- The business is failing. Maybe failing is too harsh of a word. However, they are having a hard time keeping their best contracts, and they are unable to offer proper compensation for great employees as a result. I’m not going to place the blame on the client, agency leadership, or the economy, because it’s really a combination of all three factors. The parent company, Wipro, also has a hand in the dysfunction.
- Roles are not well-defined, and effort level varies depending on the person. This is a problem at pretty much every company, but it’s particularly apparent on Designit’s largest marketing account. I’ve seen many teammates (and myself) doing the work of multiple roles. These setups tend to be thought of with promotions coming at the end of them, but that never materialized during my time at Designit. While hybrid roles are great from a company standpoint to get free labor from top performers, it is not sustainable, and the best performers will leave for market rates. This causes the remaining team members to have to pick up the slack, which sets them up to fail.
- The client is unfocused and is oftentimes doing adult daycare busy work. Endless powerpoints and meetings about nothing, endless changes in process, name changes for no reason, tooling adaptations for no reason, etc. This is not a results-oriented environment in the slightest, and that makes driving impact pretty much impossible. This seems to be a top-down problem that exists high up in the client’s hierarchy, but it certainly affects employee mentality at the agency as well.
- There is a massive disconnect between the largest account and every other account at the agency. The agency would work on projects without tapping any of the team members working on the large account. Whole RFPs for new business from the largest client would be drawn out by “creatives” at the agency without consulting the teams working closest to the work itself. This leads to disjointed proposals that no client is going to approve of. Not only for new business - no one talks about the largest client and the work the team does at all during any of the North America all-hands meetings. It may as well be a completely different company. Since there is no connection between teams and accounts at the agency, there really isn’t any flexibility to move between accounts if something isn’t working for you. When switching to a new account is brought up to someone on the team I was on, the default response was just to laugh, which I think says a lot.
- I touched on this earlier, but everyone is far too focused on process at this agency, and not enough on making sure the client is successful. Meetings about meetings are commonplace. Things take months to get approved and put into motion. Everything seems to be about doing things with as little effort as possible, which is a proven path to mediocre results. Things move too slowly and frankly, the results aren’t there to justify the approach.
- Compensation is slighly below market rate. There hasn’t been any meaningful inflation/CoL adjustment in years, so this isn’t surprising. The agency will continue losing good talent until this gets addressed.
