We spoke with Glenn Dady, Chief Executive Officer, and Nikki Wilson, Chief Talent & Culture Officer, at The Richards Group on the all things future of work: respecting everyone's unique challenges, Zoom-free Fridays, and the importance of flexibility and communication.
Over the past year, work environments have had to change drastically. How has your agency taken employee feedback, coupled with what’s appropriate for the company, to create a work plan going forward?
Being a nonprofit-owned, people-run agency doesn’t just mean by the people, it’s also for the people. Their voices are heard and propel us to act on their feedback. We’ve developed several feedback forums, like our weekly coffee chats, internal anonymous reporting site rebuildwithus.com, and regularly scheduled small group meetings. Our employee resource groups (We@TRG) continue to be an integral part of our culture and business, providing great perspective and insights on a multitude of wide-ranging topics. We are thoughtfully taking the time and putting in the work to act on our employee engagement survey to build on our strengths and seize our opportunities for improvement. We’ve implemented a hybrid work model as we look forward to our return to the office in January 2022 (a weeklong celebration is planned – a suggestion from our employees) to provide our team with continued flexibility. And we will keep listening loudly, because it serves as a barometer in our journey to be a more inclusive and innovative creativity collective.
How has the changing work landscape affected the way pitches and campaign briefs are approached and conceptualized?
Surprisingly little, to be honest, beyond the early tech challenges that most agencies faced. Once we ran the traps of Zoom and Webex and Teams and Slack and Discord (I could go on), we found our comfort zone, and it was pretty much business as usual. It’s just that much of that business now takes place at home. And that turned out okay. Given our record tenure, most of our people know each other so well that they can practically already read each other’s minds, so a little extra distance didn’t slow us down. They’re also excellent mentors to our newest staff members and collaborators with each other.
I do miss face time, but…we all have FaceTime.
In what ways has this impacted the work-life balance of your employees, and what steps have been taken to mitigate that?
We must be mindful of all the shifts that have taken place over the last year in the world and with our own teams. Flexibility and communication have been key to making sure we are meeting the needs of the business and employees – a balancing act for sure. We’ve encouraged the use of mental health days, completed a survey and shared resources and tools thanks to our GrouperCares team, and continued to review our staffing allocation to make changes as needed. We’ve also looked at how we are working, by encouraging shorter meetings and Zoom-free Fridays. This is an ongoing challenge, though one we must tackle head-on to be able to do our best work each day.
Given that each work environment can look a bit different, what has helped in creating a cohesive working relationship with clients?
Patience, effort, and lots of respect. When we say a presentation occurs over Zoom, that’s really not the case. It actually takes place in sunrooms. Closets. At kitchen tables. With smart, respected clients but also with their kids, their cats, and sometimes their neighbor’s yard crew. Same for the folks on our side. Respecting all these distractions and challenges – and laughing together about them – goes a long way toward seeing each other as friends and coworkers doing our best in the moment.
We’ve always stayed close with our clients, even in the best of times. We’ve held so many so long that we’re not just partners, we’re actual friends. So, we check in, we laugh, and we blur out the Teams background when there’s actual business to do.
What changes that have been made over the past year do you see sticking around for years to come?
The agency was founded with an entrepreneurial hunger and quest to create game-changing communications for our clients. I don’t see that changing. We’ve revamped our creative brief to curate collaboratively across departments and with our clients. We’re training our teams to be our front-line capability champions as we seek growth opportunities for our clients. We continue to elevate our talent by unlocking their potential with stretch and lead roles, mentoring, and professional development through our very own training institute, Grouper U. And we’ll continue to fuel our teams’ passion projects (like Yo Ayudé, our Hispanic vaccination initiative, developed and led by our employees) to impact the community at large. Our inclusion-first approach and plan via our INSPIRE platform will guide us and help us create the kind of workplace and culture where employees thrive and are proud to be part of for years to come.