Why Great Agencies Can Become Bad Places To Work
An agency can be producing the best work of its life and be a difficult place to spend a Tuesday. Those two facts sit together more often than the industry admits.
The confusion comes from treating culture as an output of success. In practice the celebrated years are frequently the hardest ones internally, because the same conditions that produce a breakthrough, ambition beyond the resourcing, a few people carrying an unreasonable load, will also produce exhaustion if nobody resets afterwards.
How it happens without anyone intending it
Success raises the bar and the staffing stays the same. The agency wins the account it has been chasing for three years and staffs it from the same floor. A standard is set during a period of unusual effort and then quietly becomes the baseline, so the extraordinary push turns into the normal week.
Nobody announces this. It arrives as a series of individually defensible decisions, each of which is easier to say yes to than the last.
The work got better and the week got worse, and the agency only measured one of them.
The signals that appear first
Not resignations. Those come last. What comes first is the quiet withdrawal of discretionary effort: the person who used to send a second idea unprompted sends only what was asked. Reviews start running on time because nobody is arguing. Somebody stops correcting a small thing they used to care about.
All of this looks like a smoothly functioning department, which is why leadership frequently misreads it as progress.
What separates the agencies that recover
A deliberate stop. After a big win or a brutal quarter, the recovery has to be scheduled with the same seriousness as the work, because it will not occur naturally in a business that always has another deadline.
And a leader willing to say out loud that a period was too hard. That admission costs nothing and buys back an extraordinary amount, because the exhausting part of a difficult stretch is rarely the hours. It is the suspicion that nobody above you noticed.
More on Ad Tribe Work Life.