‘We need to be more intentional': Aura chair Ruth Hinton on the client-agency relationship

What’s the background to the Working Well Charter? 

It was prompted by one of the Aura organising team, who felt there was a positive contribution that Aura could make, because we’re the UK’s biggest membership community specifically for client-side researchers. We’d seen the MRS/Opinium survey of colleagues working in the sector that was demonstrating widespread poor mental health and stress and that was yet to come down despite a lot of good initiatives. We saw, in that research, that the main causes of poor mental health and stress were excessive workload, deadlines and fear of things going wrong, so we felt that if those are the root causes, then we as clients have a role to play.

Why is this issue particularly important to address right now?

The research shows that poor mental health and stress prevail at worryingly high levels. That’s not good for individuals, companies or talent retention for the industry as a whole. Unnecessary stress and pressure can impact people so badly in terms of their mental health and their confidence. For some people, little things can add up over time and they can really overwhelm or cause much more serious problems like burnout.

On the flip side, it can be so powerful to feel respected and valued, and to be part of something worthwhile because you understand the context, you understand why it’s urgent, and you know more about the results and what it went on to do. As one agency colleague pointed out to me, the difference between good and great is discretionary effort. While we want great work, we want great results, we do really need to be valuing people to be able to do their best. There’s a real moral imperative here – none of us want to think about people being distressed, and if we can try and help that, that’s really important and something we can be proud of. But if anyone needs extra convincing, there are going to be better commercial benefits from better work that has better impact and is more efficient.

We think this Charter is a complement to other initiatives in the industry – there’s lots that happens within companies or at a sector level, but the client-agency relationship is something that we felt we could play a role in, alongside all the other things people are doing. We as clients are making commitments to try and take care of our bit, rather than assume that someone else is going to take care of this problem for us. During our consultation it emerged that there are lots of ways to pick people up after they’re struggling, help them recover and rebuild their resilience, but hopefully we can build a role in prevention which can be better than cure and stop some of these issues and stress arising in tandem with also helping people cope with that stress if and when it does arrive.

How did you go about developing the Charter?

We asked our members and our agency partners, over a few months of calls and consultations, to help us co-create this initiative. We got some members together to discuss examples of where there was significant pressure, unnecessary work, or both, and our members also consulted some of their agency partners, so we had some examples of what happens when things are going wrong. From that, we identified the behaviours and activities that may create avoidable tension and workload and we’ve summarised that as the first Working Well Together report.

The report discusses the themes, which include: the rise of ghosting – when people don’t get a reply; a lack of empathy; a ‘them versus us’ culture and not quite understanding each other’s roles; and the pain of proposals, and how much time and energy goes into that on both sides, some of which can be unnecessary.

Another thing that emerged was capability gaps among client teams. We might have methodology understanding, project management understanding and some stakeholder management, but how to work well with your clients is not necessarily something you’re taught.

Out of the themes, we agreed some ways of working that might help to mitigate them, and these have been framed as commitments clients can make. We did co-creation sessions with some members, saying: “This is the problem, what are some things that we as clients can commit to doing about that?” That resulted in the six principles that make up the Charter.

We sent out a draft of the Charter and asked our members if this was something they would sign up to. There were a couple of bits where they felt it wasn’t totally in their control, or they would aspire to do that, but realism and pragmatism meant that they couldn’t commit, so there was some careful negotiation around terminology.

The Charter is something that clients can use to commit to trying to work in this way; it’s not intended as a checklist for every single project. We can’t promise to remove all of that [stress] but we are committing to trying to be more intentional and mindful.

Can you share any examples of what clients didn’t feel was realistic to commit to?

One of the principles is: ‘We'll respect your right to disconnect’. We heard about the stress of feeling like you must always be on call and that if there is a message, that you might need to action it straightaway.

The original phrase was: ‘We will only contact you during working hours’, but not all working hours are the same; some people have flexible working patterns. Senior stakeholders who might work evenings and weekends are going to send those emails – they’re not going to commit to not sending them. Instead, what we’re committing to is open conversation about how we’re going to work together, and the fact that those emails can be ignored – just because they are sent, doesn’t mean they need a response immediately and can be picked up during the recipient’s working hours.  

So that was one principle where we initially had a tighter commitment but we realised that the intention behind it is more important. It comes back to having conversations upfront about ways of working and flagging that: ‘If something really is urgent, I’m going to tell you it’s urgent and needs actioning, otherwise, you are safe to assume that you can just pick this up in working hours.’ Some of these assumptions are unwritten and unsaid – we need to say them. The theme was that we need to be more intentional because sometimes we might end up accidentally doing things that we didn’t intend.

Do you think that some of that communication being lost is a result of seeing people in person less often? Did that come up in the feedback?

No, I don’t think that’s a cause of exacerbating it. We did hear about wanting to build more relationships, understand each other’s roles and hear more context, but that doesn’t have to be face-to-face, and when we’re talking about mental health and wellbeing, people have seen so many benefits from not spending time on the commute, not coming all the way into a venue to spend time doing something they could have done at home. Some of that leads to unnecessary stress and pressure.

Being intentional about the times when you do spend time together face-to-face [is important], especially for an agency, because coming to a client’s office often takes a big chunk of time out of their day. Clients weren’t saying that the solution is to spend more time face-to-face, and neither were agencies, but both were saying: ‘Let’s think a bit harder about the meetings we are doing face-to-face.’

Did you have to overcome any particular challenges?

It was a smooth process because we’ve really hit on something that people want to help with and resolve. We’ve had lots of interest, support and advocacy. We had lots of generous feedback – people wanted to go back to their stakeholders to get this right, to scrutinise the documents. Lots of people were volunteering their time on this, both among our members (the clients), but we have also had such a positive response from other collaborators across the sector. We’ve consulted lots of agencies through the process.

The charter launched in May, so what has been the response from client side researchers since then?

It’s been a really positive response. Adoption is growing – we’ve got a growing list of members who have signed up as supporters, and so we’re able to go back to them as continued part of our feedback loop. It’s interesting that among those supporters, we’ve got more people signing up as an individual than as a team, so it’s something that people personally feel committed to or passionate about.

What that means is that we need to empower those individuals with tools so that they can be advocates for working well together amongst their own colleagues. So next we are looking at how to help them sell it to the rest of their team and start to embed it in processes.

Members have also advocated for this initiative outside of their organisation. We’ve had people join our panel discussions at Quirks, we’ve been amplified by the IMA, the ICG, AQR, the senior client council at MRS and a list of agency supporters and we have representatives joining the forthcoming MRS People and Talent workshop and &more conference.

A lot of what came out of the conversations with agency people and some of the collaborators in the sector is that they know that they are sometimes in the role of client too – for their freelancers, their subcontractors and their sample providers. So, people on the agency side said it’s prompted some useful discussion about how they can live up to the commitments in their own work. It is about the whole ecosystem.

Many of the client-side supporters agree with the attempt to do something positive on this topic; they agree the principles feel achievable and that they don’t always remember to do everything right. We have had some client-side researchers noting that it’s fairly common sense, it’s how we should work anyway. But the feedback from agencies makes it clear there are still plenty of bad examples, or unintentional slips or blind spots, and those particularly happen we’re under pressure. When we, as clients, are under pressure we’re not necessarily going to be performing at our best, so that’s why we commit to the principles to try to be more intentional.

It is the job of a client to actively manage our stakeholders, so some of our members fed back that they see this as a useful way to set some ground rules with stakeholders and with procurement colleagues and explain to them why certain processes are followed, why time needs to be allowed, why the brief is so important and how they as stakeholders and procurement colleagues can support, too.

Some of our members said they could see it as a great tool for training less experienced team members, for general upskilling in how to maximise the benefits of partnering with agencies over time. Another was thinking about how to put it into performance and development conversations too. These are genuine problems that need addressing, and there can be genuine outcomes from working in this way. 

Next, we’re hoping we start to hear examples of positive changes and we want to collect and publish those to provide inspiration and reinforcement around how impactful some small changes can be. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.