Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
The Round Table
When it comes to surveys, you tend to love them or hate them.
Either you find them a handy outlet for sharing your thoughts, or you feel like they are a drain on your time—especially when you are digitally smacked in the face via the screens of your everyday devices with a “Thank you for attending/shopping at X. We would like you to tell us how we can improve and participate in our survey,” along with the occasional “And you could be in with a chance of winning X amount!”
At TGM, though, we love a good survey, particularly about how we can improve our company.
In fact, we love them so much that we do them every year.
Enter: The TGM Annual Round Table.
What We Talked About...
In previous years, many companies have been quite ‘hush hush’ about how things work behind the scenes.
In this day and age, when company culture is more important than ever for employees, we’re seeing a lot more transparency in this area. Publicised salaries, gender pay gap reports—you name it, it’s out there.
Here at The Good Marketer, we have something called The Round Table, similar to The Red Table Talk, but without Jada Pickett-Smith and just like her, we are open to discussing our opinions.
We’ve been holding the Round Table for some years now. It is essentially a completely open space, free of consequence and judgment, where our team can talk about TGM—what they like and what they would like to see change.
Pre-discussion, we send out an anonymous survey with a few key questions to get a feel for the basics. We provide statements and ask people how they feel on a scale of “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.
This year, though, we’ve decided to go public with our results.
What We Think...
What We Learned...
It was amazing to see, at a glance, where our strengths were and where we could focus our efforts on making sustainable improvements.
Here are a few of our key takeaways and solutions we are exploring…
There is work to be done to provide company support for work-related stress.
We are increasing our company subscription for Spill (an online therapy platform) and sending our line managers off for some extra training on how to facilitate conversations and sustainable solutions around workplace stress.
It also became clear that many are finding their workload difficult to manage.
We have added some extra rocket fuel to our hiring efforts after opening the discussion to which roles the team felt were the highest priority. We are also reviewing our internal processes and efficiencies on this basis. Finally, we have started circulating a shared document where team members can add their tips & tricks for how to manage that feeling of overwhelm that is bound to pop up here and there in any job (but especially those in an agency!).
The list goes on, and we’ve noted one or two (or ten) more things we are looking at with a view to making TGM an even better place to work.
- Time to focus on brainstorming & creative thinking.
- Greater recognition of heavy workloads.
- Bonuses.
- Communication from the top down.
- Additional support for Execs/Assistants.
- Advanced payment of shoot expenses.
Listen, there is no such thing as a “Perfect Digital Marketing Agency” or a “Perfect Company”, but for us, being open with our team – and the public – is a key step on our journey to becoming the best workplace we can be.
“It was so insightful for me to understand my colleagues and TGM the business much better. Everyone’s voices were encouraged and were genuinely understood and taken on board. TGM taking their time to understand what our gripes and grins are as individuals as well as collectively truly makes us feel valued as well as making us more valuable as colleagues and employers,”
– Kojo Achampong, Paid Media Director – The Good Marketer.
