Understanding the importance of environment on People and Culture

Let’s consider for a moment how many large organisations are coming to the realisation that their size, legacy and ways of working have industrialised the ability to think and act creatively out of their businesses. They study start-ups and create innovation teams to try and emulate some of the practices they deploy to disrupt service, products and business sectors and they study agencies to understand how to create people and culture programs to engender better ways of working for their employees.

The Agency Equation

Digital agencies have a natural creative, people, environmental and collaborative culture. Often they are of a more manageable size — by corporate standards, dozens, hundreds or very small thousands of people. Not often tens of thousands of people.

They will, by their very nature be younger — in most cases not more than 20+ years old. They will have grown up with an ethos of creativity at their heart. This ethos ensures that they will have necessitated an ability to collaborate and share, hence their systems and processes will be organised around the ability to do so.

Their teams will typically be organised around capabilities and skills, not politics (not that they don’t have them), legacy, reorganisations, or other historical interventions…