In this op-ed, Brittanie English, co-founder and managing director at The Content Division, gets into the nitty-gritty of what makes a good company culture—sometimes, the littlest things provide the most confidence for employees.
Every business owner wants a great company culture.
A great company culture is the key to employee engagement, which is the key to lower staff turnover, which is the key to better productivity, which is the key to higher rates of customer satisfaction, which is the key to better revenue outcomes, and so on. You get it.
I don’t mean to sound flippant. For an agency or any business in professional services, culture is actually everything, because it makes or breaks the quality of the work you’re able to do. That’s not even getting into client relationships, employee turnover costs, money saved on salaries, and so much more.
But wanting good company culture and achieving it are totally different things.
You’ll often hear claims like, “It’s the people that make this place the best”. And, sure, that’s true to an extent. Having friends at work has been found to increase employee satisfaction. But there’s great people everywhere, so while the stickiness of having a mate in the workplace is good for a while, especially when times are tough, it’s not going to keep them there long term.
So, what does?
I’m a little bit scared about talking about team culture, if I’m honest. I truly believe that the companies that claim they have a good culture usually don’t. After all, it’s not what you say about yourself, it’s what your team says that counts. (So no, I don’t think those ‘Great Place to Work’ stickers are doing anything for your brand).
But because we’ve been shortlisted for the B&T Awards Agency of Year Award for People & Culture – Under 100 employees for the second year in a row (ahem), it got me thinking: what are the elements of working at The Content Division that makes our team culture ‘good’?
(Honestly, I was also looking for data for my presentation for the in-person judging round for the awards next month.)
Naturally, I threw it to the team. I pulled a list of the common themes and elements that were scattered throughout the submission for the awards into a Google Forms multiple choice survey, and added an ‘other’ field for further submissions, so they could just tell me what they liked about working here.
And honestly, the results I got back actually surprised me (I could have made this the headline of the article, but I’m above clickbait).
The most popular option, and the only option in the survey that everyone on the team chose, was transparency and structure in pay.
This surprised me because, although it’s something I’m passionate about, it’s not something that is actively spoken about or acknowledged in our business or day-to-day operations. It just is.
A few years back we implemented this tiered company structure with clear pay bands aligned to each level, and we did this for a couple of reasons.
One is that I didn’t want there to be any chance of a gender pay gap in the business in like-for-like roles. We made the pay align with a position and level, and made it clear what the knowledge, skills and abilities were for that position and level.
The other is that I didn’t want there to be any malice in the team in relation to what other people were paid. I’ve worked in organisations, both public and private, that had a culture of pay secrecy that led to extreme employee dissatisfaction when team members found out someone was paid disproportionately to themselves for whatever reason.
By implementing pay transparency, everyone in the business knows how much everyone else gets paid, and that’s that.
This is also supported by the fact that everyone in the team is so damn good at their jobs I feel there’s a genuine appreciation and understanding when someone sees another team member get promoted. As yet another benefit, it also creates a clear progression pathway for team members.
What’s interesting about this is just how achievable and implementable it is for agencies. Yet, whenever I’ve spoken to senior agency leaders about this, I’ve only ever got push back and excuses as to why it wouldn’t work.
I’ve had senior agency executives and owners actually laugh at me when I shared that we did this at The Content Division. The excuses include:
“We’re too small to do that.” We had less than 10 when we implemented it and I wish I did it earlier.
“We’re too big to do that.” The government literally does it with thousands of employees.
“Some of our team members are just better than others and their pay should reflect that”. Personally, I think their position and level should reflect that.
I can appreciate that we’re quite small. We’re currently a team of 15. And I can appreciate that this may not be the silver bullet for company culture – lord knows the state government still has a lot of cultural fires to put out – but if my team knows anything, it’s what a good company culture looks like, and they ALL said this was important.
If you ask me, I don’t believe there’s any reason why agencies can’t implement pay transparency in their business. They just don’t want to.
For those interested, some of the other popular responses from the team included:
Mental health days: Everyone on the team can take four days of unplanned mental health leave throughout the year. We don’t actually track it, so frankly they could take more, but we just set a number so people know they can actually use it.
How good everyone is at their jobs: We’re obsessed with skills-job fit, and it really pays off. Everyone respects each other’s craft and what they bring to the business so much.
The conferences we get to work on: We run a leading industry conference that our whole team gets to work on. Life’s so much better when you are the client.
The feel good work we get to do: We partner with Queensland’s oldest charity to do ongoing work for a reduced rate.
The annual offsite: We get together offsite each year to learn and grow. It’s a moment to reset and reconnect.
I guess none of that sounds particularly sexy. There’s no ping-pong table, no matcha on tap, no team TikTok dance. But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the real secret to culture isn’t about being the “fun” place to work – it’s about being the fair one.
