Matt’s Story: Moving away from ‘Agencyland’ culture
A post around culture at Platypus Digital. Questions by Janinah Mckenzie. Answers by Matt Collins ~ Managing Director at Platypus Digital
What does culture mean to you? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when those words are mentioned within the context of your team?
To me culture means how we work every day.
In Agencyland, ‘culture’ is often mis-interpreted to mean free beer Fridays and foosball tables. But it’s much less dramatic than that. For us, it’s the behaviours that are expected every day. That’s why we made our values more than just a word — they’re in the imperative, they tell you how you should act. We encourage everyone to keep improving their skills, to make a positive difference…Those are things you do every day. Culture should be the accepted ways of doing things every day.
How has Platypus Digital managed to cultivate that over the years? For example, is it through getting the right hires? Or is it through taking part in team activity e.g away days etc?
Team activities and lunches are great. They give us a chance to interact with each other as people. But culture is around every day, not just those days. We’ve been careful to only hire people we think will add to and complement our culture, that definitely helps. The people we think will do the things we want our team to do every day quite naturally. Half of our interview questions ask candidates to describe times they’ve behaved that way in the past. We also co-created a new set of values. We repeat them in team meetings to make sure they are actually being used, not just aspirational slogans on a wall.
Is there anything you’ve found when it comes to culture in the workplace that you’d like to share with the Agencies for Good community?
The absolute top thing for me is to co-create a set of values. I’ve outlined how we came up with ours in this blog. Culture is what you do every day, and how you do it. Good values are like mini-instructions for how to work every day. So if everyone buys into these, and does them every day, that will create a good culture. We definitely haven’t got it all perfect. There’s lots we’d like to do more of and do better. This one thing is the number one thing for me though.
And one bonus question which isn’t related to culture, but I’m curious…How did the name Platypus Digital come about? Given that it’s such a unique name.
I was in a car with my other half one day and trying to think of a name for the agency I wanted to start. I was saying how most agencies were quite self-aggrandising in their names (Dare, Amaze). I wanted something that was kind of friendly and made you smile, like something animal related/cute. She suggested Platypus — it ticks those boxes, and is an especially unique animal. And 8 years later, that’s still who we are :)
