These are based on what I saw and experienced, and hence more subjective than objective. I’m restricting it to three aspects that bring out some good and some not-so-good points.

Relationships: (Client, Partners) I have seen some fantastic relationships with clients and partners, based on mutual trust. Add to this, a great view of publishers and platforms (both traditional and digital) and the agency is in just the right place to make a difference to the client’s business. The flip side is that many a time, these relationships are taken for granted, by both sides. Campaign based thinking and last minute briefs coexist with half-hearted work cobbled together while waiting at the client’s reception. This extends to the agency’s partners as well. One possible way to fix this is to set expectations clear on both sides and understand long term implications of short term choices, but there are constraints, especially in an age when agencies are willing to undercut and bleed to get business.

Scale: (Industry, organisation) In many cases, the agency handles huge budgets, across diverse platforms. Once again, this puts them in the perfect frame to bring about changes that can alter the course and behaviour of entire industries and to begin with, at least their marketing domains. But I haven’t seen that happening a lot. One possible reason is that the agency structure is rather silo based and there aren’t a lot of people having strategic and operational experience across traditional, digital and social platforms. The interoperability of these silos is not really the best. Therefore, whether the current setup is capable of providing one cohesive, platform agnostic direction aimed at business outcomes is a question worth exploring.

I also think that the concept of value has somehow been irretrievably tied to scale, probably a baggage from the traditional media era. The themes of the digital era – experimentation, agile marketing, brand storytelling on digital etc – are reduced to near-zero significance in the narrative that the agency presents to the client. From the agency perspective, to quote Stalin (or Mao/Lenin/Trotsky!) “Quantity has a quality all its own“, but whether it adds the best value to a client’s business future is a question often unasked. When the agency itself is hesitant and rather unwilling to change, where does that leave the client?

Talent: (Workforce, Skills) One of the reasons I decided to explore the agency side was for the experience of working with multiple brands across domains. That remains a huge advantage this side offers. I have also seen GroupM do a bunch of things to expand and sharpen the skills of its workforce. The issue that I noticed is that the sheer scale of the organisation makes smooth implementation a challenge. Also, both discovery and navigation are far from easy. For example, there might be great work done on some brand, but how easy is it for a person to know and then attempt to be a part of it? The other challenge when all sorts of verticals and horizontals (account leads, domain experts, regional bosses etc) collide is accountability. To create systemic checks at this scale is not an easy task at all, and this might be a downer for a lot of people who are used to different standards.

So, why would you join the agency side? I can provide a few scenarios based on career stages. Early in your career (0-5 years) if you’re relatively young and would like to get some cross domain exposure of how a brand and its media vehicles function before you specialise, this would be a good place to explore. If you have 5-10 years of experience, but would like to shift your domain (say, from traditional to digital) an agency stint could help you do that. After a decade of experience, if you want a different perspective, exposure to more domains, or even a reduction in pace, the agency could offer that as well. As with every other job, a lot depends on your intent, but my take is that irrespective of the career stage, you will need at least 2-3 years of investment before you can start driving your agenda. Before you ask, it doesn’t work that way everywhere, I have had three jobs that taught me otherwise.

If I had to sum it all up – agencies and the clients they deal with – at the risk of generalisation, I’d have to go with

The task is not easy. On one hand, there is a workforce that is increasingly getting overwhelmed by communication technologies that are dictating an always-on culture. (“Why you hate work.”) On the other hand, there is a new generation entering the workforce that has expectations of a culture tuned to their lifestyle and ways of functioning. They rapidly disengage if they feel this is no happening. In both cases, the end result is a loss in productivity. This is only one part of the story. There are several factors that define culture, and in an organisation, there are several factors that resist change as well.  How does an organisation adapt to these dynamics? A few thoughts, some strategic, some tactical.

Togetherness: ‘The need to belong to something that matters‘ is a Gaping Void phrase I have used before. I think it exists in all humans, sometimes consciously, sometimes in a latent form. The ideas of brand as a platform and social business are perhaps rooted in this. When people working in an organisation are bound by a common purpose, a job transforms into work and I think the employee’s motivation becomes more intrinsic than extrinsic. This would happen when the purpose of the organisation goes beyond the transactional plane. While togetherness could stem from the purpose itself, it could also be based on how the organisation actually goes about achieving it.

Trust & Transparency: If an organisation is driven more by purpose than process, I think the scope for autonomy is much higher. I came across two examples in the hotel industry recently – the $2000 discretionary budget per guest that every Ritz Carlton employee has (via) and  Hilton Worldwide’s 100+ employees on Twitter. (via) The common factor in both cases is the trust in the employee’s judgment and intent.  On the flip side, the employee needs to trust that the organisation will do what’s best both from a business standpoint as well as the employee’s own career. An employee who has the skill set to make a correct judgment call in a fluid business landscape and has the autonomy to do so – one would think that s a necessity for the organisation.

One of the tactical devices I see becoming increasingly irrelevant is the time spent at work. In most workplaces, I think it’s time to replace the measurement parameters from output to outcome. I put this in the context of trust because the inherent belief is that the employee will get the job done irrespective of where he/she is without being monitored physically.

Technology: Internal collaboration tools and their potential is something we discuss often, it can also be useful in collecting and acting on real time feedback, but let’s take a look beyond that. In what I thought was a fantastic application of big data in this context, (even before the term became hot) Google, in 2009,  had used an algorithm to find out which of its employees were likely to quit. Recently they were trying to answer if working at Google increased people’s life span! But the point is that while the world is racing to understand consumers to pitch their products/services better, it might be a good idea for ‘Human Resources’ to use data to truly understand the resources they are dealing with. Of course, there are privacy and ethics challenges involved, but if the organisation is transparent about it, and the intent is clear, it would be useful for everyone concerned. ( I could link it to the LinkedIn & Labour post)

Increasingly, culture is being seen as a strategic business advantage. Some organisations are so serious about this that they have tryouts that go far beyond the standard recruitment procedures. On the other side, maybe there is some onus on the workforce as well – to actively seek and encourage organisations that embrace values they can connect with. Hugh McLeod already said what needed to be said with this –

P.S. I think one of the best works on this subject is something Gautam made in 2010 – The Social Business Employee Manifesto. Do take a look