Employee turnover is a huge cost to any business. These costs have the potential to be incredibly damaging to marketing agencies. It hurts their productivity, increases costs, and can even compromise client relationships. 

Unfortunately, it’s a problem likely to get worse. 

You may have heard about the great resignation, but what is it, and what can you do to stop your digital marketing agency staff from leaving?

What Is the “Great Resignation” and What Is Causing It?

They’re calling it the “great resignation.” Workers are quitting jobs in the millions. In July alone, 4.4 million employees walked away from their workplace, while layoffs and discharges remained the same.

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are two distinct trends with mid-career employees resigning in large volumes. Employees working in the tech and health fields are the next biggest group to join the great resignation.

Why are staff leaving? Well, one reason is the shift towards remote working and burnout in high-stress industries. Burnout is a factor for Generation Z age groups too and this group also wants greater flexibility and control over their schedules, and they’re dissatisfied with their work/life balance.

Tips to Find and Keep Employees

Every company wants to attract happy, loyal employees, but if the great resignation is anything to go by, workers are feeling unfilled and unhappy. However, you can introduce procedures to limit the possibility of staff living, like:

• making a point of understanding your employees
• offering greater flexibility where you can
• recognizing early stages of burnout and acting before it becomes a crisis or resignation issue
• introducing a talent retention program
• optimizing the employee experience

As Brain Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice, says:

“Ultimately, employees want their 9-to-5 to look like their 5-to-9, and the organizations that deliver on that idea will gain a competitive advantage.”

Here are ten more tips to help attract and keep employees at your digital marketing agency during the great resignation.

1. Offer Remote or Hybrid Work for Eligible Employees

It’s official. The move towards remote working is gaining ground, and there seems to be no stopping it as more workers and companies realize the benefits of working from home.

A 2021 Upwork study shows 40.7 million Americans expect to be working remotely by 2026. 

That’s a considerable increase from the previous survey when only 22.9 percent of those questioned could imagine themselves working remotely.

If your agency is considering more remote working or a hybrid model, here are some tips to consider:

• Provide support: Do employees have the technological and managerial support they need to thrive when they’re working remotely?
• Maximize collaboration: Just because workers are in different locations, don’t let collaboration go out of the window!
• Introduce team building: Use team-building sessions, so employees get the opportunity to connect and catch up.

Finally, talk to staff and find out which way of working they prefer, and if this is workable for your agency.

2. Offer Unlimited PTO

Under an unlimited paid time off (PTO) approach, employers don’t give staff a preassigned number of paid days off. Instead, they have the opportunity to take time out as they choose, provided it doesn’t impact the business.

Netflix and Github are just two companies using PTO, and research shows that workers only take marginally more time off.

If this sounds like an approach that might work for you, here are some tips:

• Set a minimum amount of days for the year and individual stretches: Remote.com has a minimum of 20 days a year for its staff.
• Encourage employee feedback: Is PTO something they want to see? See how PTO fits in with your overall company policies, values, and the way it works. Could this be a good model for your agency?
• Have goals in place: Are employees still reaching their aims and responsibilities regardless of their time away?

3. Promote a Healthy Work/Life Balance

Work-life balance has become a more significant issue as the pace of life changes. For some, work has become more demanding as the needs of employers and clients intensify. This increased demand puts stress on workers to meet those goals, which leads to less time at home and less satisfaction with their jobs.

However, when there’s a better work-life balance, things get better, and it helps in all areas, including:

• employee satisfaction 
• happiness
• productivity
• motivation
• efficiency 

It’s a win-win for everyone.

How do you ensure a better work-life balance for staff? 

Again, it’s understanding what works for them, and it’s about being realistic as an employer. No manager should be expecting their team to be “always-on” and ever available. Appreciate that staff value their downtime just as much as you do.

Additionally, if the workload is getting too much for staff and you need an extra pair of hands, consider outsourcing to an agency.

4. Increase Compensation

As digital marketing becomes more competitive, so does the need to offer employees higher salaries.

If an employee has an excellent track record and consistently delivers results, it makes sense to offer them a pay increase. If you don’t value them, then they are going to look for more rewarding positions.

When looking at pay increases, consider your employee’s contributions and how you can reflect this in their salary.

Indeed suggests providing some context to the pay increase. For example, is it because of their contributions or just rising in line with inflation and cost of living? Indeed also recommends presenting the increase as a dollar amount rather than a percentage.

5. Provide Excellent Healthcare

Providing excellent healthcare for employees can help companies to:

• attract better talent
• reduce employee turnover rates
• cut down on the cost of hiring new people through employee retention
• make your company a more attractive employer for job seekers

Ultimately, when you offer quality, affordable healthcare for employees, you’re more likely to attract and retain talented staff.

In addition, a good healthcare program positively impacts the business and can potentially decrease the risk of absenteeism and lost productivity.

However, don’t forget the importance of having great health and mental health policies by setting up health programs. 

For instance, Citibank offers rewards for staff taking part in health assessments and activities. Have an open-door policy for staff who may feel they need mental or emotional support, too.

6. Ensure Your Managers Motivate

Effective managers aren’t just great leaders and communicators. They are awesome motivators too.

Employees want to do their best work for motivational managers because they feel inspired to. Additionally, motivated employees are easier to engage and perhaps have an improved chance of staying in their roles.

Remember, though, management isn’t just about rallying staff on. 

It’s about providing positive, constructive feedback, being empathic, and accepting that sometimes a manager just needs to step back and let employees do their work.

As Lori Scherwin, founder of Strategize That in New York City, says, “Top performers want space to be their best.”

Keep that thought in mind.

7. Facilitate a Fun Working Environment, But Don’t Force It!

A fun working environment can make people feel connected to the company and their work, leading to higher morale and better productivity.

One way to improve the fun factor at work is through creating an enjoyable office space with areas for socializing. Hosting team-building events or fun quizzes can work well. Office days out are another option or try some virtual team-building exercises.

However, remember everyone is different, and not all employees enjoy the same kind of fun. Make your chosen activities optional and find opportunities for less outgoing employees where you can.

8. Give Your Employees Space to Grow

One of the most important and undervalued aspects of a work environment is the opportunity for growth and development. All employees need to feel empowered enough to take on new challenges and to learn new skills.

There are several ways you can encourage employee growth, like:

• Training courses and letting employees choose areas they want to learn more about.
• Encouraging volunteering. Perhaps get the company involved in a community project, allowing employees to see the difference they’re making and how it benefits others.
• Give employees the tools they need to develop their career and take it to the next level.
• Talk to each employee so you know how they see their job going and how you can help them.

9. Consider Your Company’s Values

Company values are the foundation of an organization. Values provide meaning to a company’s work, guide its decisions, and generate momentum for its continuing growth.

A company’s values are far more than just words on a page or a mission statement. They reflect how the company lives its mission day-to-day by how it treats others and operates in the world, and they’re crucial to employees

Company values ensure staff work toward common goals, aid decision-making, and communication while motivating and engaging employees.

If your company values need some work, there are some great examples online to guide your way.

10. Engage and Reward Your Employees

Employee engagement is crucial to retention and job satisfaction. Unfortunately, a Gallup survey shows workplace engagement is falling.

What can you do to improve engagement? Well, according to Gallup, one of the top reasons is unclear communication. Ensuring clarity in all your conversations with staff at all times is a good starting point.

Additionally, you can:

• Invite feedback.
• Give staff training when they need it.
• Ensure staff knows what you expect of them.
• Allow employees to shine and assign them tasks most suited to their talents.
• Ensure your team has the resources to do their jobs effectively.

Another way to keep staff motivated is to reward them for doing well. Incentives can improve morale and productivity and help to retain talent.

Here’s how you can use incentives:

• Reward your staff for reaching sales goals and best sales performance, but don’t make it uber-competitive.
• Offer incentives at the end of project completion.
• Provide rewards for consistent hard work, so staff knows you appreciate their efforts.

Great Resignation Frequently Asked Questions

& 

The Great Resignation Conclusion

The proof is there in the stats. Employees are leaving companies in their droves. 

It’s not apparent yet if the great resignation is something that continues in future years. However, it’s happening here and now, and you ought to consider introducing steps if you want to keep staff at your digital marketing agency.

That includes introducing flexible, remote working if it’s suitable, having excellent healthcare, and paying staff what they’re worth.

Is the great resignation impacting your digital marketing agency? Tell us how below.

The Codex Seraphinianus is one of life’s stranger things, a rare tome tomb created in 1981 by Italian artist, Luigi Serafini. His work took over thirty months to complete, and depicts an odd world within its pages. His goal was to create a new Encyclopedia of a strange fantastic land similar to how a child would see a book for the first time. The imagery would transport you to that state of wonder had as a child. The Codex approaches this new dimension in an index style made up of 11 chapters, illustrated in ink and color pencil and hand written in a code made up of a Cipher Alphabet. His writing system is believed by some to be a false writing system, modeled on ordinary Western-style, being right to left with a good mix of upper and lower case letters and common punctuation but with the looping styles of the words to be somewhat reminiscent of the Sinhala Alphabet as well. The book splits into two main parts, the first of which describes the natural world; flora, fauna and physics. As well as the second part; mainly exploring culture, aspects of human life (or closely related): clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and more.

It is all too easy to get lost within the pages while exploring these new forms of almost familiar terrestrial life. Whether it be a couple shapeshifting into a Crocodile during intercourse or a strange Utopia built from impossible architecture, where the rainbows rain down colorful inhabitances upon the land. The bizarre machines or what appears to be a skin trading market, this book truly can keep your attention for days. The Codex has influenced many fellow artists throughout the years, such as French Choreographer, Philippe Découflé. The Codex inspired Philippe to create many interruptive dances such as Tricodex in 2005 and many more. Although it is said that the Codex holds no hidden coded messages within, says Luigi in a talk held at Oxford University, Society of Bibliophiles May 11, 2009. This could also be a clever use of disinformation used to lead one away from the path. This statement has whoever been discredited, where in future talks about the forthcoming edition Serafini claims, while writing the manuscript he had found and adopted a stray white cat. He states that the white cat that joined him in Rome telepathically communicated what to draw and write as Serafini did the labor. When asked about what the importance of the Codex was today, Serafini told Wired Magazine Italy. “Its popularity rose steadily for many years and fell as it went out of print, now the new edition revived it. It’s a book that speaks about crisis and about communication and it’s quite apocalyptical, suited for the present times. Anything can happen inside the Codex, just like in the Internet.”

The Codex will forever prove much more mysterious as years push on and Luigi Serafini keeps adding to it in each new edition, further intensifying the strangeness of this Rorschach like text. We all see the work differently and will always do so, as the book will take you on a journey through illustration as the written bulk of it will never be known. You can find pdf and image copies from the Codex all over the internet if you would like to check it out and for those with some money to burn I believe the first edition is only a few thousand dollars.

The post The Codex Seraphinianus: A Door into another Dimension appeared first on Right Where You Are Sitting Now.

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There’s a difference between knowing something and living as if it were true. At the end of 2013, these truths are all lingering on that awkward threshold, for me anyway.

1) The sooner you do something, the more of your life you get to spend with that thing done — even though it takes less effort (or at least no more) than it will later. It’s the ultimate sure-thing investment and I pass it up all the time.

2) I never regret working out. I can’t count the number of times I’ve negotiated with myself to work out the next day instead of today because I’m worried it will be a “bad workout.” I seldom have a bad day on a day that I work out.

3) Whenever I’m playing with my phone I am only shortening my life. A smartphone is useful if you have a specific thing you want to do, but ninety per cent of the time the thing I want to do is avoid doing something harder than surfing Reddit. During those minutes or hours, all I’m doing is dying.

4) Nothing makes me more productive and in-the-moment than a clean house. There is mind-clearing magic in cleanliness. Waking up in a house where everything is put away is a glorious feeling. There seem to be more possibilities in the air, and all my things seem more useful.

5) Minute-for-minute, nothing I do is more rewarding than meditation. Even after just a very short session, it reliably makes me better at everything, especially making decisions. It lets me do my best. Yet I still do it only intermittently.

6) Creative work is something that can be done at any time. It’s no different than any other kind of work. Inspiration is nice but completely optional. I’ve almost completely come around on this one in 2013. But sometimes the Four Horsemen still trick me.

7) Acting the way you want to feel usually works. When I feel crappy just before I have to go do something, if I decide to act as if I am happy for a while (even though I’m not) I usually end up feeling happy after not too long, or at least much less crappy. This is straight out of Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and it’s an extremely powerful thing to experiment with. [More on this in an upcoming post.]

8) Ninety-five per cent of my happiness comes from having a home, a functioning body and something to eat. I live in utter luxury, by any sensible standard of what “luxury” is. If I am unhappy it’s because I’ve lost perspective about the other five per cent. 

9) Our minds are geared to manage much less than we typically end up managing. Modern people have so many options they conflict with each other in almost every area. The fewer things I have, the more I enjoy my things. The fewer goals I have, the better I do them. The smaller the portion size, the better food tastes.

10) The quickest and most reliable path to personal improvement is to do the things on my list that I resist most. Internal resistance should be taken as a big red sign guaranteeing rapid growth and new capabilities. Given my experience with the ecstasy that comes with overcoming resistance, logically I should be attracted to it by now.

11) All you need to do to finish things is keep starting them until they’re done. The idea of doing something in its entirety always seems hard. But it’s easy to commit to simply starting on something, and then you’re past most of the resistance. Continuing is just as easy. (Thanks to Leo Babauta for this one.)

12) Whenever I think I’m mad at a person, I’m really just mad at a situation. I’m mad because suddenly life requires something new of me, and it’s easy to implicate a person who contributed to that situation. I want the situation to be responsible for fixing itself, so I attribute it to someone else’s moral failing, and then I don’t have to feel responsible for this new problem of mine.

13) Ultimately, to get something done you have to forget about everything else while you do it. The mind is always telling you that 85 things are on fire and you need to do everything now. However you respond emotionally to it, to move things along you have to pick one to deal with, and let the rest continue burning while you do.

14) The most consistently joyful activities for me are visiting with other people and reading books. Aside from earning a living and a bit of travel there isn’t much else I need in my life. Somehow these two things are still not clear priorities. What are yours?

15) If I find myself in an argument, I’ve made a mistake. It doesn’t matter whose position makes more sense, because by the time it’s an argument any real communication has ended. Marshall Rosenberg’s brilliant method of Nonviolent Communication is a far more useful default response than argument, but I often forget it completely.

16) Few things matter long-term other than relationships, health, personal finance and personal growth. Crises in almost every other area turn over so quickly there’s not much reason to get upset at them. Interestingly, those four are the areas that probably contribute most to happiness in the short term too.

If this list is different at the end of 2014 then it will have been a good year. What’s in the same category for you?

Goodbye 2013, you were great.

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Photo by David Cain