Razorfish CEO Josh Campo hosts monthly Q&A sessions so employees have direct access to company leadership. Photo courtesy of Josh Campo; Alyssa Powell/BI
Josh Campo of Razorfish advertising agency, part of Publicis Groupe, says he relies on rituals to convey company values.
According to him, these efforts have resulted in company growth and strong employee retention.
His method includes three office duty days per week, executive Q&A sessions, financial rewards, and Taco Tuesdays, among other things.
This essay is based on a conversation with Josh Campo, CEO of advertising agency Razorfish. The following text has been edited for length and clarity.
We are a service company, so of course we work with the number of billable hours. But that’s not a very useful metric for productivity. We look at how we drive the success and relevance of the ideas we develop. We are essentially an ideas company – we develop plans to solve a client’s business challenges. The relevance of these ideas is crucial: are we growing, getting more customers and doing more work?
As we have grown to nearly 2,000 employees, the challenge has been to find ways to preserve the values and culture that got us here.
We mandated that employees come into the office three days a week, but we have always placed a high value on flexibility. Teams and Zoom are great, but there’s a certain magic to sitting in a room together trying to solve a challenge and find the right solution for a client.
Before there was a policy, people would come back in, but you could sometimes only see three people in a day. As great as it would be if everyone organized themselves, when Publicis has almost 90,000 employees and Razorfish has almost 2,000, there is a sense of disappointment when people come in and they are one in ten people instead of one in 100.
Although this approach has been viewed with skepticism, it provides a better overall experience knowing people will be there.
During the Covid days, when we were all still working remotely, we found ways to connect with people and convey the organization’s values to them. When we returned to the office, the muscle memory of what we had done for years was no longer there.
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From office tours to Taco Tuesdays
We had to come up with new rituals to create consistency among team members. That was probably one of the biggest challenges for us.
So, before the mandate to return to the office, in early 2023, we started doing office tours. Our president and I did a “10 cities in 10 days” tour and just went out and talked to people and said, “Hey, this is what this year is going to be about.” We also have other executives on the office tour sent. We also had online sessions for everything so that everything happened on a parity basis.
We also host monthly question and answer sessions we call “Open Doors” where anyone can ask me and other leaders any questions they want.
Other rituals we have introduced are financial awards that celebrate the company’s values: responsible, entrepreneurial, progressive, passionate and friendly. There’s also Razorfish Week, which focuses on celebrating aspects of the office experience, for example with a day of service and discussions by managers about their careers.
We also reintroduced pre-Covid-19 rituals like Bagel Wednesday and Taco Tuesday. Food is an important part of social engagement. It creates moments of connection and reminds people of the benefits of working in the office.
The office tours are very popular and well attended. I would say we are probably at 80 percent capacity each. The Open Doors sessions are also often very well attended. I think they are well received because of their transparency.
We ask a lot of our employees when it comes to working hard and delivering for our customers. We owe them transparency in everything we can tell them, whether about the business, about customers or about policies. I think this is one of the most valued aspects by our employees.
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We are sometimes asked difficult questions. Some days I feel like we’re only a few hundred people, and other days there are almost 1000. I always wonder when I walk in and there are 1000 people there, “Oh, what is anyone going to ask?” .
We are successful when it comes to acquiring new customers and expanding our relationships with existing customers. And for me, that is ultimately the best measure of productivity. Another area I would look at is talent retention, which has been better than industry average, even during the very competitive times of recent years. We conduct employee retention surveys which show a generally positive result for us.
There is always room for improvement. We’re still trying to figure out what to do next and tweak the rituals we’ve come up with. There are many things that are beyond our control. It’s a huge advantage if you can create trust and transparency with your team so that they are on board and understand that you can’t control everything, but that everyone is in the same boat and rowing in the same direction.
This article was translated from English by Jonas Metzner. You can read the original article here read.
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