A recent Harvard Business Review article stated that “people who don’t feel their work contributes to their company’s mission are 630% more likely to quit their jobs than their peers who do.”

 

Now, they weren’t talking about just ad agencies, but rather, all companies across a myriad of industries. The article was about leading hybrid teams, and now that all agency leaders are (or should be, as is this author’s take) leading hybrid teams, the better armed we are for this weird new future we face in 2022.

In a sense, the straight-up wfh-edness of the early stages of the pandemic were clear: you worked from home. Just like it was clear in the ‘before’ times: you worked at the office. But both those eras have passed.

 

People have moved out of cities but stayed ‘at work.’ Conferencing technology has evolved, but more importantly, staff are now demanding the flexibility that this new (to most) hybrid way of working provides. 

 

In short, now that people recognize they can work from home and be anywhere, everything has changed. 

 

You can work in San Fran from Toronto. If you’re willing to keep unorthodox hours, you can work in Dubai from Toronto. Unsurprisingly, keeping great talent has become a WHOLE lot more complicated.

 

It isn’t just about money anymore. It isn’t just about the great clients you have or perks. It’s about what you stand for and who you are as a company.

 

A former boss and mentor of mine used to say “The tighter the brief, the greater the freedom.” Tidy phrase that packs a punch.

 

When you get a wide-open brief, you don’t know where to start or quite what to do. You float around a few ideas and usually end up with more questions than answers. There’s an element of choice paralysis that comes from a loose brief.

However, when you have a tight brief – one that points the team in a clear direction and says “go get it” – you’re launched on your way to one bang-on big idea after another. Internal teams struggle to choose a favourite and brands stand up and clap that their business challenge has been so smartly and strategically solved.

 

So, to keep that talent from going anywhere they want, it’s time for us to build a tighter brief. One that briefs us and all the people we work with on who the agency is, how we act and what we do. Not a brief to win clients, but one designed to win over – and keep – people. An internal brief.

With that brief in hand, we all know where we’re going. Spoiler alert, it’s forward. 

But without it, we don’t really know where the shop is going. What follows is that we don’t know where we’re going either. And if the stats check out, some of us are 630% more likely to go elsewhere.

 

So, time to tighten the brief. Time to decide who we are. Once we know that, leading is easy. Because people know who they’re following. But more importantly, they know why.