Have we lost our way when it comes to trust?
By David Price, Managing Director, The Grove Media
Trust has become an issue that’s front and centre in all our lives. Fake news, AI, social media, and governmental misinformation have all contributed to declining levels of trust.
Last year the Advertising Association announced that advertising is no longer the least trusted industry. It’s hard to see this as particularly positive – frankly it just indicates the difficult relationship our industry has with trust.
We’re a service industry and, despite the importance of technology, we’re a people business. The agency world is nothing without trust. But with the ongoing issues of transparency among the big groups, you have to question whether some agencies are 100% focused on the best interests of their clients.
As a medium sized, independent agency, we are totally client-centric and our entire service culture is built on trust. Of course, it’s easy to say this, but the numbers speak for themselves. Our client retention record is three times better than the market average. Our top 15 clients have been with us for at least 10 years – some have been with us since the 1990s.
We have built a culture of trust that starts deep within the agency and this travels out to clients and partners. Having trust within a company is so important – it’s the cornerstone of our culture and everything we do.
Trust within an agency means you can share ideas openly and work together more effectively. People are more inspired and engaged and this naturally leads to higher levels of productivity.
A culture of trust reduces workplace stress and hostility and gives rise to better, ethical decision-making – The Grove’s B Corp certification is a case in point. And, trust leads to better loyalty and retention of staff.
Achieving a culture of trust in an agency is no easy matter. You can include trust in your values and build it into your positioning, but these are just words. Ultimately it’s your actions that really matter.
It’s for this reason that we put an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) in place in 2022. There are sound financial reasons for setting up an EOT, but this was not our prime motivation. The EOT is about our people. Having a stake in the company’s success makes people feel more invested and motivated. Having a sense of ownership fosters genuine pride in the work, and it enables us to live and breathe our company values.
Lots of businesses talk about having an open door policy, but through the implementation of the EOT, we really do. Our people are involved in the day-to-day business – this means that trust is engendered from the top town and from the bottom up.
Before we put the EOT in place, there were certain aspects of our business that we had very little idea about. One of those is mental health. A situation arose in the agency and as a result we re-worked our policies to better protect our people. This would never have happened without the EOT.
We now have an agency that has trust and inclusion at the heart of its operations. We have a much flatter structureenabling ourpeople to be more involved in the day-to-day business and to act in a more senior and responsible way.
Managers at The Grove now cede more decisions to our people and we’ve dispensed with the hierarchies that can get in the way of good service. Our people are now better able to do their jobs.
And it’s through doing the work that trust extends into client relationships. This isn’t rocket science – or even computer science – but it does seem to be somewhat of a challenge in our industry. In our people-based, client-service industry.
So what are we talking about when we say that our culture of trust extends into our client relationships? Well, it’s clearly about openness and transparency, right from the start of the relationship. And it’s about communicating that transparency and having openness in all our dialogue.
It’s about being aligned. Clients work with us not just because of the results we deliver, but because they like our values and the way we do business. And this alignment extends to having real clarity around shared objectives, ambitions and measures of success.
And it’s about reliability and maintaining a consistently high level of service. We know that by consistently delivering high-quality work on time and within budget, we earn the trust of our clients.
Trust that results in such high levels of client retention.
Photo courtesy of Zdenek Machacek @ Unsplash
