FIR Podcast Network

In this episode, Chip and Gini talk about insurance. Right up there with legal and accounting when it comes to favorite topics for agency owners.

As painful as it may be to talk about, insurance is something that we all need to understand and consider.

Balancing the risks with the costs isn’t always easy, but Chip and Gini offer up some perspective for you to consider.

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Miles Everson, CEO of MBO Partners, joins Chip to talk about the challenges that agencies are facing in this new era of work — and how they can find success while mitigating risks.

This conversation explores important topics like hybrid work, contractors versus employees, the new outlook that many employees and employers have after a year of remote work, and more.

Opportunities abound for agencies that are prepared to adapt and innovate, but risks remain and it is important to understand how to balance the two.

[Watch this episode]

RESOURCES

* MBO Partners

In this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of using your calendar to set, manage, and achieve your priorities.

The most scarce resource in any agency is the owner’s time. How you spend it is one of the best indicators of your likely success.

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I’ve mentioned here before that I have a friend who works for a large conglomeration and their return-to-work policies have been chaotic, at best. At first, they sent an email at the start of July and said, “Everyone get your pets and kids ready! We’re going back to work in two weeks!”

Never mind the fact that it was summertime and many parents didn’t have childcare worked out until the school year began, but there was this small thing called the Delta variant spreading through the U.S.

They ended up pushing back the return to the office until September and then again until January, but it’s been a fascinating look at communications—or the lack thereof. 

Many organizations are working through how/if they safely return to the office, whether or not they require vaccinations, and how they’ll work through their culture and morale issues as they relate to harassment, misogynistic gaslighting, racism, and discrimination.

In many cases, there is a pretty large gap between organizational leaders and employees, as is evidenced by my friend’s company policies (when surveyed, 82% said they wanted to continue working from home).

The good news is that communicators can bridge that gap—if we are allowed. That’s what we’re going to discuss on today’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast.

Resources Included:

* Universum’s “World’s Most Attractive Employers” Report

* CBS Article: Why Many Black Employees Don’t Want to Return to the Office

* CBS Article: Race discrimination lawsuit says Amazon “de-levels” employees of color

* Spin Sucks Blog Post: The Ins and Outs of Internal Communications

* Employer Brand Video

The Mad Men era of agencies is over. Or is it?

On this episode, Chip and Gini explore the ongoing issues that women face when working at agencies — from advancement to harassment (and worse).

The topic was inspired by a tweet by Katie Robbert who shared an article by Zoe Scaman along with some of her own experiences.

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Have you ever been frustrated with your team’s performance? If so, you’re not alone.

Many agency owners have had challenges with their employees not doing what they’re supposed to do or not achieving the quality of work you expect.

Chip and Gini discuss how to sort out what’s going wrong — and what to do about it.

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It’s not going to come as any big surprise to most of you that the lingering pandemic, combined with growing geopolitical tensions, never-ending technological disruption, and an accelerating climate crisis has created all sorts of opportunities (opportunities!) for communicators. 

There has never been a time in history where business leaders have been forced to confront this kind of complexity, nor had to deal with conflicting messages they’ve heard their entire careers about not communicating values to communicating values. 

They must navigate all of these challenges while creating resilient companies that can thrive in any economic, social, political, or technological environment—and allow them to drive forward with values and purpose. 

While it really does provide us a great opportunity for 2022 and beyond, there isn’t an established playbook to help us navigate changing stakeholder expectations while advancing the business interests of our companies—or that of our clients. But a new report from Edelman, The Future of Corporate Communications, seeks to change that by understanding what senior communicators are experiencing on the front lines. 

Their research reveals that the role of the communicator has forever changed, with new expectations and rules of engagement. The message from nearly 250 of the world’s most senior communicators is clear: to meet the challenge of this moment, the communications function must advance from operating as a transactional cost center delivering on a communications agenda to being an indispensable partner generating measurable business value. 

The report has some notable insights that will help each and every one of you plan for career growth for the rest of this year and into the next. That’s what is up on today’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast.

Resources Included:

* Edelman 2021 Future of Corporate Communications Study

* Spin Sucks Guest Blog Post: Maintaining Strong Leadership Through “The Big Quit”

* The Agency Leadership podcast

Few of us get to have as much influence over a more public website than Annalisa Church, VP Digital Technology, Insights & Operations for Akamai.  She has built a career on converging marketing and technology to drive better experiences for customers and build long-term value for enterprises. She is devoted to transforming marketing into a data-driven organization through actionable insights and ensuring the voice of the customer. Prior to Akamai, she worked for eight years in Dell’s marketing department.

Annalisa recently led a massive overhaul of the Akamai website, which is available in nine different languages, with more than 1,200 pages in English covering 18 different products.  The site has tremendous customer engagement, with one million monthly visitors, and almost two-thirds of them become customers after visiting the site.

The diagram below shows some of the changes that Church implemented during her redesign to make it more effective and more relevant to visitors. These efforts have paid off in terms of more engagement, more conversions from visitors to customers, and wider impact.

 

You always hear that everyone in your business should be making the best, highest use of their time. But one of the biggest offenders of this objective are the agency owners themselves.

How often have we found ourselves doing low value administrative work that we could easily have someone else do? Perhaps we do it to “save money” or because it is just easier or because we don’t trust someone else to do it as well as we do.

The reality is that agency owners need to start with themselves in the drive to improve efficiency and profitability. Tracking the things that you do that aren’t as valuable as the hourly rate that you command will help you identify the things that you should delegate.

In this episode, Chip and Gini talk about how to identify these tasks, determine the best candidates to get off your plate, and the impact it can have on you and your business.

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As we strive to foster communities of collaboration and transparency between company executives and their employees, one question persists: How do we make our findings measurable and actionable? 

“I think communications in general is hard to measure. It’s not as cut and dry as the sales of a product or the financials of a company… it’s pretty hard across the board,” says our most recent guest, George Sutcliffe, Global Communications Insights & Analytics Lead at Raytheon Technologies. 

A former lawyer, librarian and writer, George uses his keen attention to detail to drive measurement strategy and uncover insights that impact business outcomes. In our conversation, George touches on a variety of subjects that all point back to one of Sharon and my favorite topics: How to marry quantitative and qualitative employee feedback, put it to use, and show your employees (and your executives) that their feedback is being put to use. 

“You should always aim to get employee feedback any way you can to judge employee sentiment,” George said. “I would say that an equally important thing is for the executive to acknowledge that they are looking at the comments.” 

In this episode, you’ll hear George discuss research methods ranging from surveys and LinkedIn analytics to more outside-the-box methods to measure — and improve — employee and executive measurement.