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Independent digital and creative marketing agency WiredCo. has expanded its WiredWellness offering to make public holidays fully flexible.
The Public Holidays Just Got Personal initiative allows staff to choose when and how they take them.
“The more diverse our business becomes – not just in ethnicity, but also intergenerational working, beliefs and ability – the more obvious it has became that the fixed traditional public holiday approach was no longer right," WiredCo. partner David Kennedy said.
For many businesses, the topic of how to handle Australia Day has come into sharp focus over the last five years. WiredCo. has recognised that the issue is broader than that, with a recent study by Perkbox Australia show that 58% of respondents want flexibility on how they use public holidays.
WiredCo. founder & managing director Angela Hampton said for the agency, it wasn’t just about finding a solution to Australia Day.
"We also had to think about people who don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter for religious reasons, and those who don’t celebrate The King’s birthday because they don’t place value in a monarchy," she said.
WiredCo. partner Michelle Hampton said when they consulted the team, they discovered they were 100% in favour of Public Holidays Just Got Personal.
"Because it showed trust, cultural-connectiveness and helped them create a personal working style that was respectful and effective for them," Hampton said.
WiredCo. CFO Nikki Cranley said as an independent business, any change presents a host of questions.
"We had to think about how to track these days, how best they accrue, how the team take them and how they communicate that flexibility with their teammates and clients," Cranley said.
WiredWellness was created to ensure staff not only get support in their mental and physical wellness, but also the flexibility to do their job in the most effective way.
Angela Hampton said WiredWellness wasn’t a response to the pandemic lockdown working environment, it started long before that.
"We wanted to give our team space to decompress, so we created our monthly ReWired events. Then we gave our people access to a counsellor to help them manage their mental wellbeing, so we made access to that unlimited," she said.
The agency was also one of the pioneers in remote working, giving their employees the chance to work from anywhere in the world.
In 2023, they became the first Australian business to offer parental leave for pets, named Pet-ernity.
Kennedy said that WiredWellness has helped the agency achieve 95% team happiness, 97% job satisfaction and stabilised retention at 81%.
"And we firmly believe it’s helped us commercially, with the business almost quadrupling in three years," he said.
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