How to Make the Relationship with Your Agency Rock!
by Matt Griffin, Deepend
Putting a digital production team together is a lot like starting a band. You can find and audition dozens of singers, guitarists, drummers, and bass players, but you are not going to sell out any stadiums until you find the line-up that “clicks.”
It’s not just the technical skills that matter. Every member has to contribute something unique and mesh well with their team when performing. Being the “best” instrument player is often less important than being the right player.
Organizations moving creative disciplines in-house often run into the same situation. Hiring purely for technical talent leaves important parts of the equation out of the process.
But organizations have an unexpected ally in their search for their rockstar team – the digital agency. A great agency partnership makes moving digital capabilities in-house easier and predicts a better outcome from the process.
Team Building Challenges Organizations Often Face
Moving creative disciplines in-house is a common goal for growing enterprises. The combination of risk management concerns, budget pressures, and transparency requirements often lead executives to seek in-house solutions for digital and creative processes.
However, building a team that can reliably deliver results in the long-term is challenging. Every new developer you hire can cost more than $20,000 in recruiting fees and other external costs. The pressure to select the perfect candidate is high – and it doesn’t always happen.
Organizations that plan on moving digital and creative capabilities in-house have to deal with the following obstacles:
Looking Beyond Technical Skills. Digital production requires more than coding experience. Creating an entire team requires carefully distributing roles among new hires while encouraging a positive workplace culture develops. Great teams are multidisciplinary, and the collective synergy those teams generate goes far beyond the technical skills written on their resumes.
Adapting to Different Outlooks and Learning Styles. Not all digital professionals think the same way. In fact, digital team members often use wildly divergent learning methodologies than the general population, as explained by Walter Burke Barbe and Neil Fleming’s research into visual, kinaesthetic, and auditory learning types.
Building a System for Continuous Motivation. Creative digital professionals tend to be kinaesthetic and visual learners. Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that visual and kinaesthetic learners tend to be driven by intrinsic motivations. This means that you will have to do more than offer an attractive compensation package – you will need to create and offer a variety of highly stimulating problem-solving activities for them to do.
Keeping Up with Technology Trends. Agency developers are exposed to every new development in the tech world as it happens. In-house professionals can feel cloistered from the developments in their field and lose interest as their once-cutting-edge skills stagnate over time.
How To Use Great Agency Relationships to Overcome These Obstacles
When organizations that are set on moving digital capabilities in-house communicate their intentions to agency partners, they get a powerful ally who can help establish a solid foundation for success. Agencies can help businesses create solid teams in multiple ways:
Enabling Multidisciplinary Teams. Solving complex digital problems requires running and organizing multidisciplinary teams. Working alongside an agency can help reduce the administrative burden of finding and assigning in-house talent to multidisciplinary projects. At the same time, putting agency partners to work alongside in-house employees helps to broaden your team’s capabilities.
Share and Integrate DevOps Best Practices. Integration means more than just assigning the right human talent to the right job. Teams need to share processes, practices, and toolsets that will help them communicate and work more efficiently. Your agency can help you identify the ideal framework to ensure a smooth project turnout.
In-Source a Digital Squad. Rely on your agency to help build a specialised insource digital production team. This “digital squad” will consist of technical experts offering total immersion and on-demand responsiveness without forcing you to hire new talent.
Give and Expect Full Transparency. The main thing that agencies and their clients need to do in order to maximise the potential of their relationship is to establish and maintain a foundation of trust. When both sides are looking for an honest, open exchange of talent and value, mutual prosperity is the result.
Developing in-house talent doesn’t mean you have to cut ties with your agency. It means you have the power to redefine your agency partnership in a way that generates greater value for everyone involved. That’s the best way to enable sustainable long-term growth.
Sources:
VAK learning styles: what are they and what do they mean? - AUS
https://devskiller.com/true-cost-of-recruiting-a-developer-infographic/
https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202
Matt Griffin, Deepend