Working Well: Holly Willis Of Magic Camp On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness

An Interview with Karen Mangia

Unique team structures for each client and project to leverage individual strengths and still give room for growth opportunities.

The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Holly Willis.

Holly Willis is the Founder and CEO of a new marketing consultancy and advertising agency, Magic Camp. Prior to founding Magic Camp, Willis served as Head of Accounts at The Escape Pod, and Managing Director at FCB, along with a tenure at 360i (now Dentsu Creative) and 21st Century Fox. She has worked on a range of clients including fortune 50 companies to independently owned brands and startups.

Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you better. Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.

In March of 2023, I was burnt out, overwhelmed and had stopped learning. I quit my job and went to Mexico to celebrate my friend’s wedding. It was also the first vacation of my adult life that I didn’t work — not one single email. On that trip I realized just how much I had sacrificed for my career, and to achieve financial stability and security.

At times advertising can be the best job in the world! At other times, it can be brutal. Long days, tons of not-sexy travel, bad pay for a long time, and the need for super thick skin. And it usually incentivizes toughness and endurance over creativity and collaboration. We’re now only seeing the beginning of a big shift in the agency model. It’s led to tons of layoffs, unfair advantages, and a lot of people who are unhappy all the time. And tension-filled relationships with clients, that no one talks about but everyone knows exists.

I’m a dreamer by nature. And my dream was to create an agency that people loved to work for and with, doesn’t sacrifice the quality of work, or the relationships with its clients, and everyone gets to keep learning and growing. So, I spent the ten months before we launched the agency in my “quiet era”: listening, lots of honest self-reflection (especially on how I benefited from/contributed to the model), therapy, meditation, and tons and tons of research. I came out on the other side with a pretty bleak overview of the advertising landscape, but with a lot of potential solutions that look at the systemic root of the issues. I also came out the other side a completely different person. My values are stronger, I’m healthier and far happier.

Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?

We recognize that there are so many factors that go into an individual’s overall wellness, many of which are out of the control of an employer. Though, creating an emotionally and psychologically safe environment is critical to encouraging overall wellness. And we think there is a responsibility to create financial safety and security for our employees and partners, to the best of our ability.

We like to look at our operational structure through the lens of Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs. What any advertising agency ultimately delivers is creativity — the very top of the Needs pyramid. While some folks gravitate naturally more toward creative endeavors, and can remain creative under pressure or duress, I’ve still never met anyone that consistently delivers great creative thinking and positive impact to their team, when in burnout. So, we looked at what impact and structures we could create to support each rung of the pyramid along the way and designed our operational structures, hiring practices, and employee benefits around that. We are structured very differently than your typical agency, and have made a lot of both small and large operational changes to keep our employees fulfilled while still delivering excellent work for our clients.

Based on your experience or research, how do you correlate and quantify the impact of a well workforce on your organization’s productivity and profitability?

We approached this very similarly to how we measure success for our clients — through a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative data. The advertising industry has one of the highest turnover rates in business, which makes it increasingly difficult for agencies to stay profitable (and financial security is essential to the two base rungs of the Needs pyramid). So, we look at our company’s financial health and employee retention as an essential part of delivering security to our teams and our clients. When folks are burnt out, feel undervalued, or overworked, trust immediately starts to erode, and productivity and success go way down. We then look at specific KPIs that correlate to each rung of the Needs pyramid to make sure that we’re delivering operational infrastructures that give our teams the best chance of success.

Even though most leaders have good intentions when it comes to employee wellness, programs that require funding are beholden to business cases like any other initiative. The World Health Organization estimates for every $1 invested into treatment for common mental health disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. That sounds like a great ROI. And, yet many employers struggle to fund wellness programs that seem to come “at the cost of the business.” What advice do you have to offer to other organizations and leaders who feel stuck between intention and impact?

Start with questions — “why does this matter to our organization?”, “what are the root/systemic causes driving the results of our topline KPIs?”, “if we don’t make changes, what impact will this have on our business long-term?”, “if we do make changes, what impact will this have on our business immediately?”. Humans are complex, and the systems that we create are complex. Sometimes, a subtle change moves the entire system, and other times you need more radical shifts. So, it’s really important to look at both the short and long term needs of your business. This helps you look at the systemic catalysts driving growth or causing churn.

Next, make sure that your leadership team is wholly on board with any shifts or investments needed. Change, even good change, is really emotionally taxing, and any operational investment will take time to deliver tangible results. Leaders all need to be able to keep the company prioritized on your “why’s” so that you can weather the discomfort or tumult that happens during times of change.

Finally, recognize that not everyone will be happy you made changes and be okay with that.

Speaking of money matters, a recent Gallup study reveals employees of all generations rank well-being as one of their top three employer search criteria. How are you incorporating wellness programs into your talent recruitment and hiring processes?

Transparency and clear communication. We have high expectations and big goals, which we recognize isn’t attractive to all potential employees. But we also have been very clear that we are in a business centered around people. And humanity comes first, always. The biggest friction points for any new employee are often when their expectations don’t match their realities. So trust is our internal currency.

We prioritize onboarding. It’s important that new employees know the important components of our business before they start working: our core values, what success looks like, how we make money, our core processes, etc. Similarly, the agency prioritizes onboarding before starting work for a new client. We need to know the core components of our client’s business before we suggest ways to improve it.

Next, we set clear and realistic expectations. Every employee develops 6 month roadmaps that map out their growth goals. There are clear and measurable milestones attached to these goals, and any roadblocks are identified so individuals aren’t penalized for variables outside of their control. Similarly, before beginning work with a new client, we set up two types of scorecards: 1) the traditional KPIs that align our deliverables against core business goals and success metrics and 2) relationship scorecards that lay out ways of working, communication expectations and have KPIs that measure against trust, joy, and productivity. The agency is clear on what we can and can’t deliver, with excellence, and don’t overpromise. And then we meet frequently to calibrate and reflect.

This level of transparency is very infrequent in our business. We’ve found that alone has created a huge pipeline of folks wanting to work with us.

We’ve all heard of the four-day work week, unlimited PTO, mental health days, and on-demand mental health services. What innovative new programs and pilots are you launching to address employee wellness? And, what are you discovering? We would benefit from an example in each of these areas.

• Mental Wellness:
• Emotional Wellness:
• Social Wellness:
• Physical Wellness:
• Financial Wellness:

We’re very clear on the expectations of our work — to deliver excellence for our clients. But that doesn’t mean you have to be working at 100% all of the time. In fact, that’s really detrimental to your ability to deliver greatness consistently. You don’t see elite athletes playing at 100% every hour of the day. That’s because they look at recovery and taking care of their mental wellbeing and resilience as an essential part of their training routines.

The biggest “ah-ha” we found is that there is a real superpower in the discipline of rest. Not just physical rest, but also mental, emotional, and creative rest. And when you’re overworked or depleted in one area, it often greatly impacts another area. Most companies don’t want to overwork their teams. But the tension comes from the need that the company still has to deliver consistently. So we designed a unique operational structure to make sure that happens, and still allows individuals to consistently prioritize various forms of rest. Many of these practices overlap across areas of wellness:

• Unique team structures for each client and project to leverage individual strengths and still give room for growth opportunities.
• Leverage technology and AI to execute mundane tasks.
• We work in sprints and have a “work from where you work best” policy.
• Have adopted a 4 day work week.
• Created a sabbatical program.
• Build raises and promotions into our P&L vs. only accounting for attrition and the necessary recruitment costs associated with heavy turnover.

If we assume the best of our team, set up infrastructures for them to succeed, and create realistic and honest development roadmaps, they will work with less fear, lift eachother up, and ultimately deliver better results. The biggest distractions at work are not from technology, they’re emotional. So, if we get to the root of what’s causing emotional distractions and try to fix those, we’re already leaps ahead.

Can you please tell us more about a couple of specific ways workplaces would benefit from investing in your ideas above to improve employee wellness?

Life is short and we only get one shot at it. So when you think about the kind of legacy you want to leave behind, ask yourself what you’d be most proud of. For me and my co-founder, we care more about the impact we have in people’s lives than the shiny objects. That important reframing helped shape so much of why we work the way we do.

Also, ensure that at minimum, everyone on your leadership team understands how your business makes money. And if you’re in a client-service-based business, they understand how your clients make money. Even better, help ensure every employee has basic understanding, too. I find way too frequently that employees you’d expect to know details of the business haven’t even been provided the basics. Companies have procurement and finance teams for a reason — it’s not just to cut costs and increase profitability, but should also be to help a company provide financial stability and remain competitive. Operations should be built to maximize profitability and prioritize our most important products. But, as I said, humans are complex and the systems they create are complex, so rarely are decisions black and white. There needs to be room for gray. If your decision makers understand the operational infrastructure of your business, they are better equipped to provide nuanced recommendations and solutions, vs. only looking at the dynamics that directly impact their disciplines and teams.

How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?

We had the incredible benefit of starting from scratch as it relates to culture and operations. But, we’ve also been a part of or witnessed so many small and large scale organizations attempt to make change. As we grow and maintain our business, it will be essential for us to keep coming back to our why, and holding everyone accountable, leaders in particular, to embody this why. If leaders don’t become the best examples of living your values, it’s so much harder to ensure that the rest of the company can live those too.

Ideas take time to implement. What is one small step every individual, team, or organization can take to get started on these ideas — to get well?

Know your “why“. Then align yourself with an organization that matches your “why”.

What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?

If you’ve ever been financially insecure, you understand how detrimental that can be to so many other aspects of your life. But excess and greed can have very similar effects. Learning that even the seemingly strongest and most successful people feel scared or vulnerable at times, has made me deeply see how important it is to understand your root values and to live by them. I’ve had more honest, vulnerable conversations in the last year than any other time in my professional career. I think there is an incredible amount of change happening across businesses right now, but I also think those times bring out more culture, innovation, and art.

Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-willis-1888b219/

Our agency’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/96624832/

Our website: https://www.magiccamp.co/

Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.