Making Goodness a good place.
Thoughts and ideas on trying to create a better place for people to work.
Work-life balance, inclusive and open environments, safe spaces, flexibility. All words that every workplace is talking about now. So much so, that even ‘real estate’ people are using similar language to sell office space and most businesses are scrambling to develop their “employee value proposition around workplace flexibility whether it is “work anywhere”, “flexible first” or “remote always” with some mix in-between”. To quote Kirsten Ferguson in the SMH.
I’m writing this at a time when my own experience of workplace culture along with the experiences of some of our team are being played out on various channels. Whether it’s toxic or abusive workplaces being celebrated (great job AFR) or more serious allegations being made. It all feels very current.
But also a time when some of my workplace inspirations like Future Super and Accept and Proceed are visibly leading a charge and treading the path for people like us to follow.
So writing this piece is part having an opinion and part sharing some insight, into what a small creative business is doing to create a great place to work. My idealistic side hopes this will let other people know that it’s easier than you might think to create a safe, productive and creative workplace for people. That may be the case if anyone actually reads this.
The events of the past 5 or so years combined with a dramatic shift in where we are headed from a workplace perspective has changed priorities for a lot of people and a lot of places have been rapidly adapting to suit their people; finally.
I have spent the last 3 years working with a team of very talented creatives, all of whom happen to be women, to build a culture and a place where we all want to work together. There are a few key themes that we focus on, that act as our pillars or our ‘employee EVP’ if we wanted to sound all corporate; but realistically they are more fluid and just about putting people first.
Some people I know just don’t go into an office at all anymore. For Goodness, we’re now wanting a balance of WFH and studio time and that time is different for everyone based on where they live and their other interests and priorities.
Flexibility feels like a basic thing — work where you are comfortable, somewhere that makes you feel good about what you’re doing. Sometimes that means we’re all together, other times not. We’ve found this transition easy to manage because of the trust and respect we have for each other and our clients. I think this trust is the fundamental piece needed for better workplaces.
Working days/weeks are another flexibility process we’ve wanted to address, whether it’s needing a day off for childcare, or because a team member has a side hustle that they want to nurture. Some people might be more productive doing longer days with a break in the middle of the week, some people want to get in early to get a parking spot.
Creatives have been banging on for ages about the fact that you can’t turn creativity on and off like a tap; that 9–5, 7 days a week doesn’t suit us all the time and that we end up doing more than we’re paid for regardless of what our contracts say.
Now feels like the time to fix some of this, but we have to be sensible with how we do it.
We’re learning to balance each other, our clients and a world that has 9–5 ingrained into most things we do with this one, but it seems to be going well, I mean no one has had a breakdown, missed a deadline or died from too much work-life balance.
What’s making this work is knowing that our team members respect our timeframes and those of our clients and we trust that we’re each going to do our jobs much more easily, with more enjoyment if it’s more on our terms.
Some of the foundational elements of creating a great workplace seem to take longer and might feel harder to navigate or know if you’re doing it right. Building a truly diverse team requires an element of scale and profitability to support more people for example. This is something that we are determined to address and we want to hold ourselves accountable collectively.
One of the most important aspects though is safety, in all its forms.
I’ve worked at some amazing places and some terrible places, some of those places had issues that they swiftly and without hesitation acted to fix. Other places turned out to be harbouring some of the darkest and deepest rot you could possibly imagine in a workplace. The sort of darkness that leaves white, males like me alone. Which is an incredible privilege because it did affect and badly hurt so many others.
When I started Goodness, I wanted to use all of the things that I’d seen and hated about the places I’d worked as a blueprint for what not to do. Not just as a guide, as a concrete ‘do not treat people like that’ blueprint.
Which was actually fairly easy, as most of it is basic human decency and legality. Like not stealing my employees super!
The thing that my experience taught me was that even though as employees we felt we could make things better, it was the leadership that kept pulling it back down. They set the rules, they’d made their blueprint based on what they’d experienced and what they wanted a workplace to be, for themselves.
What is frustrating is that from a business owner point of view, I now know how hard it is to actively go against some of the basic frameworks in place to keep staff paid, legally covered and safe.
What has been more worrying to hear, is that most of our current team have had disturbing workplace experiences that have had a lasting impact on their work-life and mental wellbeing. Which has led me to the conclusion that a lot of unpleasant workplace situations viewed as “accidents” or “oversights” have actually been active decisions by leaders to go against the frameworks in place put there to keep us protected.
So for my role in creating a great workspace, I have tried to do everything possible to make the people that work here feel like they can change things and make them better at any moment, whenever they need to. Knowing that my limited experience and perspectives couldn’t possibly get things right from the start, so the best place to work will be a collaborative work in progress.
We’ve made the culture here feel open and transparent where possible, making sure people are comfortable at all times with what’s going on. Knowing they can call something out if; on any occasion, they felt they needed to.
We don’t have any secret leadership meetings, I don’t come in with any new plans for the business that aren’t thrown on the table and discussed first. Everyone is encouraged to challenge decisions and each other whilst being supportive, understanding and collaborative. We discuss what work to take on if there’s ever a question about its authenticity or values regardless of the commercial value.
Potentially divisive decisions like whether to hire a male employee in a senior creative role and the effect that might have on our female leadership opportunities are topics of open discussion that help keep us open and everyone comfortable with their future at Goodness.
Reviews are based more on personal development and are worked on as collaborative sessions that deliberately span weeks to get them right. It’s not just me deciding what people need to do to get pay rises, delivered in a 30 min session at a cafe once a year. More about what the team actually want to do to grow and how we can support them.
Responsibility, respect and trust; are again the key to making this all work.
We’ve also introduced smaller initiatives and ideas that have been designed to cultivate safety, confidence and respect at every stage of our working culture. Things like extra paid health days or flexible time when it’s needed and providing health products. We gave extra time off at Christmas to decompress properly and have played around with personal development and learning time as part of our flexible working practices to allow new skills and side projects to flourish.
Speaking on behalf of the team, we’re proud of what we’re doing at Goodness and our workplace culture. Our collective experiences have given us plenty of ‘what absolutely not to do’s’ but we’re collectively deciding on what we should do, making a place that doesn’t try to be a home or a venue, just a really enjoyable place to work.
