Agencies have always been centered around finding inspiration and sharing it with others. As such, agency work is a field in which it’s vitally important to maintain enthusiasm and keep the creative juices flowing. Yet, with the daily grind, keeping that creative spark alive can often get pushed to the back burner.
Agencies need to ensure they are keeping their team’s creativity thriving by actively making the workplace more interesting. We asked 15 members of Forbes Agency Council to open up about their strategies for keeping creativity in the workplace high throughout the year.
Members of Forbes Agency Council offer tips for fostering creativity by making your agency a more interesting place to work.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Change Up Your Team’s Responsibilities
We believe in giving our staff new responsibilities and changing up account teams from time to time to keep our employees engaged and challenged. We also encourage the team to innovate new ideas and strategies for using our customer acquisition data and services, and we’ll often start by implementing these ideas for our own internal marketing efforts. – Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.
2. Leverage Inspiration, Connection To Wellness
We kicked off the year by awarding everyone a discovery credit to use in a way that inspires them—an Audible subscription, art books, a great read or attending a museum exhibit. For literal creative juice, we’ve been running all agency team meetings with our executive team making fresh juice. Connection to wellness and inspiration keeps the energy and creative juices flowing. – Matthew Clyde, Ideas Collide
3. Partner With Purpose-Driven Organizations
We are very intentional in ensuring that we prospect, attract and partner with brands and organizations that are purpose-driven—purposes that we believe in and are excited about. This approach to clients we desire ensures the kind of great creative opportunities that keep agencies energized, combined with brands and efforts that we, as people, can believe in. – Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding
4. Hold Lunch And Happy Hour Creative Learning Sessions
Besides our normal lunch walks, this year we are organizing regular non-client-oriented creative sessions. During these short sessions, held over lunch or happy hour, we are having small exercises that require the staff to get outside of their normal brainstorming habits and learn other ways to exercise their creativity, including one exercise that is a marketing-themed paper telephone game. – Nichole Brandt, XOMAD, LLC
5. Organize Weekly ‘Team Time’
Our agency launched a brainstorming meeting every Friday. We order in lunch and spend an hour talking through client campaign ideas or discussing industry trends. We even brought in a professor from a local university to walk us through a creative writing exercise. This year, we’re also focused on our agency’s expansion, both geographically and with new talent, so that’s bringing us new energy too. – Catherine Seeds, Ketner Group Communications
6. Reenergize And Refocus
I started this year reminding our team of just that: Our work is supposed to be creative, and a fun process promotes a better product! With so many deadlines, it can be easy to slip into “just get it done” mode. If you start to feel that way, remind yourself that an autopilot approach will have a negative effect on your work and your audience. Reenergizing and refocusing are worth the effort. – Scott Greggory, MadAveGroup
7. Develop A New Expertise
From the outside, it appears our industry evolves constantly. Yet, our core mission of “putting the right offer in front of the right audience at the right time” never changes. Our team always reenergizes when we help clients adapt this core mission to be effective in new, less-cluttered channels. This year, we’re becoming experts in creating personalized video. – Bruce McMeekin, BKM Marketing Associates, Inc.
8. Lead By Example
Enthusiasm is infectious, and I strongly believe it’s important for agency leaders to set an example for their team. Our agency was born of joyful rebellion and creativity, and I strive to honor our founding principles every day and inspire our creative culture in unexpected ways, like unique company retreats or inspirational guest speakers with a focus on culture, art and diversity. – Lisa Clunie, Joan
9. Offer A Change Of Scenery
Every quarter, we change up our seating arrangement in the office. This encourages our employees to interact, engage and collaborate with different team members. It also gives them the opportunity to clean up their desk area and get rid of accumulated papers or garbage. This year, we are excited to be moving into a new office, and I think this change of scenery will provide new inspiration! – Darian Kovacs, Jelly Digital Marketing & PR
10. Focus On Personal Professional Development
My firm is focused on personal professional development, which not only helps our clients, but our employees as well. We have a step-up training program to integrate employees so they understand how our clients think. Thinking like them helps deliver for them. Further, one-to-one professional coaching provides a safe place for employees to challenge themselves and the way they think and approach solutions. – Ilissa Miller, IMiller Public Relations
11. Create A Stimulating Environment And Promote Friendly Competition
Environment is one of the key factors in creativity. Add an arcade machine or pool table, ensure your meeting room promotes thought, etc. Also, put a program in place that forces employees to think out of the box and get engaged. We created a contest for our sales team to come up with the best call script, and whoever signed up 10 people first received 30% of the total revenue generated. – David Kley, Web Design and Company
12. Offer Flexibility And Adventure
We have contractors and freelancers around the nation, as well as our core team players. We love sharing at the beginning of meetings where we are, who we have met recently and what we have been discovering that will promote our client needs. Encouraging travel, exercise, mental acuity and personal growth are key ways we refuel our team’s creative engines. – Evangeline Sutton, Regenerative Marketing LLC
13. Encourage Creative Conflict
Personal conflicts are an HR nightmare, but conflict surrounding ideas is a foundation for creativity. Providing an ecosystem that promotes and encourages thought leadership helps support enthusiasm, ownership, leadership and creative juices. To successfully implement that, an authority figure must align employees behind a purpose and explain conflict as a necessary step to decision emergence. – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
14. Let Team Members Design Their Spaces
We ask all team members to creatively design their own workspaces to embrace individualism. By making their space their own, they can feel comfortable, inspired and at home. We design our office collaboratively, always changing and including areas like “reading nooks” and a TV room. We also often attend trends events to stay sharp, competitive and inspired by changing innovations. – Lauren Shirreffs, 2Social | The Social Media Agency
15. Use Psychometric Testing
Psychometric testing and evaluation of employees has unearthed fabulous creative outputs for our agency. Discovering our employees’ strengths, be they detail-oriented or big-picture thinkers, has enabled management to bring creative and disruptive thinking into brainstorming and strategy sessions, regardless of staff seniority. It’s a simple and effective way to get the creativity flowing! – Darrell Wright, Cognito
