March Challenge - Day 11: Retaining Talent

Ever since university, I've been told that your success comes from the people you have around you. Your team, whether you are the leader or a member of the team, you are important and have a contribution to make. I took a course in university called "Managing People for Excellent Performance," which not only re-emphasized the previous points, but helped you play the role as the manager of this team. I also had first hand experience leading a big team of my peers as the head of a student council - looking back on that experience, there were definitely areas where I succeeded in leading, and others where I failed miserably.

With all of these lessons learned before I entered the workplace, you could imagine the shock I had when I entered it and finding out that seasoned managers and executives still had problems getting this right. It's not that they are stupid or emotionally inept, but they continue facing the problems I did when I led a large group of people, there's always areas where we succeed and places we fail when it comes to human resources.

In a recent conference, Andrew Bennett, the CEO of Havas Arnold Worldwide stated some shocking statistics during a speech on Agency/Employee Loyalty. While I say shocking, I mean for people outside the industry - people within advertising are less than surprised by any of the following statistics:

- 30% of the collective agency workforce will be gone within 12 months

- 70% of employees call recruiters back if one reached out to them

- 96% of employees said they can easily find another job

- 37% expect to stay 1 - 5 years in the industry, 66% plan on staying 5+ years

- 90% of employees said they learned to figure out problems on their own as opposed to formal training (Bennett asserted that an average Starbucks barista has more training than any person entering the advertising industry)

So what's happened? Why have we as an industry given into the fact that this is a reality of our industry as opposed to doing something about it? In my five years in this industry, I've seen several factors make people quit and jump agencies - good people, who would have stayed if any of these issues were addressed:

- low compensation and recognition

- performance reviews and development plans not completed or discussed

- lack of advancement opportunities or challenging projects to work on within the agency

- lack of training or funding to training outside the agency

- managers not mentoring direct reports for the next level

So many of these issues could be addressed easily if open communication is involved (ironic that our industry is all about communications, yet we cannot seem to grasp that internally). This jumping of talent from agency to agency doesn't serve any agency any good - managers might think, oh, well, I'll just get someone better who's looking to advance from another agency to replace the employee that has quit. But if you consider the amount of money that is involved in recruiting, interviewing, training and getting that new employee acclimated to their new role, would likely superceed any amount that old employee was asking for to stay in their role.

Trust me, managing people is incredibly difficult. It gets astronomically more difficult as you manage 50, 100, 200+ people and try to balance it so that you keep them all happy. No one can say that they have a perfect workplace, not even those on the Canada's top 100 workplaces list (not surprisingly, no advertising agencies made that list). But managers have the onus of being able to keep their ears to the ground and figuring out how to address their employees' concerns, and it's up to the employee to bring up the concerns and open up the dialogue, as no one can read minds. As much as the discussion might be difficult, if you don't get it off your chest in a professional manner, no one will know that you're not happy.

One other point that ad agencies do a terrible job of is recruitment. Mostly based off of the fact that we can never gage where our business will be six to twelve months from now, we rarely go out to schools and recruit, we let the graduates come to us. It's an incredibly narcissistic way of looking at things. Even the best companies in other industries go out to schools to recruit, that's one of the reasons why they continue to be the best, because they attract the best talent by reaching out to them. This is what is going to make an agency stand out from another one - those that actively goes to schools and recruit, they will get the best talent submitting their applications.

It's doubtful that the industry will change anytime soon based off of Bennett's speech or this blog entry. The focus is still on the bottom line and no one is willing to take the chance of being disruptive in the way they manage their team.

But I am hopeful - with agencies taking more chances due to the shifting of traditional media to digital media, maybe that risktaking will carry over in their approach to managing and retaining people.