‘Big on pledges and small on action’: why is the industry failing on mental health?
Despite two years of agencies reckoning with toxic working culture through the pandemic, recent data published by Nabs, a wellbeing charity for the advertising and media industry, points to a worsening crisis of poor mental health among workers across the sector.
Agency bosses point to the pandemic as the root cause of employee burnout, but workers disagree / Image via Pexels
Calls to Nabs related to mental health are up by 15% on both 2021 and 2020 figures, revealing a worrying upward trend as mental health concerns now account for a quarter of all calls to Nabs’s advice helpline, with therapy referrals up by 50% year-on-year.
Agency bosses point to the pandemic as the root cause of employee burnout, alongside the stress of subsequent crises such as the rising cost of living. However, those behind Creative Communications Workers (CCW), a growing movement to unionize the advertising industry, blame systemic issues in the working culture of agency life – exacerbated by Covid and the ongoing fallout on the public – for the bleak figures.
Here we speak to professionals across the industry to get to the bottom of what’s causing adland’s mental health crisis.
Talk is cheap
When asked about support for employee mental health, most agencies will be able to reel off initiatives.
“We have put a huge focus around the physical and emotional wellbeing of our employees. We offer weekly exercise classes such as pilates, yoga and HIIT classes to encourage physical activity, and have recently reinstated our in-agency sports teams to encourage fun and collaboration among colleagues,” says Paula Joannou, chief people officer at Wunderman Thompson UK.
“We provide one-to-one wellbeing coaching sessions to offer people the individual support they may need, with sessions focusing on anything from general stress management to building resilience and improving sleep patterns. In addition to this we also offer an employee assistance program to support emotional wellbeing, which is available to everyone.”
But with so much focus on the creation of the programs to help, is the industry in fact failing to acknowledge the root of the problem and just how deep it runs? Kev Chesters, strategy partner at Harbour Collective, thinks so.
“Like any issue, the first principle is to admit that you’ve got a problem. The industry has been good at doing that. We’re talking about it, but like most issues facing the industry, it has been big on pledges and small on action.
“Talk is cheap. I’ve seen so many ‘initiatives’ and ‘pledges’ that are basically a press release and bluster, which are then forgotten about a week later. Advertising tends to be more about words than action. And that’s why we’ll see a lot of pledges, articles and manifestos, but not much in the way of lasting impact.”
Sammi Ferhaoui is an account manager at Havas London and a CCW founding member. He says that while there may well be plenty of decent, enlightened and well-meaning individuals within agency management teams, the immediate interests of agencies are “qualitatively different to the average worker’s” and far more likely to be centered around minimizing costs, streamlining operations, protecting their image and delivering ever larger profits to shareholders.
“It is for this reason that we believe many initiatives championed by agency leaderships fall short of the mark,” says Ferhaoui.
The measures Ferhaoui lists are pledges, PR campaigns, webinars and empty perks such as Summer Friday half-days “that everyone is usually too overworked to take advantage of.”
Chesters also chastises the “infantile lauding of overwork and long hours” and “pitching culture” across adland. “I’m sick of seeing senior execs on Twitter talking about how they love a pitch. They might, but I bet their junior staff who do all the work don’t.”
Lack of opportunities
Nabs’s mental health data highlights that the second and third biggest reasons for contacting the organization were for financial support (29%) and redundancy, which makes up 67% of all digital enquiries across Nabs’s redundancy tool and support bot.
Uzma Afridi, head of careers at Nabs, points out that “many people are contacting us with concerns relating to redundancy, confidence and career improvement following the last two years.”
Joannou also acknowledges that the pandemic has led many to feel their careers are at a “standstill,” and posits thorough appraisal processes to encourage those important conversations.
“We [Wunderman Thompson] also recently launched ‘W Time,’ which gives our people dedicated time every month to focus on their development, whether through attending a live training session or online course, listening to a podcast or reading a book.”
However, Chesters believes that disillusionment in agency life can no longer be solved by those at the top.
“The bigger issue is systemic,” he says. “An oversubscribed industry. Too many agencies chasing too few clients. Clients with retainer expectations and project budgets demanding more scope from less fee. This is an industry problem that can’t be solved by agency management teams.
“I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do know (and the stats bear it out) that things are getting worse, not better. And if we’re going to attract and retain the best talent we’d better start working together on solving the problem.”
Ferhaoui concludes that this is the reason CCW has been formed, in recognition that change in the area of working conditions, whether that be pertaining to long and unpaid hours, the mental health of workers, harassment and bullying or a lack of training and long-term development opportunities, cannot come from above.
“Bosses and senior managers lack any compulsion to take serious action on working conditions and wages, which is why we believe that real change can only come about as a result of workers in our sector coming together to push back against issues such as low pay, unpaid overtime, unfair redundancies, systemic abuses of power and the lack of long-term career development for many,” he says.