Avoiding stress and burnout in your agency

We’re not letting you into a huge secret when we say that agency life can be brutal and exhausting.

You’re constantly trying to juggle your client’s needs, make them like you, report to them and pitch new ideas to them. Factor in those weekly team meetings, brainstorm sessions and end of month reports, and many agency workers are left literally hanging on the edge of reason.

Decreasing job satisfaction levels and general unhappiness are not unique to agencies. However, over time a culture of negativity and pessimism has evolved, especially in large media agencies, and staff turnover has increased as a result.

In this article we look at five reasons why agency burnout might occur, as well as helpful suggestions to avoid each one…

Stress & Anxiety

There’s no doubt that the year 2020 will go down in history as the year of stress and anxiety. But, even before we’d even heard of the name COVID-19, agency workers were already burning out under too much stress and negativity in the office.

In an agency, you are always on watch. That’s your performance from both a client perspective and a management perspective too. You never really know who’s on your side! Your emails log all your promises to clients, your phone-calls track your conversations and your reports are scrutinised each and every month. Doesn’t sound too enticing as a career, does it? After all, who wouldn’t be stressed out by all of that?

How you can help:

Making employee wellness part of your agency’s culture can help create a balance against the fast-paced nature of your work.

Encouraging your employees to slow down and deal with stress is vital when they need some space to breathe. Online yoga classes, meditation sessions and mindfulness exercises are all great ways to combat stress, calm nerves and increase focus.

With Cademi you can send your employees micro-learning lessons with mindfulness exercises when you know that they are coming up to a client pitch or to their end-of-month reporting periods. You can add links to morning breathing exercises to alleviate anxiety if they’re leading a meeting and also recommend energy-boosting desk-exercises to avoid that afternoon lull.

Long hours

In their 2020 study, Gallup found a connection between the number of hours people work and burnout. Although they found that occupational burnout wasn’t solely caused by over-work, their employee burnout statistics show that the number of hours people work each week does matter, with burnout risk increasing significantly when employees exceed 50 hours and climbing even higher after 60 hours.

Agency working is one of those professions where there’s very little ‘off-duty’ time. Whatever part you have to play in the agency team, you have this tiny pocket-sized computer, aka your phone, which helps you to stay connected way past the normal office hours. Back and forth emails, even after 10pm are the norm in many agencies nowadays, which has a knock-on effect on both sleep quality as well as family relationships.

How you can help:

We all have limits. Our brains simply can’t function properly after too much time emailing, being on the phone or staring into our screens. Your agency employees need real breaks – ones when they can totally disconnect from their work.

This disconnection time can be spent learning a new hobby, reading up about an existing passion, exercising or learning a new language. And, it should be something that not only do you encourage, but that you facilitate.

Also, encourage time off – holidays, duvet days and lunch breaks included. Schedule breaks even when your employees are working remotely and encourage them to mute their emails and calls for the duration of that break. Many agency staff don’t take time off for fear of looking lazy or uncommitted, so make this mandatory and enforce it as part of your company culture.

Your staff are sure to feel more replenished and more productive if they take small, bite-sized chunks out of their day to focus on things other than work.

Lack of empowerment

Empowerment plays a huge role in ensuring your employees are motivated and connected to their roles. Feeling powerless and micro-managed makes the possibility of burnout much more likely.

Micromanaged workers are those who aren’t encouraged to make their own decisions or who have bosses who are incapable of letting go. This is a common delusion, especially in smaller agencies, where business owners feel that no one can do anything as well as they can. Have you ever done a task yourself just because it’s easier than showing your employee how do it? Do you frequently find yourself getting involved in disputes between your staff members? If so, you might just be one of those micro-managing bosses!

How you can help:

The key to empowering your staff is to give them the resources they need to develop themselves and the tools to work more autonomously.

Regular training via engaging platforms can upskill staff on pretty much any topic imaginable. From better communication skills to motivating a team and handling conflict, to more specific task-related competencies.

Train your team members regularly so they can handle problems on their own – which helps to build trust and open communication.

Agency employees who are confident and empowered will be ready to work harder and smarter for you.

Lack of feedback and recognition

Even though you might be training your employees to handle situations on their own, this doesn’t mean they don’t need support, feedback and recognition. If you don’t touch base regularly, then you leave them without the feedback they need to improve and grow.

If employees are unsure, scrambling for answers or repeating mistakes without you noticing, then this is a recipe for burnout disaster. Similarly, if they are thriving, succeeding and pushing boundaries without you realising, then they will equally burnout through lack of recognition.

How you can help:

Check in with employees regularly, daily in fact. It doesn’t have to be face-to-face, it can be via email, phone or messenger. If you fear that an employee is struggling in one area of their work, you can offer links to relevant training so that they can strive for improvement in this area.

Similarly, offering feedback on training is important too so that employees can track where they are in their development journey.

Recognition is not a one-size-fits-all solution, however, and it’s important to recognise different ways of rewarding people based on what makes them tick. It’s about finding little ways to say “thank you” and “well done”. Hidden hero awards, personalised cards, free lunches, duvet days, shopping vouchers and money towards a personal goal can all go a long way in rewarding loyalty in your team.

Cademi approaches recognition and rewards through gamification. The platform is powered by science and psychometric analysis to make learning a daily habit and rewards success where applicable – in other ways, we know what makes your employees tick personally, and how to reward them appropriately.

No flexibility

Strict policies on working hours, illness, personal calls or work breaks can cause your employees a lot of stress. After all, we all have lives outside of office hours and sometimes those boundaries overlap.

If your employees can never take a day off, catch a proper lunchtime away from their computer or leave work early to make an appointment or their kid’s football match, they’ll burn out quickly with the exhaustion of trying to balance everything.

We know, especially after this year, that flexibility needs to be a priority. Even if your staff aren’t yet back in the office, they may be dealing with children, family stress, technology issues and a poor working environment at home. So, remember that life comes first.

How you can help:

Managing a team of unique individuals within an agency environment means unique situations will no-doubt arise. Not all of these situations can be accounted for in your agency policies, so allow some flexibility for them to be edited if needed. If you have hired people who you trust, then trust them to use their best judgment, and to find the best way to manage their own work/life balance.

Make your training programme flexible too. Make training available in bite-sized pieces, and accessible from any device, anywhere in the world. That way your team can log in and learn at a time that suits them, during a period of the day when they feel most able to centre their attention.

If you are keen to find out more about Cademi and how our Holistic Training Platform could be implemented to enable and empower your agency employees, then here are two ways to get started:

Book a free demo to play around with the platform
Start your free 14-day full access trial today

Cademi provides the platform, you see the results.