friend. And the number of people opting to use voice assistants is not expected to decrease.
Yes, we all know this form of AI is beneficial for our ever-evolving digital world, but are these voice assistants causing more harm than we realise?
A greater number of consumers are starting to question the gender bias in voice automation, as they are starting to understand that opting for a female voice can reaffirm the social ideals that women are obedient, should do as they’re told, and most importantly, are here to serve the needs of others.
And because of these observations, many AI creators are now facing criticism for opting for female voices.
With all this in mind, we were intrigued as to why so many companies opt for female voices. Throughout this article, we uncover why there is such a strong gender bias in AI and map out the key steps we can take toward changing this bias.
The lack of male data is the most common reason most programmers opt for female voice when creating voice automated AI, and this is a problem that has been building for some time.
To create voice automation, you need to have a rich set of voice recordings within your text-to-speech system, and most text-to-speech systems have been trained using female recordings. Therefore, it’s much easier and cheaper to create female voice assistants.
So, why do we have so many recordings of female voices available to use?
Up until 1878 telephone operators used to be a solely male-dominated workforce, but they were often heavily criticised for being rude, abrupt, and unhelpful. In response to this Alexander Graham Bell suggested hiring a woman to see if her voice was better received.
Emma Nutt made history and became the first woman to be a telephone operator. Customers responded so well to her voice that she sparked an industry-wide overhaul, and by the end of the 1880s telephone operators were exclusively female.
It’s because of this industry-changing decision we now have hundreds of years of tried-and-tested female audio recordings available to us to create new forms of voice automated AI.
And this leads us on nicely to our next point…
This is probably the most contentious reason why AI programmers opt for female voices – we prefer the sound of female voices.
Many studies have suggested that our preference for the female voice begins when we are in the womb, as these sounds would soothe us even as a fetus.
Another reason why some researchers argue this preference exists is that women tend to articulate vowel sounds more clearly, making female voices easier to hear and understand than male voices.
An example of this can be seen as far back as World War II. Female voice recordings were used in aeroplane cockpits as they were easier to hear over the male pilots.
Up until now, this idea that female voices offer more clarity than a male voices remained unchallenged. Today, many researchers heavily dispute this claim and have found that the many studies that claim female voices are easier to hear when using small speakers or over background noise are simply not true.
There’s even more evidence to show that many people criticise women for their vocal ticks. For example, if you type into Google search “women’s voices are” the top suggested search will finish this sentence with the word “annoying” …
Clearly, AI programmers currently face a difficult challenge when asked to create male voice automation, and Google is a prime example.
Google Assistant was first launched in 2016, and many people were wondering why this AI product was not assigned a gendered name. The reason behind this choice was because Google wanted to launch its new voice assistant with both a male and female voice.
Unfortunately, Google’s text-to-speech system is what ended Google’s desire to launch a virtual assistant with a male and female voice.
Google’s initial text-to-speech system worked by joining segments of audio together from recordings, by using a speech recognition algorithm. It would add markers in different places in sentences to teach the system where certain sounds would begin and end.
As the text-to-speech system was trained using female data, Google Assistant performed better with female voices.
The global engineering manager for text-to-speech at Google, Brant Ward, explained why it was so hard to create a male voice for Google Assistant.
He said that the markers used in their text-to-speech system were not placed accurately for male voice recordings, this meant that it was more challenging to create a male voice assistant of the same quality as the female counterpart.
As it would have taken over a year to create a male voice for Google Assistant, the team at Google decided to run its Google Assistant with only a female voice.
As you can now see, the gender bias in voice automation has become an unshakeable paradigm because of a lack of data and societal acceptance over the preference of the female voice.
When a whole industry is stuck in its ways, even the notion of creating male voice automation can feel like an uphill battle.
It’s time we changed our approach to male voice automation, and there are some simple things we can do as an industry to eliminate the gender bias in voice automation and throughout the AI industry.
1. Inclusivity Is Key
Perhaps it’s obvious to say, but this is an issue that needs to be highlighted. Full stop.
Currently, “women make up an estimated 26% of workers in data and AI roles globally, which drops to only 22% in the UK”. And this percentage drops even further when you look at the number of people in AI who are transgender or non-binary…
It’s disappointing stats like these that show we need to do much more to encourage people of all genders to pursue a career in AI. We want our AI development teams to be more diverse, and this won’t happen if we don’t act.
Once we have a more diverse workforce, we will be able to pinpoint and resolve complex gender issues before and during the production stages of new AI products. Now, in order to attract more diversity, we need to start looking at ways to encourage all genders to follow a career path in AI in higher education.
This can be easily achieved by creating a strong educational foundation, with multiple learning channels available to all students, no matter their gender orientation.
We also need to encourage people of all genders to take an active role in the development of AI course materials. When students see they are being represented in courses they are studying, they are more likely to continue in further education.
2. Develop New Machine Learning Technology
Machine learning technology has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years, and there are now new text-to-speech systems available that create naturalistic male and female voices for AI.
After Google struggled to create a male voice for its virtual assistant, the tech giant joined forces with AI specialists DeepMind to develop a more advanced text-to-speech algorithm that significantly reduced the volume of recordings needed to simulate human voices.
Now known as WaveNet, this algorithm allowed Google to create a more naturalistic voice for all genders, which were then added to Google Assistant in 2017.
Today, America’s version of Google Assistant comes programmed with 11 different voices, and new users are assigned one of two basic voices – one male and one female – at random.
3. Industry-Wide AI Standards Need to Be Made
The domination of AI is not expected to slow down any time soon. In fact, the global market value of AI is expected to reach $267 billion by 2027!
When you think about how AI is becoming an integral part of our society in one way or another, it is shocking to think that there are still no standards in place concerning the humanization of AI.
To this day, most tech companies develop virtual automated systems with a female voice, and this can still enforce the stereotype that women are “assistants”. In order to combat this, we need to have AI standards in place to ensure our products are far more inclusive.
To create these industry-wide standards we must include people of different genders, sexual orientations, races, and ethnicities in the decision-making stages.
With a more diverse group of individuals, we can work together to define what “female,” “male,” “gender-neutral” and “non-binary” human voices sound like and when it’s appropriate to use such voices.
These industry standards should also include a basic set of protocols. Companies would then need to adhere to these rules when creating text-to-speech algorithms to ensure AI products are unbiased and sensitive to potentially harmful gender stereotypes.
It looks like voice assistants will be a part of our lives for the foreseeable future, and because of this, we need to address the gender bias surrounding this type of AI technology now.
Just by opening a discussion about gender representation in voice automation, we can actively begin to create a future of AI that’s more inclusive for all.
Liana Dinghile, Partner at Tonic Creative Business Partners, discusses flexibility – is it a good or a bad thing for the future of work?
Most agencies are already embracing a more flexible approach to work and an overwhelming majority of employees would like to see this continue. But as so-called Freedom Day approaches and businesses get to grips with what the future might really look like, it’s worth considering where being less flexible can increase your chances of success.
Counter-intuitive maybe. But some things will need to be inflexible and non-negotiable for a more flexible future to succeed. Let’s explore.
The conundrum
On one hand, remote working has changed the game that needed changing. It’s levelled the playing field by creating access and inclusion for diverse talent and given people the opportunity to better balance their lives. Productivity has increased and priorities have been sharpened. But on the other hand, many argue that creativity, culture and learning have been compromised as a result. The double-edged sword now forcing a hybrid work revolution.
Every business is finding its way through this revolution. Some are leading with new ideas and bold policies they hope will work – from four-day weeks to mandated days and localised work hubs. Others are following and failing to master the transition – criticised for uninspiring or restrictive policies or not properly explaining or setting clear boundaries for people to get creative with.
In all cases, however you move forward, it mustn’t come at the expense of employee trust or compromise the strength of your culture. These two factors are still an agency’s best advantage when looking to win the big briefs and the battle for talent.
The non-negotiables
With boundaries, people are more likely to experiment and make good judgements. When supported, people are more likely to support others and act beyond their own interests. All basic principles, but never more fundamental and at the centre of a new cultural contract that’s separating the best from the average in business and society.
#1 A solid values system. Having a strong belief system at the heart of every action you take, evident in every leadership decision and willingly embraced by every member of your team. Non-negotiable.
#2 A minimum standard of work. Setting parameters for what great looks like for the work. Wherever and however work gets done, having a standard that is universally understood, championed and honoured. Non-negotiable.
#3 Empowered teams and managers. Setting clear objectives at a team and project level to set the boundaries for autonomous action in the interests of the clients they are closer to. Support leaders to manage the complexity and be the simplifiers and role models their teams need. Non-negotiable.
#4 A well-harnessed culture. Creating a culture of wellbeing and psychological safety for people to openly share their needs, concerns and successes as they find their way through a different time. Non-negotiable.
Structured flexibility
With the non-negotiables in place, you’ll have the confidence to find the flexibility level that’s right for you. Here’s three new ERA principles to help get the balance right:
Continue the EXPERIMENT
– Draw on learnings from the last 18 months of experimentation. Ruthlessly reappraise the core work of the agency and what it takes to do it really well. Where has remote working accelerated or challenged your capacity to deliver to this standard?
– It will take time to fine-tune and adapt a future work policy. So be upfront with your teams that this is an experiment and be clear about where you need their help to stress test.
– Whilst its unhelpful to follow blindly because ‘Apple or Twitter tried it’, there’s a lot of experience out there to learn from that may give the benchmarks you need to explain the benefits of your strategy.
Be RUTHLESSLY focused
– Seriously ask and challenge what an existing office or potential workspace is for. Architects are experimenting with different models from ‘plazas’ to ‘neighbourhoods’. Co-working spaces are seeing a revival and hotels are reinventing themselves as work hubs with benefits. Lots of possibilities, but what will your ‘workspace’ be for – learning, collaboration, contemplation? Be ruthless about whether it measures up.
– Genuinely ask your teams how ready and confident they are to change. Be clear about what their needs really are rather than be forced to change things to retain them later down the line. Create space for people to share concerns about work, welfare or location. What you learn will be the underlying data needed to design a truly equitable workplace culture.
ACT and ADAPT
– Create the blueprint for your fully remote or hybrid future and draw from your research to demonstrate how it’s designed to the specific dynamics and workflows of your agency and teams. Put into practice as an experiment and be upfront and clear on how, and how often, you’ll measure success.
– Be ‘all-in’ from the start. Draw on your belief system and rally everyone around the experiment. Recruit their support and feedback to know what’s working and will be right long term. And don’t forget to role-model the changes you want to see in your teams.
Winning agencies will attract and retain a diverse mix of talent based on the strength of culture and thoughtful design of their workplace strategy. They will exceed expectations for productivity and creativity by harnessing the strengths of their teams. And they’ll do so not because of where they come together but how they make it count. Here we see the rise of the interdependent agency – mastering the non-negotiable bonds in order to realise the true power of flexibility.
First appeared in Creative Brief BITE on 15 July 2021.
This week sees the end of the Government’s ‘work from home’ mandate in England which has been in place since the start of the pandemic. We know anecdotally that many businesses within the region’s creative industries have taken this opportunity to review their flexible working policies and we’re keen to understand what the future looks like for the South West’s creative community.
We’ve pulled together a handful of questions that will give us a top-line view of the new normal. We’ll be more than happy to share the findings with BCI members who may like some guidance on shaping their future flexible working policies. Share your thoughts here.
Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash
Agency culture is something that is typically easy to manage and foster within a small, start-up organisation. When your team is small, you’re able to communicate your values and ethos more easily and directly encourage your employees to embody the right behaviour for your agency.
This becomes more challenging as your agency grows and your teams grow and disperse between line managers and agency pods.
At Digital Agency Coach, we’ve helped over 200 growing digital agencies overcome their company culture nightmares — and in this article, we’re going to tell you exactly how we do it.
First thing’s first — it’s important to note that a good agency culture is not about ping-pong tables and fresh fruit deliveries. A good agency culture is about the values and behaviour of the individuals within your team.
How your team behaves and interacts with one another, is dictated by the overarching company culture — and as the agency leader, this has to start with you.
As the captain of the ship — the behaviour of your agency and your people begins with you. With this in mind, the first step to creating a great agency culture is to embody this within yourself first.
Once you become the agency culture example, demanding and expecting this from your team becomes much easier.
An agency’s behaviour is defined by its values. It doesn’t matter what those values are, as long as you and your team can honour them and they’re the right characteristics for your agency’s purpose.
Some agencies are driven by philanthropic, social or environmental values, while others are heavily sales-driven and are motivated by competition and commercial values. These are two very different examples of strong values, both of which are equally as valuable when it comes to creating the right culture for your agency.
To define your values, think about the overarching direction of your agency (as above) and consider what your ideal employee or manager looks like.
We advocate thinking about those standout individuals in your current team or people you have previously worked for or with, and pluck out the key attributes that made them great. Use these to build a base of 7–10 core values and let these dictate the behaviour and culture of your digital agency.
Poor-fitting employees will impact the productivity and morale of people around them. Addressing any ‘bad apples’ within your team is key to improving your agency’s culture.
At Digital Agency Coach, we advocate using a ‘Cultural-Fit First’ approach within your recruitment process. Prioritise the cultural fit and core-values screening early on in your recruitment process, and if a candidate doesn’t fit the bill, don’t continue with the hiring process.
Building the right team, with the right values, from the very beginning is the easiest way to foster a sustainable, scalable agency culture.
With that being said, it’s never too late to address the values and culture within your existing team.
One of the key Coaching & Mentoring exercises we work with agency owners on is analysing the culture and values within your current team. This exercise helps to Identify any ‘bad apples’ that could be impacting the morale, productivity and ultimately, the performance of your agency.
To do this, we use an Entrepreneur Operating System tool called The People Analyser.
This is a simple template you can create yourself within a Google sheet or Excel workbook. Start by listing your 7–10 values along the top and a list of all your employees down the left-hand side. The trick is to make sure you set ‘The Bar’ as the minimum standard of what you require from an employee.
Once you have this set up, measure each individual against your values and determine whether this is something they Always, Sometimes or Never demonstrate. Once complete, you’ll have created a visual representation of employees who are a good cultural fit and those who aren’t.
Implementing these five steps will guarantee positive changes to your agency’s culture and ensure that you are able to scale your business and grow your team with the right people.
As always, if you have any questions about fostering a great agency culture or would like some help using The People Analyser tool, please Get In Touch with the team at Digital Agency Coach, we’d be more than happy to help.
We all know how important it is to encourage equality through our culture in the workplace. But it’s no secret that women are underrepresented in senior leadership positions.
It’s everyone’s shared responsibility to become not only advocates, but champions of women from diverse backgrounds within their organisations – and in their lives at large. And in the creative sector, if we want to truly do our part to help women stake their claim, it means businesses taking ownership of their own equality scores in a number of ways – not least, by appointing women to the senior leadership positions we need them to be in.
At Proctor + Stevenson, we’re one of the UK’s longest-established independent marketing agencies. Despite this, we’ve never been conformists, and we’re a good step ahead of your traditional London-based agency in more ways than one.
Our Founder and Chairman, Roger Proctor, has always been an outspoken industry figure. He’s championed diverse young creative talent from the South West of England and Wales – an often neglected region for the arts – throughout his career.
Back in 1979, he laid in our bold and independent foundations in Bristol. And the rest is history. We’ve been challenging inequities and hiring diverse talent ever since – such as through hosting the South West Design + Digital Student Awards (which saw a particularly high volume of entries from young female designers this year).
In short, the talent is there. So what changes are being made?
At the start of 2021, Roger and the senior team restructured Proctor + Stevenson by splitting the larger brand into three companies: P+S Creative, P+S Technology and P+S Strategy, all overseen by the P+S Group (you can read more about these changes here). And this change marked a new milestone for the P+S team.
Our restructuring was the perfect opportunity to progress our own equality targets across the team at Proctors. It was at this point in our journey that we ensured the P+S Group met a target of 50/50 male-to-female directorship.
So, without further ado, meet our board…
· Joy Locke is our Company Secretary. She applies her 20+ years’ experience with us to take lead of everything operations, finance, accounts, and administration. She ensures that we were keeping on track with budgets.
· Ailsa Billington is one of our Directors. She leads our client services operations and takes charge of directing major global campaigns for our multinational portfolio of clients. She directs over all teams in the P+S Group to make sure that we deliver the best campaigns to transform our clients’ businesses for the better.
· Nikki Hunt is our Financial Director. CIMA-qualified, Nikki brings a wealth of experience in management accountancy, HR, payroll, and health and safety to our business, keeping us running efficiently and safely.
· Roger Proctor is our Chairman. He founded P+S in 1979 and has continued to lead its transformation ever since. Under his leadership, the business has grown from 2 people to more than 70, plus a network of freelance talent, and has won a global portfolio of clients such as Panasonic, National Grid, Saudi Arabian Airlines, and much more. He is passionate about the power of creativity to make positive change and is also heavily involved in strengthening the links between the creative industries and education.
· Mark Jamieson is another of our Directors. He helped establish our presence in the Middle East and is an expert in developing, building, and maintaining positive client relationships in across all sectors.
· Steve King is the final member of our current team of Directors. He leads our large-scale digital projects on everything concept creation, development, and project delivery. He’s worked on many innovative and world-first technology projects.
At Proctors, we’ve always taken equality and diversity extremely seriously. Because when we celebrate and empower women in business, it benefits everyone.
We strive to nurture careers amongst our female talent, building them up into more senior roles within our business. And we want to continue to progress further. We’re currently building a broader, transparent picture of our teams, our diversity, and our biases to discover how we can do better.
There’s lots more to be done to help narrow the gap between women in leadership across the UK. It’s a fact that only 5.6% of women in the UK run their own business and women only account for 33.8% of positions as directors on business boards in the UK, with only 16% of creative directors reported to be female.
We’ve just launched the first instalment of our Women in Business interview series. In it, our own Marketing Manager, Becca Peppiatt, sits down with Peaches Golding OBE CsJT, Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of the County and City of Bristol. This interview, like the rest of the series, delivers insight into the female perspective of working in business, so aspiring young women can see themselves represented in leadership roles. Stay tuned for more instalments of the series, coming soon.
We can all do our part to progress the important conversations which need to be had about an industry that is in many ways stuck in the past, ignoring some of its blatant inconsistencies. There’s lots more to be done and we intend to continue to work hard to narrow some of the gaps that exist. We need to think intersectionally about how we hire, and how we can create healthy, fair environments for women to succeed in.
For more information about Proctor + Stevenson, or to discuss our services or teams in more detail, please email us.
Is your digital marketing agency profitable on purpose, or by accident? At Digital Agency Coach we’ve worked with hundreds of agency owners over the years, some of whom were unaware of their profitability stats.
Many agencies end up being profitable by accident, as a positive consequence of the year’s work. In this article, we share our insights on turning an intentional and deliberate profit.
As a busy agency owner, it can be easy to prioritise managing the day-to-day operations and allowing your profitability to become an afterthought. With this mindset, it’s difficult for you as an owner, to have that profit-oriented, strategic mindset that is key to growing your agency.
At Digital Agency Coach, we always recommend approaching profitability with intention and purpose. This approach can feel foreign and a little acquisitive at first, but it’s important to remind yourself that it’s completely genuine and moral to design your business in such a way that it earns you money.
Having a profit-driven mindset enables you to reinvest into your business, enhance the quality of your service and grow your agency.
When it comes to an agency’s profitability, there are typically three different degrees of intent and three defined profit groups as an outcome.
Agencies who generate anywhere from 0–12%* profit are generally doing so by accident. These agencies usually no profit strategy in place and the year-end results are unpredictable and often speak for themselves.
Those digital agencies turning anywhere between 13–22%* profit, are almost always doing it on purpose. The closer the number lies to 22%, the more deliberate and considered the profit is. The lower the number, the less intentional their outcomes have been.
And as for those generating a profit percentage anywhere north of 22%*, we classify those guys as purposeful, profit machines. These digital agencies know their services, their clients, their team, and their business like the back of their hand. Their sales pipeline and financial systems are geared toward driving high volume, quality leads which convert.
*These figures are general only, actual profit margins will depend on the agency size. Large organisations with substantial overheads typically will have tighter margins.
Address these six top-line areas and improve your agency’s profitability today.
Take a close look at your gross margins. If they’re outside the range of 50–60%, unfortunately, you’re not profitable enough. Your gross margins are calculated by taking the overall revenue of your agency, less the sum of those direct salaries and/or contractor and freelance fees required to deliver your particular service.
As a service-based business, your agency sells time — utilisation looks at how many billable hours you have available to your clients. If you are operating at less than 72% capacity, there is scope to improve your profitability by maximising your utilisation.
These can be either your employees or clients. If you attract and retain poor performers, this will lead to inefficiency and low profits within your agency. It might be that you need to address some of those long-standing, legacy clients from your start-up days, or certain team members who are less efficient than others. The solution? Try raising your fees or developing the skills and/or expertise of your employees.
Usually, those agencies who fall into the 0–12% profitability category, have no insight or oversight on their financial or sales reports and forecasts. Having a robust sales pipeline and reporting structure in place will allow you to understand when, where and how you can maximise your revenue and minimise your expenses — which we know will lead to a direct increase in your profitability.
For digital marketing agencies within the UK, it’s recommended you charge £90 per hour as an absolute minimum for your services. At Digital Agency Coach, we advocate charging anywhere between £100 — £150 an hour and ensuring you bill all for those all hours at your full rate in order to maximise your profitability.
Is the service you provide right for the current market? This is a big question for web design agencies who are competing against the likes of Wix and Squarespace. These ‘done-for-you’ website builders have significantly devalued the product to where it’s now within the reach of many small businesses and small budgets. As a specialist agency with a highly skilled team, you need to be bold and honest with yourself and ask if there is a future within your market. If the answer is no —you have to innovate and change with the times.
Remember, it’s perfectly moral and genuine to gear your agency to become a profitable, money-making business. As a business owner, you are doing your customers, employees, and your market a disservice if you are unable to reinvest your profits back into your industry.
Ready to begin? Start by asking determining which of the three levels of profit and intention describes your agency. If you’re turning a profit anywhere south of 20%, it’s time to change your mindset and address these six ways to increase your profitability.
Watch Our Free Video Class: Profit On Purpose (7min) & kickstart your journey toward profitability
Of course, if you have any questions or would like to chat with one of our Digital Agency Coach Consultants, please Get In Touch — they’d love to help.
At Proctors, our people make us who we are. Bold. Brave. Imaginative. Resilient. But resilience doesn’t mean things are always easy.
It’s truly taken a village to see us through the last 12 months. And this article explains more about how our team spirit and collaborative culture have helped us to balance the books throughout these difficult times – and flourish, rather than just float.
When COVID first hit in the beginning of 2020, the consensus was this epidemic would be around for three months in the UK, and we should start to see signs of economic recovery beginning in July 2020. (No comment!)
At the time, we’d just finalised our financial forecasts for the year ending March 2021, but it was clear we needed to review these figures.
After revisiting our forecasts, we worked on a realistic model which would see a dip of around 30% in the company’s income for the first quarter of 2020, before gradually returning to 100% by the summer. We then expected we’d see an uptick in work – to around 130% by the end of the year – as clients rushed to spend already -approved budgets.
Despite knowing now that the information on the pandemic’s duration proved to be inaccurate, this approach placed us in excellent stead.
Our biggest challenge was managing cashflow. With fee income dropping, we still had to cover our business costs. It became crucial to cut costs wherever we could – and quickly.
We reviewed our overheads, and any payments deemed non-essential were stopped or placed on hold. The government also launched an initiative called the CBIL Scheme, and allowed us to defer our PAYE and VAT payments, helping us manage cashflow.
We also made the decision to place any money received from loans or PAYE and TAX deferments into a savings account. As we knew the funds were always going to have to be repaid in March 2021, we decided to only use them if we had to.
Employee utilisation is something we’ve always used to measure productivity across the business at Proctors. It describes how much time any staff member is spending on achieving paid work each month.
During the pandemic, we were able to use our employee utilisation data to forecast upcoming work, and quickly identify the staff members who would be under-utilised over the coming weeks and months, and the skillsets where there wouldn’t be a lot of work coming in from our clients. We could then place those affected employees on furlough, whilst ensuring all other staff had high utilisation levels, reducing our costs while keeping our clients happy.
Over the last few years, we’ve introduced a number of KPIs to ensure we’re always performing efficiently, aiming to be within the top 10% of agencies of our size, financially. This has given us a strong financial foundation, allowing us to continue to support our clients who were also struggling though uncertainty.
Our relationships
Externally, we’ve been part of a working group of Financial Directors within creative agencies for the last four years. Pre-COVID we would meet quarterly, discussing all things financial and operational as well as sharing ideas, best practice tips, and KPIs.
At the beginning of the pandemic we met via Zoom, and as usual shared our latest updates – only this time, we discussed how to approach the upcoming challenges which would affect all of us.
Many agencies cut back on their non-fee earning staff, including new business and marketing. But our own stance differed: as long as we weren’t at a net loss, we would continue to look for new clients and deliver new initiatives to our existing ones.
We kept our new business and marketing team together, giving them the creative and technology staff needed to work on pitches and ideas – and for us, it paid off, resulting in new clients and new business.
Despite a number of businesses in the aforementioned Financial Directors group making different decisions based on what might work best for them, being part of a community that shares knowledge, resources and support has been invaluable.
Those invaluable relationships have extended to our clients too. Like many other businesses, we’ve been there for our clients – and vice versa – during an incredibly testing year. In most cases, we’ve gotten to know each other even better, and have built even stronger business and personal relationships with many of them.
A challenging time for the world, for our business, and for our people. It was so important to us to ensure our employees felt valued, informed – and were able to have just a little fun wherever possible.
Over the last year we’ve introduced a number of new staff initiatives, including our Quarantine Quiz. We originally introduced the quiz to raise money for the Quartet Community Foundation, donating to their Coronavirus 2020 Response Fund, as well as to boost our teams’ morale while we’ve all been forced to work remotely.
And unlike many of the Zoom quizzes we might have held in our personal lives, to this day The Proctors Quarantine Quiz lives on! The format has now evolved slightly, with different staff members hosting each Wednesday, and one lucky winner claiming a £50 Amazon voucher in a nice little midweek boost.
We’ve been rewarding staff for more than just their general knowledge, too. 2021 has seen the return of our famous Proscars awards. The Proscars are our quarterly awards by employees, for employees, with every staff member able to vote for three colleagues they believe should be rewarded for their hard work. Our three winners then get to choose a prize – either £250 in cash or £400 in vouchers.
To get us all moving, we’ve been further breaking up the working week with weekly lunchtime fitness and yoga sessions, hosted by a personal trainer online. And if you’d rather gin than gym, on Fridays our weekly virtual social kicks off at 5pm – although, it’s strictly BYOB!
If all that wasn’t enough, each Friday afternoon our Chairman, Roger Proctor, sends out his weekly ‘Good News’ email. Just as it sounds, it’s a cross-department weekly catch up about all things good – inside and out of work – and an informal welcome to the weekend.
As well as looking after our finances, it was also critical our staff had access to the support they needed to look after their personal wellbeing.
We engaged a psychotherapist and Mental Health Consultant to run a series of wellbeing workshops and Q+A sessions with all Proctors employees. This was followed up with a further series of workshops with our managers, providing them with additional tools to guide and support their team, as well as handouts on working from home, managing stress and more.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve continued to promote our Employee Assistance Programme, offering 24/7 GP, legal and financial helplines, with options for counselling and psychiatric therapy available through our private medical insurance.
We also felt it was important to offer extra help to those who might be struggling with the pressures of family life in lockdown. Therefore, we sought to share helpful guidance and tips to P+S parents for effective home school and balancing with work as well as providing additional flexibility for maintaining work balance and wellbeing during additional childcare and home schooling. We even set up regional and international remote working agreements for those who benefited from being with their family outside of Bristol.
Christmas looked different in 2020, but we still managed to celebrate in style. In lieu of our traditional knees-up, we sent a hamper brimming local treats and bubbles from The Mall Deli in Clifton to each of our staff. But it was also important for us to give back too.
We joined forces with Caring in Bristol to donate a video in aid of homelessness in our city, helping to raise over £20,000. And we’ve kicked off the new year in a similar way by sponsoring Lebeq Ladies – a local women’s football team, in our community of Easton, Bristol.
Our future
None of the positive action we’ve taken should be viewed as temporary.
We intend to continue treating Wellbeing as a priority across the Group, and are continuing with initiatives in this area, such as with Mental Health First Aid training for select staff in June.
Above all, our people will continue to steer our direction moving forward: whether that’s via team surveys, policy and process updates or with lots of creative ideas. Because this has been one of the hardest times in recent memory to manage and market a business. And tough times lie ahead. But with a strong foundation, and an overwhelming commitment to your original values, it is possible to stay above water – even in the most testing of times.
If you’d like to talk to a truly ‘people first’ agency, we’re herewith a listening ear. So talk to us, at marketing@proctors.co.uk.
At Adapt, Covid-19 has provided us with plenty of positive insights. One key change we are focusing on is how we view our engagement with our offices and physical spaces.
As we come out of lockdown, we are fully embracing what we have learned these past 12 months across our 2,000+ global Welocalize workforce and we refuse to revert to how it was before.
We know we can do a whole lot more, and by that, we mean we will be more forward-thinking, more innovative, more flexible and more people-focused.
We will stick to our word and provide a better environment for our team. We want to focus on providing people with a sustainable work/life balance, as well as a more enjoyable future work environment.
We have one underlying principle: to encourage people to take ownership of their own time and how they choose to engage with our physical spaces when our teams are safe to return. In short, we want to ensure people are given the trust and therefore flexibility to work in a way they feel most productive.
Our working habits have changed. This pandemic has accelerated some principles for work that may have arrived in the future, but we are very lucky to be able to embrace these in 2021 – far earlier than we would have been able to over the next decade without Covid-19.
We have very clear, tangible data across our global workforce that shows we simply do not need to gather everyone that works for a business in the same four walls every day to deliver for our clients, be productive and work well together. And our results prove quite the opposite – some of these trends have improved in the last year.
Over the last 12+ months, our teams in the UK and globally at Welocalize have proven that we can deliver amazing results and work for clients regardless of location.
We have plans to grow our footprint internationally and already have major international hubs in Barcelona, Beijing, London, NYC and Portland.
On top of that, we have shared spaces all over the world for our teams to gather, meet clients and build face-to-face connections.
Embracing a more dynamic way of working, less focused on specific locations and more focused on how we best serve our teams and clients will make us a far stronger business in the future and better able to serve our clients.
We have learned to embrace this far better than we could before the pandemic. And it is now time to take those findings into the future and shape our culture.
First and foremost, we want to facilitate our teams spending time together should they choose to, and we will do this by providing inspiring collaborative spaces around the world at Welocalize for people to gather on their own terms, with colleagues and clients.
Where we have clusters of employees and clients, we will invest in collaborative spaces for people to use to their own benefit and to fuel their own productivity.
As a result, we are opening a new collaborative space in Bristol city centre.
This new space, ready to use when it is safe to do so, will give us a great opportunity to stay true to our new direction… to better support our team and clients where we have a strong presence.
We could not be more excited to have a Bristol base to socialize and build stronger rapports and support the networking and growth of our team relationships.
Do you like our new approach to working? Do you want to work for a business that trusts you and gives you this kind of flexibility and has an international outlook?
We have many current roles open across our business! Click here for Adapt and Welocalize careers.
You need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationNotifications