Mark Coad, Anneliese Douglass and Cathy O'Connor.
The advertising industry's old ways of working defined by a ‘suck it up and keep quiet’ attitude needs to adapt, industry leaders say.
The industry can be a high-stakes, pressurised environment which can negatively affect the psychosocial safety of agency employees.
To protect against such psychosocial harms, the the Media Federation of Australia (MFA) in partnership with dozens of advertising businesses launched an industry code of conduct to provide tools and information for agencies.
But for people who have been in the industry for 20 plus years they grew up in a different culture, where hard work and face time was a badge of honour and to get ahead no-one whinged.
So it's important to check the bias of leaders to ensure positive improvements, oOh!Media CEO Cathy O'Connor said.
“We have leaders in our business that think [the younger generation] should harden up, but no that's actually not the case," O'Connor said on a panel discussion at the launch of the MFA code.
“[Businesses need to] check the biases at the senior levels about what fairness is - not every person is built in your own image if you are one of those people that will work yourself into the ground and be productive doing so it's important to know there'll be many that will be but there will also be many that won't be.”
The industry, which has historically seen compulsory after-hours work, endless deadlines and demanding stakeholders, is no longer such a place, Mentally Healthy co-chair Andy Wright said.
“There are a lot of people who have worked in the industry for a long time and [tell younger staff] ‘suck it up’ or ‘harden up’,” Wright said.
“Those people may think psychosocial safety means walking on eggshells and not being able to get the most out of people - but it's not about people taking it easy, it's actually about making sure the environment is safe for them to work.”
O'Connor believes part of the reason why advertising people are feeling stressed and unsafe, is because businesses often ask for unreasonable things.
One strategy to help is giving more decision making responsibilities to younger staff.
“We often control decision making in bottlenecks, so I think we need to pass the decision making power down the line so that younger staff can control their own workplaces and train them to deal with difficult conversations,” O'Connor said.
“It's easy for us, because we've been around a while, we're pretty well schooled at tough conversations, but right through the organization it's a capability that's born of experience and they don't have that experience.
“So how do you get them to be able to say, ‘this feels really scary because my boss is working harder than me, but I'm not safe or I'm not coping’.
“Psychological safety is an obligation, leaders that don't have the right mentality need to either get on board, be realigned or go and work themselves.”
Andy Wright, Mark Coad, Anneliese Douglass and Cathy O'Connor.
Aprais Australia principal Richard Goodrich believes agency staff have to ask themselves if they should be in this industry, because it's different from a lot of other industries.
“There is a fundamental difference between pressure and stress,” Goodrich said.
“If you're experienced and trained properly and not poached to go to another agency before you're ready to go - you're worth the money and you don't suffer stress.”
Webster sees that the younger workforce lacks the necessary training.
“Our industry thrives on pressure but because there's a lot of kids under 30 in the business who came out of university and haven't been trained properly, generally they can't brief properly and therefore the agency kids don't know how to react to a bad brief, and therefore they don't know how to sell the work and it's a self perpetuated problem,” Webster said.
IPG Mediabrands CEO Mark Coad also sees lack of experience as a barrier, but believes this makes psychosocial safety training even more important.
“We've now got kids being managed by kids because of compression in our organisation charts,” Coad said.
“We've got grads being managed by someone who's got 12-18 months experience in this industry, and they need to understand their role in managing people.”
However the problem is not necessarily just about the level of training, it's also about personal disposition, Safework NSW assistant state inspector Gerard McDonell said.
“So whilst for one person a level of pressure may equal a certain outcome, for a different person there will be a very different outcome, however everyone has a breaking point,” McDonell said.
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