How to Stay Lean Without Straining Your Team

COVID-19 has delivered the biggest hit to marketing budgets in years. While we’ve all heard how much this has affected everything from advertising campaigns to the number of new hires, the grave implications for agency operations haven’t received much attention. Yet as an agency owner or leader, you’ve probably experienced them firsthand.

As reduced budgets have made brands cut out agency services, agencies have been forced to downsize resources — making it seemingly impossible to scale and remain profitable. Sound familiar? It’s tempting to ask a shrinking team to take on an increasingly larger number of tasks, but this is hardly a wise decision amid a pandemic-induced mental health crisis.

So, what can you do as an agency owner or manager to stay lean and scale without wearing your employees down? Make mental health a priority in your organization. Here are a few key ways to do it.

Be transparent

Transparency is always a must for building an organization with a culture of trust and collaboration, but not all managers link it with mental health. This is a mistake — the less team members know about your company’s plans, the more likely they are to anxiously expect the worst. Should they expect a potential layoff? Could the agency go under altogether?

To avoid fear spreading among your employees, schedule regular meetings or discussions where you can update the team about the company’s current outlook and plans for the future. You could even give everyone the chance to anonymously submit questions beforehand so their worries can be addressed directly without them having to put themselves in a vulnerable position.

As a leader, your natural instinct might be to protect your team from knowing the full extent of how bad things are, but in reality most people will take more comfort from honesty — and they’ll also feel like they’re being respected and treated as an equal.

Offer flexible options

Companies that try to entice potential recruits with free yoga sessions at lunchtime and mindfulness workshops have become the laughing stock of the working world in recent times. The pandemic has exposed that most workers don’t want excessive gestures to protect their mental health — they just need flexible working options in place that will keep a crisis at bay.

What are your plans for the “new normal?” Do you intend to bring everyone back into the office full-time, offer remote working options, or a mixture of the two?

Will you continue to expect your employees to work set hours (e.g., the classic 9 to 5) or will you let them choose the hours that fit their schedule best?

The last two years have shown us that flexibility and lenience don’t breed laziness as much as many people thought. As your team returns to the office, many of your employees may well appreciate the opportunity to continue choosing their own hours — especially if they have children or have underlying health conditions.

As luck would have it, a flexible policy can also be the perfect tool for increasing your agency’s productivity and leanness. Sounds like a double win!

Check in with your staff regularly

Although team meetings are a great place to discuss issues that affect everyone, like your company’s outlook and targets, not all your employees will feel comfortable speaking up about the support they need. And while responding to anonymous queries has its place, you can’t give people personalized help if you don’t know who they are.

The solution? Ensuring there are regular one-on-one meetings between staff members and a mentor or manager, designed solely to check in on their mental health. To do this well, the people conducting the meetings will need dedicated training, but this is an investment that pays dividends (in the form of a more empathetic, aware workforce).

Of course, organizing these meetings is only half the battle — you also need to act on feedback if one of your employees reveals they’re struggling with their mental health. In some cases, this could mean changes in your policy (like introducing flexible working), but other times you might need to refer your employees to specialized help (like paying for counseling).

And even if everyone claims to be “fine,” make sure managers are trained to spot the warning signs of mental health issues.

Encourage personal growth

Most companies claim that they support their employees to grow as people and develop their skills, but how many of them can really say they mean it?

When you’re struggling to make it through the daily grind, giving your employees extra space to do anything other than meet their short-term goals can feel like an unnecessary luxury.

But try to remember the bigger picture: if your team never expands their skills beyond their day-to-day role, they’ll soon lose motivation and feel burned out. So, make it clear that everyone is encouraged to learn about areas and skills beyond their role, even if there’s no obvious link with their current job.

Ideally, this would mean offering a set budget for each employee to spend on self-development. But even if you can’t afford this luxury, you could offer everyone the chance to learn about different roles in the agency or try out new projects. This has the added benefit of training people to backfill if you lose one of your current employees.

Passionate and motivated employees tend to be more productive — and maybe they’ll even bring your agency the innovation it needs right now.

The solution

COVID-19 may be a novel phenomenon, but agencies facing bottlenecks and roadblocks along their path to growth is nothing new. Neither is burnout. And if you’re struggling with any related issues, it certainly doesn’t mean your agency is doomed for failure.

While some online gurus might claim scaling an agency is easy, the truth is that it’s a difficult job — it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong, even without a pandemic to contend with. Fortunately, you can get back on track by enlisting external support.

At MEADE, we help agencies to scale and develop the right strategy for their needs — that includes advice about how to manage your team and their mental health.