I have just reached my 17-year milestone with A&P and I can honestly say the time has flown by. Being in an agency environment has been the most rewarding career experience for me from seeing the growth of the agency, dealing with our amazing clients and, most importantly, making sure all my colleagues enjoy their time at A&P.
Spinning a lot of plates is a key aspect of my day but my number one priority is making sure my colleagues are happy because if they’re not happy, I’m not happy! Happiness can be achieved from actioning simple requests such as no longer using plastic spoons which shows we’re doing our bit to help the environment, to refurbishing our kitchen making it open plan and the ‘go to’ place for lunch or a healthy stand-up internal meeting.
Communication is the name of our game so it’s essential we practice what we preach. Our internal newsletter is jam-packed with information we can’t wait to share with our colleagues so we all feel more informed and truly part of the A&P family. We use Yammer, from Office 365, for our less formal internal comms and it seems to be going well. There are some who have yet to see the light but with encouragement, they will.
Richard Branson’s quote ‘train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to’ is brilliant, and at A&P we encourage learning and development. It is good to have a mix of ways to learn as we all like to learn differently. So, our learning can be a mix of on-the-job training with peers, watching webinars or getting out of the agency and attending conferences. What is important is that individuals must share their new-found knowledge with their colleagues to increase our #knowhow.
I have encountered a few challenges over the years but none more so than GDPR – I think most businesses and data protection people would agree with me here. Our agency had double the work to ensure compliance with both client-side and internally for ourselves, which meant auditing data, updating policies and procedures, sorting contracts and undertaking training. After a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and great teamwork in the agency we survived...and strangely the world has not stopped turning!
Hope you’ve enjoyed my snippet into my ‘General Manager’ world at A&P.