Agency life is hard — this is what we’re doing about it
Agencies can be difficult places to work. The main reasons we see for this, are:
- You are constantly switching between different contexts
- There is a natural power imbalance between client and service
1. Context switching can lead to insecurity
Switching between contexts means that you can often feel unprepared for the meeting you’re going in to. When I worked at Cancer Research UK, I would probably be in more meetings than I am now, but all would have broadly the same goal — curing cancer sooner. The specifics of what was discussed obviously changed depending on if it was fundraising, advocacy or brand but a lot of the context was the same. This gives confidence and security to many people.
Agency teams can be working on curing cancer at 9 o’clock, helping to improve people’s brain health at 9:45 and working to recruit participants to a clinical trial at 10:30.
Personally I love this variety, but many find it very very draining.
2. Power imbalances create stress and pressure
At the end of the day we are providing services for people who are paying for that work. This creates a natural power imbalance in favour of the person paying for that service.
This is something that is very hard to change, although we are working towards doing so.
The end result of that can be that there is an enormous amount of pressure on individuals to deliver against the person in power’s timelines, expectations and needs. Fundamentally everyone wants to do a good job in any role, and many have pressure put upon them to do that no matter what the situation. But the external pressure of a power imbalance can make this an order of magnitude harder in a service situation.
So what do we do about this at William Joseph?
Create psychological safety between team members so they can support each other
“Pressure is only unbearable if it feels like you’re the only one experiencing it” — Steve Hansen, New Zealand Rugby coach
There’s only so much we can do to reduce the pressure that a service environment creates. What we can do is invest in the support mechanisms around people. The number one factor in this situation is the support of your team members.
No matter how hard or stressful a situation is, if you know you’ve got people you can turn to who have got your back no matter what, and are going to practically help you then it makes all the difference in the world.
Avoid toxic positivity and provide professional mental health support
Thankfully we don’t live in a society where ‘keep calm and carry on’ is the standard approach to mental health. At William Joseph we are open about the frustrations or difficulty we may be having and the impact on our own anxieties.
This openness can help to reduce “toxic positivity” embedding itself into team culture, where expressing concerns or worries might be considered a negative presence or not helping to move things forward.
We all proactively talk about mental health and give people support through Spill, to talk to trained professionals about their own.
Multi-disciplinary teams and rubber ducking to reduce pressure
By bringing lots of different perspectives to a problem, you get better solutions. This happens because no matter how hard the situation is, someone has always got a way to move things forward.
If it’s a discipline you’re not so familiar with, asking questions from a fresh perspective will unlock ideas in a specialist.
This isn’t a simple, magic solution — it takes time, emotional intelligence and can often feel hard. The very nature of the situation is that everyone has disagreeing opinions about moving things forward. This is why creating trust between these people is so important — it’s the only way that we can build on these points of view to create new solutions.
The practice of ‘rubber ducking’ where someone explains a situation to a fresh pair of eyes, in the hope of ordering their own thoughts and generating ‘stupid questions’ has solved countless problems for our team.
These multi-disciplinary teams also reduce the pressure of any single person being responsible for a project. The pressure is shared across everyone which makes it much easier to bear.
Work with people who value us as equals
We are getting better at finding clients who share our values and focus on equity.
We used to assume that because we only work with charities or the public sector, that everyone would operate in this way. However we now realise that empowerment and equality across teams isn’t a given in any industry.
Some questions we’re starting to ask people before we decide to work with them include:
- Do you show salaries on the jobs that you promote?
- Do you monitor your gender pay gap? If so, what is it? What steps are you taking to address it?
- What is your highest paid role’s salary as a percentage of your lowest paid role?
- What are your organisational values and can you give me an example of how you personally have lived them? Can you give an example of when you’ve failed to live up to them?
None of these are deal breakers, but they give an insight into how people really operate.
Aaaaand breathe
Even with all of these steps, there are still pressures that will pile up and days which are harder than others. We do everything we can to support each other through them, but sometimes the best thing we can do is to take a breath, focus on what’s the next thing we can do and move forward one step at a time.
