Direct Agents: Commitment Excellence
By Sara Martinez-Noriega, Director of Human Resources
When you think about good company culture, it's easy to visualize ping-pong tables, happy hours and unlimited snacks. While those perks are great and can definitely help contribute to a fun environment and catch potential job-seekers interest, they are not your culture. Culture is driven by a company’s mission, vision, and values. At Direct Agents, we look to propel a culture of excellence that is driven by our senior leaders and supported by our core values and mission. Values like collaboration, innovation, and passion along with a mission to be independent, entrepreneurial and diverse have helped land Direct Agents among those selected in the coveted Crain’s 2018 Best Places to Work list.
It’s not enough, though, to just have great sounding values. The key to success comes with implementation. In the last few years, we’ve shifted strategies and began investing in a culture of structured feedback and true listening. We looked to our core value of collaboration and understood that it didn’t just need to work on the level of employee-to-employee, but more importantly on the senior leadership-to-employee level.
We’ve since evolved in various ways. At a basic level, we’ve moved from junk food snacks to more nutritious snack alternatives because we want our employees to feel good at work and stay healthy. We saw that insurance premiums were too expensive for individuals and even more so for families, so we joined a PEO to bring employees much needed savings.
We listened and saw that work life balance was increasingly important and we worked to get more flexibility in the schedules and time off. We purchased new laptops for all employees so they could work remotely when they needed to. In addition to increasing the allotted days of paid time off, we also increased work from home days and implemented an initiative called “WeWorkAnywhere.” WeWork Anywhere enables employees to maximize their global travel time by matching them with a co-working space in whichever city they may be visiting.
On a deeper level, we looked to invest in not only day-to-day tactical trainings, but in the fostering of strategic thinking through reviewing and discussing Harvard Business School case studies in small group sessions. One of these case studies was on Google’s Project Oxygen which looked to uncover which traits make a good manager. From our discussions around this case study we were able to implement our own iteration of Project Oxygen and give our managers guides and resources for how to improve their management skills based on the reviews they received from their direct reports.
Our last engagement survey reported Direct Agents at 82% employee engagement––13 points above our benchmark comparisons to other media and creative companies in 2018. More importantly, however, it highlighted areas for improvement and we were able to create several initiatives like those around learning and development––creating clear growth paths for each role within the company, and feedback and recognition––celebrating wins of all sizes and impacts.
Beyond achieving a diverse company make-up of 71% non-white & non-male employees, we’ve continuously championed the importance of diversity of thought and inclusion through the creation of programs like Women of DA (WoDA), State of the World and “Ted Talk” Tuesdays. WoDA’s mission is centered on paving a path to leadership for the women of the company both in and out of the office. Through conferences, internal seminars and networking events we look to create a space for women to excel in our industry. Our State of the World group holds “fireside chats” around trending and sometimes controversial current events allowing us to think beyond ourselves as day-to-day marketers and examine our greater contribution and impact on the world at large. Finally, our “Ted Talk” Tuesdays are employee led, pre-work breakfast discussions around a wide range of topics that revolve around the themes of growth and empowerment.
The results of our focus on culture can be reflected in the numbers over the last three years:
● Turnover- under 15% annual turnover, with a YoY drop of over 10% (industry benchmarks of 50%+)
● Team size- doubling of the number of FTE’s, with the addition of west coast branch in Los Angeles
● Engagement - overall engagement rates of 82%
● Diversity - 70%+ team members are non-white and/or non-male
● Glassdoor- Increase in our overall Glassdoor rating to 4.0 and climbing
● Growth- YoY revenue growth of over 50%
Maintaining a good company culture is an ongoing process, but through these kinds of initiatives and continuous changes, we hope to show our employees that we were committed to innovation, growth, and excellence—for them.