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 [email protected].
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.
The UK’s creative industries have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, but there are also many examples of innovation and successful pivots.
The sector is vital to the UK economy and as Britain looks to recover, the government has set out its vision in the ‘Build Back Better’ strategy.
But how do the creative industries feature in the plans?
Gail Caig is a freelance consultant currently working as an advisor to the Creative Industries Council. She also joined the Bristol Creative Industries board earlier this year. Speaking to Dan Martin, Gail highlights the key measures for the creative businesses and freelancers in the government’s 2021 Budget and wider recovery plans.
“Many businesses in the creative industries have been incredibly hard hit by COVID-19 but that experience has not been not universal. Elements of the creative industries that depend on footfall and live experience have suffered a great deal, but some parts of the sector, like games companies for example, have been thriving and attracting new audiences.
“We have seen a huge amount of innovation and entrepreneurial activity in the sector. In their response to the difficulties during the pandemic, many organisations have looked at new ways to engage audiences, they have embraced technology like AR and VR and have done their storytelling in a different way. Innovation is a huge positive that has come out of all this but I think it’s less clear how you can viably get ongoing revenue from the new innovation. Venues, theatres etc have been very successful in reaching audiences and finding new ways to share content, but that’s no replacement for a live audience and many of the traditional business models.
“There has been support from the government. The £1.5bn Cultural Recovery Fund was a huge vote of kind of confidence and belief in the sector by the government. It hasn’t been a panacea and it hasn’t protected every element of the sector, but it is a very substantial investment which recognises how important the government sees the UK’s cultural and creative infrastructure.
“On the negative side, the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of freelancers which make up a third of creative industry workers. They can’t access the furlough scheme in most instances, and a big section of freelancers, particularly new entrants to the creative industries, can’t access the Self-employment Income Support Scheme. I think there’s a real concern in the industry that the new generation of talent could be irretrievably lost.
“That has been a real priority for organisations like the Creative Industries Federation. They’ve been lobbying the government about the need to recognise the freelance workforce.”
“In the Budget itself, and a series of documents published alongside it, the government is demonstrating that it recognises the importance of the creative industries and its capacity to bring communities together and regenerate. That’s really good news for the sector because it means that government policy going forward should be shaped in a way that will help and support the creative industries. That’s not a given. It’s a situation that has evolved and developed over the last 20 years when the creative industries were first recognised by the government as a specific, important and valuable sector.
“In the government’s Build Back Better strategy, the creative industries are featured throughout. In his forward, chancellor Rishi Sunak says: ‘We have an international reputation for science and world-class universities. And we have strengths across many sectors, from financial services to creative industries.'”
“The government announced in the Budget a consultation on the definition of R&D tax credits. The creative industries are innovative because they are constantly reinventing their products and services and they do a huge amount of R&D. But because a lot of that R&D doesn’t happen in a traditional industrial way, it’s not recognised as R&D. That has a business level implication because R&D tax credits as they’re currently structured are not accessible to the creative industries. The sector has been lobbying for a long time to get the R&D that happens within the sector recognised. This new consultation references the creative industries which is very positive.”
“The £1.57bn Cultural Recovery Fund has been extended by £300m.
“The government also put in place previously the Film and TV Production Restart Scheme that has supported productions in carrying on despite COVID. The scheme has been extended.”
“There has been an ongoing problem with apprenticeships in the creative industries. The vast majority are micro businesses with a very small number of employees. They don’t have the capacity to take on an individual for a long period of time and provide training. Many are project-based such as TV production companies. When they have big periods of activity they’ve got work to offer but they can’t guarantee 12 months.
“Also for micro businesses, the admin involved in taking people on is a really significant burden. Making apprenticeships work across many tiny businesses is a very different proposition to one big car plant. The apprenticeship scheme was set up with things like a big car plant in mind. However, big employers in the creative industries have been paying the Apprenticeship Levy, but not benefitting from it. That’s been an ongoing challenge for the sector and the Budget recognised that.
“There’s a £7m fund to be introduced from July this year to help employers access the apprenticeship scheme. It will also look at making the apprenticeship system more flexible so that it works better for creative industry businesses. The Budget document that talks about the new fund specifically references the creative industries.
“The government has also launched a consultation on flexi-job apprenticeship schemes which could help the creative industries.”
“The government has committed to setting up its own domestic replacement for when European funding ends in the UK as a result of Brexit. Between the EU funding stopping and the new UK scheme starting, they’ve launched the Community Renewal Fund.
“It’s £220m for programmes for 2021. The bids of up to £500,000 get submitted to the government via a combined authority or a local authority. The deadline for bids to be sent to the government is 18 June.
“There are two kinds of government funding – revenue and capital. Revenue funding can be spent on people, business support programmes, skills development, training, community arts practitioners, events etc. Capital funding is for building things like roundabouts, railways etc.
“For the creative industries seeking support and skills development, revenue funding is very important. There are examples of big cultural infrastructure but generally, that’s much harder for the sector to access. What the sector really needs and wants to access is revenue funding. The Community Renewal Fund is really important for that.”
“This is capital funding. The scheme is for bids of up to £20m and it runs over a series of years. The deadline for funding in 2021 is 18 June.
“It has three priorities – transport, regeneration and cultural investment. That’s really important for the creative industries as it’s a direct name check in a big capital programme. It talks about ‘maintaining, regenerating or creatively repurposing galleries, visitor attractions, heritage assets, as well as creating new community-owned spaces to support the arts and serve as cultural spaces.'”
“Networks and intermediaries are absolutely crucial in the effective running of creative clusters. Creative industries come together and group in clusters because they are a collection of interdependent small organisations that have specialisms. For example, one of the specialisms in Bristol and Bath is television. To make that clustering and networking work effectively, organisations like Bristol Creative Industries are absolutely fundamental. That’s why I wanted to be a BCI board member!”
Top image credit: HM Treasury.
As an agency in the creative industry, we think empowering women is vital. 60% of the agency is female – including many in leadership roles. We’re also tech-savvy. However, there is always room for improvement.
This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is centred around one pledge – and that’s to drive a force for gender equality everywhere. Whether that is to call out gender bias, to take steps to educate yourself on the matter, or to engage in positive conversations that promote change.
We’ve asked everyone in the agency how they ‘choose to challenge’ and here are some of our favourite responses. But first, please take a look at our top tips for deploying diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Diverse teams make better decisions 87% of the time. – Jacqueline de Rojas CBE – President, Tech UK.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘Myself to not use gender-sensitive or gender-defining language, e.g “man up” or “ladylike”‘.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The perception of women on social media & how the plethora of unattainable body shapes & plastic faces are setting the standard for normality for all women’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The gender pay gap’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘As a pair of working mothers to two small children, we champion gender equality every day in little ways. From not being a traditional nuclear family and how our children understand and talk about this, to the mundane household tasks we do – we put out the bins, hang doors, mow the lawn, put oil in the car, build furniture. Most importantly, we are educating our children that men and women can do all jobs…and that boys can wear pink, and wear it well!’
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘Myself I how I lead and create opportunities for other women’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The assumption that women can’t thrive in tech’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘Seeking out more stories (in books, TV and films) centred around women. A lot of the time, media focuses on men’s stories with maybe one or two women in token roles (the mother, the love interest, etc). It’s getting a lot better these days, so it’s easier now to find and consume stories that put women on an equal footing with men – that portray them with as much complexity and interiority as men have been portrayed for hundreds of years’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The inequality of maternity/ paternity rights’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The stereotype that all women are emotional and therefore crazy. The stereotype that women can’t be interested in football or car racing – sports that are deemed to be ‘for boys’. The stereotype that women have to be married at 30 with a baby, or else they’ve failed at their societal function. The stereotype that a woman can’t be a successful leader without being called a ‘career b***h’.
I CHOOSE TO CHALLENGE…
‘The lack of visibility of women in leading creative roles’.
And challenging ourselves doesn’t stop with the actions and thoughts we have. Here are our favourite books for female empowerment!
Little Black Book – Otegha Uwagba
I couldn’t put this book down from start to finish. Namely, because it is so well-written; condensing every skill that women might possibly need in business to 12 mini chapters – but also because Otegha Uwagba is a source of inspiration to all women. Without letting her background, race, or gender, hinder her career ambitions, Uwagba has achieved a degree from Oxford University, a stellar career in advertising and has also gone on to start her own successful business. I’ve learnt so much from one tiny pocketbook and one powerful woman. – Marketing Intern, Ellie Sibley
Girl, Woman, Other- Bernadine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other tells the story of twelve different characters (mostly black British women) across different social classes and generations. No spoiler alerts here, as everyone should read this book, but an interesting reflection was around the experimental and poetic style. The writing flowed with no punctuation at the beginning and end of a sentence with unexpected line breaks; perhaps representative of life – or in rebellion of a predefined, rigid structure. Although at times the style made me work, the narrative shone through. I laughed, I cried and didn’t want it to end. I’ve now lent it to my mum! One of the best books I’ve ever read. – Client Partner, Sally Gillo
Invisible Women- Caroline Criado Perez
In a world where attitudes shift and grow, it’s always good to keep checking your own privilege. As a male reading this, I’ve been astonished at all the unconscious biases women have to deal with in the world. Everything in the world that’s built for the ‘average person’ is really for the ‘average man’ . Things I’d never think about and just take for granted, ie. the air con in an office is set to average male temperature (hence seeing loads of women with blankets and even hot water bottles in offices). I was also struck by the stat that 47% of women are more likely to get seriously injured if in a car accident because it’s been designed for guys. – Digital Project Manager, Tom Barklamb
Outspoken: 50 Speeches by Incredible Women, Deborah Coughlin
This book is about reclaiming space, history, and women’s voices. It’s an anthology reminding us of our shared frustrations, hopes, and dreams…So we can continue to build on women’s ideas to create the inclusive and equal future we all deserve. – Product Manager, Iglika Lax
One part of it that will really stay with me is a quote from Virginia Wolf’s essay “A Room Of One’s Own”:
“She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it – in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.[…] I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.”
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, Florence Given
I’ve laughed with this book, poured over the sassy illustrations and at times exclaimed out loud in agreement. This book is not your typical feminist book, it’s conversational in tone, making relatable and easy pick up and put down and has one simple mission: to challenge outdated narratives supplied to us by the patriarchy. For me, it’s made me ask myself more questions. Everything from what I actually think about shaving my legs to what i want and need to do to protect my own energy and my passions. – Design Director, Jenny Powell
We hope you enjoyed our take on this year’s International Women’s Day theme. How do you choose to challenge? Drop us a line.