“Fantastic work culture” with Richard Barnes Founder of Buffalo 7

As a part of my series about about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Barnes, Founder & Managing Director, Buffalo 7. Having spent a career building and nurturing kick-ass design teams to believe in a ‘whatever it takes’ philosophy, Buffalo 7’s Founder now focuses on the wider day to day running of their busy studio, ensuring their talented team stay happy and stay hungry for more creative goodness. He loves the challenge of making sure they’re the best agency on the planet to work for, and to ensure other agencies are tearing their hair out wondering what their Secret Sauce is.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My background was helping large agencies deliver hundreds of pitches to all types of clients. It was usually very large businesses trying to talk to other businesses, so we learned that it’s really key that the delivery of the messages and the ideas is premium.

Everyone’s looking for an edge to help win a pitch, and the edge that we were able to give, as graphic designers, was to help that pitch team deliver the best presentation that it could be. It was very short turnarounds, but we worked really hard to be able to deliver those stories.

So, I learned a lot about pitches, a lot about presentations, a lot about working with people under pressure, and a lot about how people can be super disorganized in these situations — so how do we coax out that information to help them deliver that pitch?

And, most of all, I learned that you need to have a lot of guts and a lot of positivity, because it will be tough going all the way to the end, but it’s worth it when you win those sorts of meetings.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

So, for me, culture is key to the success of the business. If you create a strong teamwork ethic, built into your business, it will thrive in the good projects and especially in the bad ones.

We get together as a team every Monday to recognize and celebrate this culture. It’s a really important part of who we are and, from that, we have this tagline which is: ‘We are Buffalo 7’.

You know, we’re really proud of the fact that we win together, we do things together, and family is one of the values that we strongly believe in; in that we work together as a team.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Right now, we’re working on the Asian Champions League. The Asian Champions League is currently going through a huge rebrand, a significant investment, and it’s going to be a game-changer.

It’s going to be huge, it’s going to be a very powerful sports turnaround platform over the next decade, and it’s very exciting for us to be part of this and to be contributing towards the success of this soon-to-be global sports tournament.

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

We’ve worked extensively in the US recently, but I’m more comfortable talking about UK worker welfare, because it’s what I see in our team, our suppliers and our clients every day. I’d assume the challenges are pretty similar across the pond.

I think some employers can micro manage their employees too much. Of course, it’s essential to engage a workforce, giving them clear and meaningful briefs, but if you dictate exactly what they need to wear, when they can check their phones and stifle their individuality, negativity can be a result.

We let our people work so they’re comfortable — listening to music, wearing casual clothes, heading to different work environments and so on. We trust them to deliver brilliant work, and they value that freedom.

Mental health is a very big factor in employee happiness too. We’ve partnered with a local mental health charity, Manchester Mind, and we’re very aware of the effect that work-related stress can have on happiness.

People spend most of their waking hours at work, so it stands to reason that they need to be happy there in order to improve their overall happiness. Some employers find it hard to justify the resource and cost involved in improving work wellness, such as healthy foods on offer, yoga and well-being, flexible working and access to gyms.

But it’s a fundamental part of our employee package, and I’d love to see more employers finding ways to offer more.

Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

To me, it’s pretty obvious that an unhappy workforce will have a massive downturn in company productivity, because people just won’t enjoy what they’re doing.

If they’re not enjoying what they’re doing, how do you expect them to do good work? Employee health and wellbeing is extremely important, because we need to look after our people, we need to make sure they’re not over-worked, we need to make sure that they have a balance, that they’re talking holiday, that we’re contributing to their personal growth as well.

Not just providing them with fruit, but actually with insights into how the brain can get better. So, it’s kind of mental training to improve mental health. It’s really important that we allow people to enjoy work, and that will have a massive impact on their productivity, which will, of course, have an impact on the company profitability.

Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?

1. It’s really important to talk to your team, as in individuals. Everyone should do one-on-ones with their team; you should be talking regularly.
2. Find time to build relationships: it’s about building trust, it’s about building understanding. It’s about allowing gaps to talk about how people are getting on, what’s important to them, how they’re developing.
3. Keep on top of discussions about PDPs, it’s about forming bonds with people; it’s really important.
4. It’s really important to be open and have regular get-togethers with the whole team. You want to keep people updated on what’s going on, what’s happening, what’s new, what’s exciting?
5. It’s really good just to get people together to smile and appreciate what other people are doing and celebrate success. Make sure that we’re talking about when we win. It’s really nice to know when other people are doing really well at their jobs. We don’t see what everyone else is doing; it’s nice to be able to hear about someone else’s success in the team and celebrate that as a group. So, it’s good to get everyone together regularly. We do that every Monday morning.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce’s work culture?

I also think it’s a really good idea to have open-plan workplaces; you want people mixing together regularly, having conversations. You know, being part of the studio is really important, as part of culture, part of teamwork.

We are social beasts, we like to mix and mingle and talk about what we’re up to, share ideas, help each other out. You can achieve that in open-plan. You can still have offices that people can go and sit in when they want to do something quietly, but most of the time, they should spend it in open-plan.

Which leads me onto kitchens: you need a really big kitchen that allows people to get together, break bread and talk, and just enjoy spending their lunch together and having a chat. So, you need to provide those spaces, as a business, that allow genuine relaxation. A kitchen is great for that, because everyone’s got to eat. So, if you’ve got somewhere to go for breakfast or somewhere for lunch, you’re really helping people to enjoy being at work.

How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?

My particular leadership style is built around enablement and encouragement. I like to help people question what they’re trying to do. I don’t provide the answers; I like to provide the questions, I like to help people think around what they’ve got to do. They won’t feel the sense of achievement if you’re spoon-feeding it to them.

It’s really important that people grow, and the only way they can grow is by embracing the challenges. What you can do is provide support, but it is about making sure that they feel that sense of ownership over the ideas and the empowerment that comes with that.

It’s really important that, as a leader, you make yourself available. Hence, I sit in open-plan. I want people to feel they can come and talk to me any time they want. I’ll always answer the phone, any time of day or night. It’s about being there for people when they’re stuck.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

So, I was lucky, whilst working at large agencies, to be exposed to some really senior people. These are the people that are running the pitches: the CEOs, and the board-level people, who always treated me with respect.

I learnt a simple skill: treat everybody with respect and you can’t go wrong. If you treat everybody the same, you’re going to be respected yourself. It’s really important to treat people with respect.

A certain individual I learnt a hell of a lot from when I was at ZenithOptimedia was Gerry Boyle. He’s now CEO of Publicis Media. He’s a hugely-influential Scottish guy. He was fantastic to work with, he was extremely important, but he always gave me the time of day. He had an insatiable desire to win, which is something that I also shared. It was brilliant working with people who really were passionate about what they were doing, but also gave the time of day to speak to people. He was a great person to work with.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

As our business got bigger, we knew that we wanted to give something back to our community. So after a lot of deliberation, we decided to become the charity partner of Manchester Mind — raising money, volunteering and generally helping them out any way we can.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

So, the quote that I would say is, ‘One day, you’ll look back and realize you spent too long worrying about things that didn’t really matter’.

I think the point here is that it’s easy to get lost in the woods, and we end up transfixed, as humans, on certain things. It’s really important that we allow ourselves to take a step back from problems, that we see it from other people’s point of view and embrace the fact that they have opinions and we don’t know it all.

If you can do that, if you can step back from the problem, it’ll help you work together better with your customers, or your clients, with your team. It’ll help you solve problems, it’ll help you deliver success.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I don’t know. I’ll need to think about that one! What I would say is that it’s really important we encourage creativity in our classrooms and don’t just create exam robots! Creativity is in all of us and we need to do more to help bring it out of our children.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you continued success!