One of the most rewarding and intense relationships in a digital agency is that between the owner of the business, generally an entrepreneur, and the people that work for the agency – employees. Make sure you have the right people in the right place and in that, utilize the great minds you have recruited to work for you.
Employees like to work for companies because they enjoy structure, processes stability, knowing they have a future career, teamwork and collaboration. Entrepreneurs are comfortable working on their own, thinking of new ideas and implementing them without documenting one line.
They are mostly okay with not knowing what is happening in the future and feel in control of their own destiny. So when I speak to agency owners they very often struggle with why their staff are asking for regular meetings, career development plans and to know where the business is heading in two, three and five years.
Agency owners have often felt frustrated with their team when they see them come in at 9am and leave at 5pm as per their job contracts wondering “why don’t they work the hours I do?”. Well, if they did work the hours that you do, then they would have an entrepreneur mindset and would be working for themselves.
So our roles as owners of the business are to acknowledge that we need our team in order to run our business. So to work effectively we need to give them what they need to be successful and share with them how we work so that they can understand us better and we can all be more productive, thus achieving our common goals.
How can we work together in harmony?
It’s easy, you need to make sure you have the right people in the right seats in your business and that includes you, the agency owner.
Create an organisational chart for today, for 12 months, for 18 months and so on. Then share this chart with your team. Show them while, yes you are the owner of the business, you are not planning to do everything all the time and they can see ways for their career to develop.
3. Create a competency map of all the skills that your agency requires, categorise them into departments, eg. Website development, Account Management, Marketing Software and so on. Ask each person to rate themselves on where they think they are in relation to their skills, 5 being excellent, 1 being a newbie. You can then review their results in your one to one meetings with them and create a quarterly training plan with them for courses or certifications they should be doing to improve their knowledge.
4. Create job descriptions for each role and ideally have a number that you can measure each person on that contributes to the overall health of the business. For example, account managers can have a goal of a certain NPS score with your clients.
5. Core Values and GWC exercise – this is another great tool available through the Entrepreneurial Operating System by Gino Wickman. Firstly, you must do a team exercise of deciding your companies core values, choose 4-5 of them.Then you can measure your current team in relation to these core values – after that exercise you then have to ask yourself three questions about that person in their existing role. Do they get it? Want it? And have the capacity to deliver to their best in that role? You need to be honest – you might have a brilliant people in your business but they are simply in the wrong seat.
This is just a small summary of this very big topic of hiring and recruitment in your agency. I will be writing more on this topic, so keep your eyes open. Or, if you have any questions drop us a line – hello @growitgroup.com. If you have any comments, we would love to hear from you below.
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