Leaders Speak – Nikki Gatenby

It’s my fundamental believe that we should be able to enjoy what we do everyday.

Happy people do better work than miserable people. It‘s not rocket science, but it’s rarely factored into the business plan.

I’ve spent the last 20 years on a bit of a mission to put people before profit. Having worked with various captains of industry in the advertising world, and been a little disappointed at the single line focus on the money, the margin on everyone’s head, rather than the human side of business.

The irony being if you put people first, yourcustomer experience improves, your business performance increases and if youcharge appropriately for it, your profit naturally does too. 

At Propellerent, …we’ve flipped that statistic. Our mission is to ‘Make Life Better’. Against a backdrop of a global engagement figure of 30%, 90% of my team are engaged.  30% of those, are superengaged

And why is that so important? Well it shows up in the numbers every time.

• ​98% of our team would recommend working at Propellernet to others – and actively do
• ​This has a positive impact around the business, on each other, our customers, our environment – it’s a magnet for good people, having a positive ripple effect beyond the agency walls to you.
• ​And this level of recommendation saves us considerable time and effort on recruiting, time we can focus into customer impact instead.
• ​Our staff turnover rate is less than 7%, the industry average according to last IPA report is over 30%
• ​Here we benefit from a reduction in wastage, less time needed on re-recruiting, along with the pain of client knowledge and agency expertise walking out the door with each leaver.
• ​And our customers enjoy  building consistent relationships with long term agency contacts, rather than the frustration of having tore-brief a new person every time the account director, or creative lead, or PR contact, or developer, or media strategist (and so on) leaves.
• ​We enjoy world class customer satisfaction levels of around 95%recommendation rates and great feedback
• ​80% of our business comes from client referral, they just can’t help saying great things about us
• ​We average 1 day off sick a year, industry average is way higher, anywhere between 5 and 12 days, depending on what source you look at
• Planned absence, holidays, are essential for people to take. When time out is planned, both client and agency benefit, primarily from being able to plan around the work in advance and having the joy of a refreshed and invigorated agency person back after their break (too many cancelled holidays causes burn out and health issues).
• ​Unplanned absence on the other hand, has a huge impact on both agency team and customer alike. If someone phones in sick(and we’re all allowed to be ill) it has a direct impact on the agency team and ability to hit client deliverables with the speed and quality that everyone wants to achieve.

The last point is particularly pertinent in our industry; where overwork and burnout are endemic. At what point did it become acceptable for a cerebral career in marketing to cause so much anguish?

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Nationally there is a worrying increase in the number of people absent from work through illness. And if we take the statistics from London alone, according to the Mayor of London’s office, sickness absence costs London businesses £10.4billion a year.   An organisation of 250people can lose £250,000 a year due to sickness absence.

That’s shocking. And there is so much we can all do about it. Backed up with plenty of evidence – here’s a couple of sources; Happy Consulting and Gallup:

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1. Consulting Company, Happy, are experts in the field of engagement and have significant proof points;

·        Happy , engaged staff are 22% more profitable

·        For every 2% increase in how happy employees are, revenue grows by1%

·        Investing in a great workplace compared to the standard stock market over the last 25years would give a 3.5% increase in return

Source: Happymanifesto.com

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2. Gallup2016  survey; employee engagement vs bottom line across 1.8millionemployees, concluded that business divisions scoring at the top half reported employee engagement had nearly double the performance impact, compared with those in the bottom half.

This is regardless of the organisation, industry or company; regardless of changes in the economy or even massive changes in technology. In simple terms, on a global scale, people who are engaged are natural brand ambassadors and deliver high quality outcomes.

So if performance and profit are important to you, your people are the place to start.