As a company you might work with an ecommerce or digital agency. Here is how to keep them motivated.
As a company you might work with an ecommerce or digital agency to help you gain a competitive advantage in all things digital. This agency most likely forms a dedicated team to work exclusively on your projects. In an ideal scenario, the agency has a process in place where people can apply to work for a given client / client project which — in case done smart — leads to having these people working for you that are most motivated for your project.
You (the client) and your agency team.
Let’s assume you (the client) start working with the agency team. For sure you will do a joint kick off, invite the team, show them your company site, production line, let them get an idea of your companies values, your brand and how you work, think, act. Ideally this adds to everyone being motivated and on the same page. The mood is good, everyone is eager to get things done and of course you all agreed on “being agile” (which in the majority of cases unfortunately leads to a waterfall approach and discussion about project scope, timelines and budget, because agile is about cultural change and mindset more than processes). However, let’s assume everyone is motivated from the start.
In this article I try to suggest a few things that shall help keeping the motivation of the (cross functional) agency team at a high level throughout the partnership. Why should you as a client actually care? Because you want maximum output, speed and high-quality work delivered by the agency. A highly motivated team will produce multiples of output compared to a frustrated team. So instead investing time in negotiating another 10% off of the agency daily rate, you can get factors of output for a given daily rate if you care about team motivation. And no matter how much agency management invests in motivating their folks, a client can easily reduce (or multiply) output of the agency team by the way they work, talk and behave in a client / agency partnership.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying this is only the clients’ responsibility. Both parties are responsible: agency and client. At Sitewards we call it partnership.
The following is a small, non-complete list with the goal to inspire one or the other client what they can do to get (way) more output for their money by keeping the motivation up.
1) Stay positive.
IT is a dissatisfier. Nobody appreciates if things are “ok” (web shop runs flawlessly, site performance is good, no downtime since 2 years), but as soon as a problem comes up people get nervous (which is ok) and start giving their internal pressure (even if the problem is caused by the client) to the agency (not ok), sometimes by literally yelling at the agency team (absolutely not ok — time to cancel partnership with the client), sometimes more subtle by using font size 40 in red in an email to all people involved, cc’d to top management (on clients and agency side) to make chaos and frustration perfect and by doing so DELAY the solution to their problem significantly.
Other clients pick up the phone and explain the problem (not the solution!) to the team / their project manager and gives them a couple of minutes (or hours/days, depending on urgency or problem classification) to think through a solution and provide options to the client (GOOD!).
So compared to: “Asap do the following and we expect this to be done until Y and bypass testing in that case.”, how about trying: “Dear team, last time you helped us out in an amazing way when we had trouble with X. Unfortunately, we made a mistake in how we configured some banners which causes trouble for us because a marketing campaign is running and the banners lead potential clients to the wrong page and we’re not able to correct this. Do you see a solution for this?”
Which of the two approaches you think would lead to a quick solution for you? The first one? Because it’s shorter, you define until when it needs to be done and how it needs to be solved? Surely not. Motivate people, let them work out the solution and you have a solution in place in no time. As hard as it might be to stay calm, concentrated and positive in a stressful situation — it will lead to (way) better results. So take a few seconds to think about how to communicate things. Even (or especially in stressful) situations.
2) Appreciate good work.
IT is a dissatisfier (yes, again). But we (you as a client) can change that. When we stop taking everything for granted. Your team comes in on a Saturday to launch your ecommerce site? An honest ”Thank you for your work” is the absolut minimum (and please don’t use the “we pay you for this” sentence). Better: invite the team to a launch party for the successful launch. Try calling your team just because of thanking them for something from time to time. Takes maybe a minute and works like magic (if it is authentic).
Start small: Try “thank you”. Get better from here. Great example I’ve seen: client sends custom shirts to their team, invites for launch parties and team events. More important is including appreciation in every day communication with the team. Always stay authentic. It leads to team motivation and you get more bang for your buck (more output for your daily rate — and that’s want you want, right?).
3) Tell the agency your (business) problem, not your (technical) solution
This is a tough one, because distinguishing between problem and solution is sometimes hard.
“I need a mail form with the following fields until end of week” is not describing the problem, it describes the solution for a problem the client missed to communicate to the agency team. The problem lies somewhere else. A good technique agency teams can use is continuously asking the client “why”. When you end up finding out that the problem is that the clients’ clients use phone calls to organize returns and he wants to avoid manual effort the agency team can easily come up with a proper (more effective, better maintainable, maybe faster) solution. In this example: activating the included RMA functionality of the ecommerce software he uses. Done.
If you as a client describe the solution to your agency team (instead of the problem) you narrow the teams view to thinking in the direction of your solution (how long will implementing the form take, etc.) instead of encouraging them to think about a PROPER solution for your business problem. Additionally, you frustrate the team. Highly skilled developers want to come up with solutions, not put in the lines of code you think are the best solution. In this case you could just do it yourself, save (maybe) money and time short term but you will not benefit from the expertise of a professional agency. In all cases I’ve seen in over 12 years in ecommerce this leads to unstable, unmaintainable and slow ecommerce platforms that need to replaced or at least refactored within 2 years after launch.
4) Listen to the teams’ advice.
You work with your agency because you think they’re experts. You chose them (maybe they also chose you). You might pay perceived-high daily rates. Summing things up: You hired a great agency that you think is the best one to help you get forward.
Now trust them. Yes, from the start. If at some point you don’t, talk openly about it with them, find out why. If trust cannot be established, you should question / repair that or change the agency asap.
I’d like to encourage to listen to the agency teams’ advice and expertise. It’s like hiring someone: If you hire a great employee (and all employees you hire are great, because otherwise — why would you hire the employee then?) and than start telling them what to do in detail — where is the sense in that?
5) Stop to micro manage and micro control. It’s a waste of time and directly affects team motivation.
Kicking things off with informing them you require time reporting on a 15min grid from each team member is absolutely the opposite of trust. It’s micro controlling and micro management. Time-tracking also takes time. I have seen scenarios where people track the time they needed to track time. And time tracking entries on how long it took to control tracked times. And all this time is substracted from the time the team can work on your project. And it’s frustrating. So get rid of it. Agree on mandays. If a team member shows up to work and works fulltime on your project, client pays a daily rate.
Free the agency team from everything that frustrates them. Maybe…just ask them what that is?
Disclaimer: there are tons of things agencies can do to deliver the best experience for their clients. I might come up with an article on this topic. This one is about what clients can do.
