Work Life Balance Archives

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5 simple exercises to kick-start your creativity

April 25, 2022 No Comments

The pandemic has prompted us to re-evaluate our approaches and philosophies toward work—not just our work-life balance, but our working lives as a whole. When the world could so suddenly change, what is that we value most?

In August 2021, 4.3 million workers quit their jobs, another dramatic step during the so-called “Great Resignation.” I have explored a variety of creative outlets over the last few years, from creating music to an online design store to dabbling NFTs. When I tell others about my various creative endeavors, many people respond that they “wish they could do something like that” and tell me they don’t believe they are a creative person. Creativity is a skill that can be developed over time, and it can lead you down paths and into careers you never considered.

Create for yourself first

One of the biggest obstacles to creativity is fear, and worrying about what other people think of your work. When I used to create music, I would ask my friends what they thought. I would cling to every piece of feedback and would be hurt when someone didn’t like the piece of art I had worked so hard on. It would paralyze me from releasing songs and the music would change into something that didn’t feel authentic. I quickly learned that when creating art, don’t ask for feedback, make what feels authentic and true to you.

Octavia Goredema, author of Prep, Push, Pivot: Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women, echoes the sentiment saying, “Don’t get attached to validation. Often, people won’t get what you’re doing while you’re creating something, or even after you’ve created something. That’s okay. Validation often comes long after the hard work is done. Not all opinions are equal.” Value your own opinion and you will feel assured about whatever you create.

Try new skills you believe you’re bad at

We tell ourselves we can’t do things before we even consider them a possibility. Then it becomes a habit, involuntary: “I’m not musical,” “I can’t paint,” “I don’t understand poetry,” etc. We believe these things because we may have tried these things once when we were schoolchildren and did not immediately excel or show talent with. I can vouch for this idea of charging ahead. I began making music with zero experience, purely because I love music and now my songs are considered for placement in television shows and movies.

Practice visualization. Mehta Mehta, a global executive creative director at Hogarth Worldwide, suggests, “Visualize in your mind, the moment, the position or the feeling you want to achieve. See it in detail, move around it, make it real in your mind and explore the many possibilities.”

Build a community of fellow creatives

Although people often view creativity as an individual effort, that creatives may start for themselves, many creative people I’ve talked to have a community of creative colleagues they engage with on some level or another. These circles are composed of cohorts they trust to bounce ideas off of.

Justin Gignac, a founder, and CEO of Working Not Working, a community for creatives, says, “My most successful personal projects were ideas I sat on for months, even years. The ones that kept popping back up and I couldn’t shake them. I’d tell my friends about the ideas so much that they’d finally ask, ‘That’s great, man, but when are you going to do it?’”

Inspiration can spring from those moments when your friends push you to try something new. Collaboration can also move this process along.

“Learn from the best,” says Meng Kuok, Founder of Bandlab, an app that helps those with no musical experience to create their own songs. “Listen, watch, consume whatever you can find online. Imitate, copy from your favourite artists note for note, stroke by stroke—the more colours you add to your palette by learning from the best, the more ideas and options you’ll have at your disposal when you try to paint your own picture.”

Make the time for yourself

Creativity requires daily practice, and it’s important to put in the work. Dedicating some time each day is ideal, but that’s not always conducive to every individual’s creative process. Whether it’s a small daily practice or carving out full days for yourself, it’s important to make the time.

“Every day, I challenge myself to come up with a list of 10 new ideas to grow my business,” says Ajay Yadav, founder of Simplified, an application that allows non-creatives and creatives alike to create their own graphics. You don’t have to be lifting heavy weights every day, even a little quick exercise can help keep your creativity fresh.

Build up to greatness gradually

You’ll find that even the smallest steps can lead to big strides in progress. Chase Jarvis, CEO of CreativeLive and the author of Creative Calling, underscores the importance of patient effort: “Don’t underestimate the power of creating something small every day, whether that’s a photograph, doing something interesting in the kitchen, or picking up that dusty guitar in the corner. Even for just a moment.”

No matter what your schedule is or what you have going on, it’s possible to bring your dream projects to life. When you dive in and face new challenges, you lead yourself down a path of a more purposeful career and life.

Feature Image Credit: Elīna Arāja/Pexels

By Arianna O’Dell

Arianna O’Dell is the founder of Airlink Marketing, a digital design and marketing agency helping companies create digital programs that drive results. When she’s not working with clients or traveling, you’ll find her making fun gifts at Ideas By Arianna and songwriting at Outsourced Feelings. More

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

Try these remote work “life hacks” to boost focus, ergonomics and well-being

June 17, 2021 No Comments

By R. Dallon Adams

From virtual networking opportunities to strategies focused on fostering a healthier work-life balance, these remote work tips could optimize your virtual routine.

In the last year, many professionals have transitioned to the home office with varying degrees of success. Compared to the traditional work environment, telecommuting comes with its own unique set of challenges. This includes ergonomic considerations when designing a workspace, crafting new pre-and post-work routines to more abstract considerations around work-life balance. We spoke with a number of academics, executives and remote workers to compile a list of WFH tips to enhance the virtual 9-to-5 grind.

Work from home tips: Understanding your tendencies

Before adding new strategies to your virtual workflow, it could be a good idea to take an introspective look at your approach to telecommuting and work boundaries, in general. In more basic terms: What type of remote worker are you?

Timothy Golden, a professor at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discussed tips to structure the workday based on these preferences and traits for two general types of remote workers: “Segmentors” and integrators.

“Segmentation and integration of work and home lives has to do with how comfortable people are with mixing these two aspects of their lives together. Some prefer to keep them separate and distinct, while others are comfortable carrying out both at the same time,” Golden said.

These segmentors prefer to separate their work and home lives, Golden explained, and as a result, he “often” finds these remote workers “are sure” to log off “after work hours and refrain from checking” messages in their personal time. Additionally, Golden said segmentors are “disciplined in their work habits” and “reserve work time for work, and family time for family.”

Conversely, integrators are fine with mixing their home life with the professional workday, he explained, noting that successful telecommuters with a penchant for integration “permit their work to spill over into their family lives” and do not mind answering person calls on the clock or check the inbox after logging off for the day. Although there are integration caveats to consider.

“While integrators are more comfortable with letting work spill over into their family lives and vice versa, they still need to carefully balance the demands from both their work and their family,” Golden said.

Ergonomics, movement and focus

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations switched to virtual operations on short notice. While some companies offered stipends to help employees festoon their remote office, many people were left to finagle workstations with in-situ materials a la kitchen tables, stackable accouterments and more.

To this point, Chad Henriksen, the director of WorkSiteRight at Northwestern Health Sciences University, discussed ways to ergonomically utilize everyday items around the house to complement remote workflows. This includes using an ironing board as a standing desk if so inclined.

Additionally, Henriksen recommended following the “90-degree rule,” and this means ensuring a person’s “arms and legs are parallel to the floor” and “as close to a 90-degree angle at the elbow and the knee as possible.” Henriksen also suggested taking steps to ensure your eyes are looking straight ahead.

“Keep your eyes in line with the screen. If you are slightly looking down or gazing up at your screen, use some books or a box to raise your screen to the proper height,” he said.

Additionally, Henriksen suggested taking “micro-breaks” for approximately 10 to 15 seconds every half hour to stretch, add activity to the workday and “refresh” a person’s focus.

As a “bonus tip,” he also encouraged people to take their meetings standing up and or tuning in to calls while on a walk to incorporate movement to the task.

Tweaking the daily commute

The lack of a daily commute is one of the top remote work perks and this can save some professionals multiple hours each week. Although for some, this dedicated buffer space does serve as a beneficial time to ramp up and wind down before and after work. Gabriel Dungan, founder and CEO of ViscoSoft, said that he has incorporated a “fake commute” of sorts into the remote workday.

“Rather than just rolling out of bed and immediately checking Slack and email, I take at least 30 minutes to ‘commute’ to my home office. Instead of driving, I take a walk around my neighbourhood and listen to music or a podcast,” Dungan said. “This act of leaving the house, getting fresh air, and ‘commuting’ means that when I get back home, I’ve signalled to myself that it’s time to be at work.”

Over the last year, the home has pulled double and triple duty as a residence, virtual learning center and home office for many households, blurring the lines between personal and professional spaces.

Psychotherapist Angela Ficken who has been working remotely for the last 12 months, made note of some of the benefits of telecommuting while also detailing the downsides, stating that many people have difficulty setting boundaries between home and work life.

“Responding to emails at all hours and not shutting off notifications after regular business hours, all of this means that they are now working longer, which increases stress, and they are now not honouring their own time,” she said.

A few strategies Ficken suggested include turning off inbox notifications after 5 pm, scheduling short periodic breaks to stretch, get some air and enjoy a snack. Ficken also recommended remote workers plan at least one “fun thing to look forward to each week.”

“Maybe that’s seeing a friend, trying a new recipe, or going for a bike ride. You don’t need to move a mountain to feel better. These are small steps that do help increase self-care, overall wellbeing, and can help you manage your stress,” Ficken.

Some remote workers are devising clever tactics to help compartmentalize and separate the workday from their personal lives. Nicole Graham, a lifestyle and relationship coach at Womenio, has “adorned” the office door with various signs to signify when the workspace is offline or open for business.

“As ridiculous as it may sound, if you promise yourself that you will not work once the sign reads “closed,” it will work,” Graham said.

“It’s easy to want to appear productive when you work from home, and it’s simple to let your work time spill over into your personal life. But before you know it, you’re up until the wee hours of the morning, wondering where the day went,” Graham said. “Working from home, I’ve discovered that having clear boundaries between work and personal life makes me [a] lot more productive and happier.”

Expanding your professional network

Compared to the traditional office environment, working from home lacks the social interactions and haphazard water-cooler conversations afforded by on-site work. Interestingly, about half of professionals believe telecommuting has negatively impacted their careers and many feel as though working from home has reduced internal and external networking opportunities, According to a 2020 Blind survey.

Alison French, CEO and co-founder of Emerged, a healthcare-focused SaaS company, made note of the phrase “your network is your net worth” and detailed a few remote networking strategies to consider.

“Working from home can stifle the growth of your network so take advantage of university alumni groups or professional organizations to maximize your future net worth,” French said.

Additionally, French said people are “never too busy to say yes to an invite to coffee, lunch, etc.” adding that these social opportunities “are key to your sanity if you plan to WFH for the long haul.” She also suggested creating a network of other remote works in a person’s industry.

“Start a group chat or Slack channel. A quick Slack or group chat to share a joke, idea or vent help break up the monotony of spending the day alone in your house,” French said.

Emphasizing empathy

Anna Lyons, senior vice president of people and culture at Alegeus, said she encourages employees to have “realistic” remote work expectations and this includes making “concise and focused” to-do lists covering the “critical” tasks so people can “feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of every day.”

The last year has come with no shortage of stressors for remote teams wrestling with new collaboration tools, less than optimal work setups and technical issues amid a global pandemic.

Speaking to pandemic-related stressors, Lyons suggested that remote workers “lead with empathy and understanding – for ourselves and our colleagues.”

“Work-life balance doesn’t exist in COVID (cue the screaming child in the background). When we recognize that, we can give ourselves and others the space and grace we need,” she said.

Feature Image Credit: GettyImages/filadendron

By R. Dallon Adams

Sourced from TechRepublic

In News

Will marketing agencies always be nothing but sweatshops?

August 9, 2017 No Comments

By Samuel Scott.

There are so many slaves in the marketing industry that we should create an underground railroad beneath all our office buildings.

Following the recent news that the Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has been charged in the suicide of an illegally overworked employee, I collected stories from my own personal experiences, what I have read in the press, and what others have told me or posted online. Identifying specifics and situations have been removed. The anecdotes are from several countries.

But first, I will present data that compares agency and in-house salaries in the PR, advertising, and digital worlds in the UK, US, and Canada. (For those who want more information, the UK recruitment agency Major Players partnered with The Drum to release this 2017 salary report as well.)

The salaries

Public relations

The Works PR and communications recruitment agency in the UK conducts a salary survey every year. Here is part of the 2016 findings:

For the US, I pulled data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at PR agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

For Canada, I used the latest data from The Creative Group:

Advertising

For the UK, I could not find side-by-side comparisons of agency and in-house salaries. But I did find the following two data sets for agency positions in the Major Players 2017 salary report:

Here is the corresponding US data from PayScale. The chart in the top left corner shows the median nationwide salaries for various job titles at ad agencies. The other boxes are in-house salary details of some of those listed agency jobs:

A comparison for Canada:

Digital

For the UK, I used a report from The Candidate staffing firm:

US and Canada:

I could not find such side-by-side salary comparisons for digital agencies and in-house jobs in the United States and Canada, but I did find this 2016 agency survey conducted by Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin that includes both countries:

What it means

For most positions in all three countries, the salaries at marketing agencies are moderately to significantly lower than those for in-house positions – especially at the inexperienced end of the spectrum. The ‘gap between the rich and poor’ also seems to be larger within agencies.

However, I can attest from personal experience and stories from others that many agencies effectively give even less than these figures – and that they do it with a straight face.

Public relations

In the PR world, many agencies consist of a few well-paid strategic executives and an army of low-level, underpaid publicists who make countless phone calls and write untold numbers of emails to get as much news coverage as possible. Most are salaried but work so much overtime that they are effectively paid only a couple of pounds, dollars, or euros per hour. Many are students or recent university graduates who are officially – and often illegally – unpaid “interns” who are there only to “learn” and not work.

It’s a huge problem that no one is acknowledging – because the old have always taken advantage of the young.

Agency stress is also higher. Companies take weeks or months to hire and fire in-house staff, but many clients feel that they can change agencies within days. As a result, agency staff are under constant pressure to respond at all hours to multiple ‘bosses’. The young are on the first line of communication from clients and bear the brunt of the workload.

In a case that rattled the entertainment industry and beyond, the US studio Fox Searchlight settled a lawsuit last year from an unpaid intern who argued that he had learned nothing from his work on the film Black Swan and was essentially free labour. (For those in America who think that their rights have been violated, the Huffington Post published a list of tips on how unfairly unpaid interns can get their due wages. Here are the US Department of Labor’s specific rules.)

When any agency advertises openings for interns, the business goal is almost always to get cheap labour. No agency makes money by altruistically devoting time to teaching something to someone who will leave in six months.

Still, the problem does not stop with interns.

Advertising

Take a look at this archived Reddit thread from 2015 on “Why agency people are so unhappy.” Two of the comments summarise the problem well:

“The money just doesn’t make sense to me at this point for the amount of time you have to work sometimes… Most of my peers look at it as more of a long-term game. Low pay up front, but bust your ass long enough, and with a little luck, you’ll never have to worry about money again. That’s a little unrealistic for most of us, but the few optimists I know look at it that way.”

Here is more:

An anonymous advertising industry blogger simply called agencies “white collar sweatshops”.
MGH Advertising itself once placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal claiming that the ad industry was full of sweatshops (see main image).
“Goodvertising” author Thomas Kolster wrote in a column for The Drum that the industry needs to stop the overworking culture and make it fun and worthwhile instead.

The Twitter satire account Adweak, which is as funny as it is truthful, put it perfectly:

Digital

On the digital side of things, the situation is a little different. Online marketers should not be surprised at the low salaries at agencies. People who routinely proclaim that they know multitudes of quick and easy ‘hacks’ have only themselves to blame when their retainers and salaries are hacked down as well. Why should anyone pay a lot of money for someone to do hacks?

Instead of creating long-term, integrated campaigns, digital marketers all too often suffer from short-termism and think about numbers of social media followers, blog spam, and rankings of keywords – and those activities occur with high turnover rates that lead to lower retainers. Of course, the good agencies know that true SEO is a complicated, long-term process – but the constant promotion of ‘hacks’ by hacks is not doing anyone any favours.

So, between ad agencies and digital ones, guess which ones are paid more? Companies often choose to go with digital agencies when they need something done quickly and cheaply.

I do not want to name names, but I know the owner of a digital agency in a certain country with global, well-known clients. I respected the person greatly – until I found out that the owner was paying gross salaries of $18,000 per year to young employees in the agency’s large, metropolitan and expensive city.

A friend of mine who once worked at a ‘content agency’ in a certain country told me this:

“At my content agency, they defended the rights of the client at the expense of the employee. We had very stringent goals on a monthly basis which were impossible to meet. At one point, I had almost 30 blog articles I had to write in one month, many of which were extremely technical and required 2,000 words.

“Days off were allowed, but it was known that they give a really hard time and try to make you work on vacation days. I took off in April to be home with my family. I took one week off after being there almost a year and never even taking a sick day.

“About a week before the vacation, I get called in for a meeting: ‘Congratulations! You have a new client! They only require 12 more articles a month – starting now.’ I was furious. I had told them about my vacation and they never even took it into consideration.

“This is the situation in many agencies. More work is more money and employees are expected to go to all lengths to to get the work done without being included in the conversation in the first place and saying whether or not it’s possible to even accomplish.”

Sweatshops kill agencies

Among my circle of friends in marketing, most of us agree that agencies are places to learn early in one’s career – but that everyone should leave as quickly as possible. Those with talent and ability eventually end up in-house. (Many of us have also sworn never to work for agencies again following the bad experiences.) It’s why sweatshop conditions lead to short-term gain but long-term pain for owners – everyone ends up leaving.

And the agencies have no one but themselves to blame.

In 2016, Farmer & Company chief executive Michael Farmer, a 25-year advertising veteran, published ‘Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies‘, a book that Keenan Beasley summarises in Forbes with this question: “How did America’s darling Mad Men go from rolling in it to barely holding on?”

The answer, according to Farmer, is a combination of outdated compensation models, an inability to measure results, and the pressure to spread themselves too thin. In the Forbes interview, he also says:

“Executives at these large agencies somehow continue to eke out profits through these sweatshop conditions, and they get huge bonuses for doing so. They’re all just praying they retire before the whole system blows up.”

The timer might already be ticking. Two years ago, marketing consultant Mark W. Schaefer cited reports from the Association of National Advertisers and the Society of Digital Agencies to show in the Harvard Business Review that companies are bringing more and more marketing in-house. In the first half of 2017, an increasing number of brands purchased agencies themselves.

Gerry Moira, the retired chairman and UK director of creativity at Havas London, put it more bluntly:

“If I were starting out now, I’d much rather be client-side. It’s the future… Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops whose output has become so much more prosaic because of social media.”

So, what’s the answer?

Of course, not every agency is like the underground work camp in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Most bosses are not going to rip out hearts and wheel people down into lakes of lava – unless perhaps you work for Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.

But far too many agencies are, in fact, sweatshops.

Agencies typically compete with other agencies and in-house alternatives with either their expertises or their pricing. In other words, they market themselves by saying that they are either better or cheaper. Those that compete based on price are usually sweatshops that deserve to implode more quickly than Lindsey Lohan’s acting career.

Once the sweatshops close, the marketing agencies that remain will deserve to remain and will be those that focus on the one thing that differentiates them: creativity. Agencies need to reassert the value of creativity to get higher fees, and agency employees need to do the same to justify higher salaries.

Creative people get bored easily. It’s why agencies have typically delivered the best ad campaigns. (Just remember that the doomed Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot was created by an in-house ‘content creation arm’, a fact that reveals the results when marketers who do not know advertising are the ones creating the ads.) People who work on a single brand will eventually run out of ideas. The ability to work on multiple accounts keeps the creative juices flowing.

As I discuss as a frequent marketing speaker, the problem is that creativity is being increasingly devalued in the marketing world today. Marketers think more and more about data, automation, and analytics – and, therefore, what typically results in direct-response campaigns.

Just read this eye-rolling column from Jesse Williams of Mindbox Studios:

“Marketing is no longer design, it’s no longer messaging, it’s no longer SEO, or social, or branding. It’s data – and the rock stars of modern marketing are the ones who can find and interpret that data.”

Unfortunately, this pile of malarkey is what drives a lot of discussion today. Too many people think that they can merely press a couple buttons, insert a few keywords into website metadata, target and track the best individuals, spread blogspam, or write a social media post in a certain way and then the sales will start pouring in.

In response to such drivel, creative staff need to communicate that direct response campaigns are only one tool of many and that a lot of the data is completely wrong anyway.

Creativity can save agencies

Creativity is something that the tech world will never replace – and that creativity is what builds brands and can be used in areas ranging from television to print to social media to email. Creativity is the only advantage that premium agencies can offer because all of the others compete on price and therefore offer a value proposition that is not viable over the long term.

But I guarantee you that some martech person somewhere will soon develop something he will call ‘AI-powered content marketing’. It will purport to use artificial intelligence and real-time analysis of one thing or another to create instant blog posts designed for goals such as ranking in Google search results or maximising conversion rates.

And the posts will be loads of tosh because they will be more boring than Daft Punk’s autotuned-to-death song One More Time. They will do nothing to build brands. Creatives need to remind people that at the end of the day, the brand is the most important thing. It’s the only way that agencies – and the people who work for them – will survive.

Creative agencies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your existence. Come together to advocate for brand advertising and against the hacks the dominate modern marketing. Show the world the benefits of creativity. Demand higher fees, not lower ones. Pay your workers more, not less.

But will all of this work? I admit that I’m skeptical. As conditions will either remain the same or worsen, I think that we will instead see more unionising along the lines of what boutique consultancy Modern Craft co-founder Randy Siu recently saw in Canada:

Unless agencies can raise their fees to cover the higher salaries that workers deserve, such unionising will merely slow down the approaching agency extinction rather than prevent it.

So, in the meantime, will marketing agencies really ever stop being sweatshops by another name? Sadly, it’s as likely as a bloke building a time machine, going back to the year 2000, and dating all three members of Atomic Kitten at the same time.

But please prove me wrong.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, a global marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

By Samuel Scott

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum from Samuel Scott, a global keynote marketing speaker who is a former journalist, newspaper editor, and director of marketing and communications in the high-tech industry. Follow him @samueljscott.