I’ve shared how Empathy can help you unlock more value from your marketing agency’s employees. We’ve gone over how the power of Vision (your vision and the vision of your employees) can motivate your team and help you retain them longer.
The 3rd and final part of this series (though by no means the last way to maximize the value of your employees) is more widely known.
Though being widely known doesn’t mean it’s widely practiced.
Let’s dive right in.
Empowerment
Imagine you’re starting work at your first agency job after a few years of running ads as a freelancer.
You get access to several accounts and are told to manage them, but aren’t really given any other info. You send a few emails to get budgets, goals, and context, but don’t get any responses.
A couple of weeks later, your boss calls and complains about your performance. You’re overspending and missing targets and haven’t sent any weekly reports.
WHAT?!?!
Can you imagine how powerless you would feel in a situation like that?
You’re given no direction, no training, no information, and no support but you’re the bad guy?!?!?
It seems like an extreme example, but a lot of agencies onboard their employees with little or no training. They give them no documented processes or direction. They often don’t even clearly communicate their expectations of them.
You should, instead, be empowering your employees to do their job well.
But what does that mean? How do you give your employees power?
It’s kind of the opposite of the above examples.
It’s about making it easy for them to be confident in their role and to let their skills and abilities flourish uninhibited.
There are many things that give power to an employee:
- A clear understanding of the work they should do
- Processes to show them how to do the work you’ve assigned them
- Access to the tools and resources your team uses to do the work
- Training on the tools and processes so they know how you expect them to do the work
- Introductions to the people on your team with whom they’ll be working
- An understanding of the roles of their coworkers and when to contact them
- An understanding of how involved you’ll be and if/when to contact you
- Detailed information about their clients, their strategies, budgets, goals, channel mixes, communication frequency, communication style, etc.
- Encouragement, coaching, and a clear understanding of troubleshooting or support channels
- A clear understanding of and path to success in their role
The list goes on.
It’s not enough to hire a great employee, though you should be seeking to hire qualified employees.
You could, in theory, hire an expert with lots of experience and expect them to do their job well with minimal training.
But, as I’ve seen in working with dozens of agencies, everyone does it differently.
A pro with 9 years of experience working in an agency could come into your agency and start doing things in a way that made no sense to you. You might think that they have no idea what they’re doing because they’re not doing things the way they should.
Even an expert needs to know your expectations. They need to know how you want things done to serve your clients consistently.
This is exponentially true for a more junior hire.
Nobody has your exact level of knowledge, experience, and way of thinking.
If you want things done a certain way or to a certain level of excellence, you need to get really good at employee onboarding, training, and communicating expectations.
Summary
There are few things as empowering as confidence and confidence, or a belief in one’s ability to perform their role with excellence, comes from knowledge and experience.
Experience comes in time, but you can deliver knowledge up front with a great onboarding and training process.
If you didn’t crush onboarding and training when you hired your existing team, you’d probably still benefit from putting together some training and processes for them. Plus, you get the benefit of asking for their help with it to get a more accurate product on the other side.