What makes a PR agency agile?

The word agility is bandied around in business so readily that it’s meaning is generally well understood: being able to quickly change direction to respond to challenges, meet clients’ needs or fill a gap in the market. Quickly being the imperative word there. 

Agility is undoubtedly crucial in PR… 

• The media landscape is changing all the time in terms of what topics are trending, where content is being published and how people are engaging with it. 

• Clients’ needs evolve markedly over time, and so must the services you deliver to them. 

• And fundamentally, how and where people work is shifting constantly.  

If you want to attract and retain both great clients and great employees, you have to adapt, you have to be agile. 

Now, I would (of course) say City Road Comms is an agile agency, although it’s not something we shout about. As a smaller agency, we are constantly evolving our service proposition, adapting retainers and strategies for clients, and changing how we go about our work internally. And we are able to make those changes in days, not weeks or months. 

But it’s important to properly assess – and benchmark – how one’s organisation functions. So, when an invite came through for an event on the topic of ‘agility’, and the importance of being agile when running an agency, I was keen to attend. And the event itself did indeed spark some thoughts, hence this blog.  

The thorny issue of timesheets 

One of the presentations at the event focused heavily on workloads and, in particular, timesheets. More specifically, the case was put forward that by using software to monitor employees’ workloads (based on timesheets) agencies can be more agile in allocating resources and taking on more work.  

It’s a fair argument, but for the fact that it’s based on the assumption that agencies use timesheets. And I’d argue – not that I did at the time as there was no Q&A element – that timesheets significantly impede an agency’s agility. 

Now, timesheets are an age-old issue in PR. To timesheet, or not to timesheet. At CRC, we don’t. Here are some of the reasons why: 

1. Many employees don’t enjoy it. It’s micromanagement of sorts.  

2. Filling them in consumes time and harms productivity. Plus, if a task is allocated as requiring two hours of someone’s time, that is how long they are likely to take to do it, even if it could be done in half the time. Similarly, if tasks take longer than planned, people can end up either rushing or working longer hours rather than feeling they have the freedom to adapt their schedule and workload (in an agile manner). 

3. PR is a creative industry. But people’s creativity can be stymied by prescribing to them exactly how long any given task should, or is allowed, to take.  

4. Clients do not want to be told, ‘sorry, you need to pay us more now because that task took longer than expected and we’ve consumed all your allocated hours’. 

5. Timesheets are rarely accurate. This event referenced a function to automatically chase employees for missing timesheets – they are often not filled in in real-time. Can you remember exactly what you did for the duration of your working days in the last week and how you apportioned your time? I can’t. 

Instead, we use a project and workflow management software that allows us to focus on deliverables for every client (and assess people’s workloads based on the tasks on their plate) but without fencing people in with potentially restrictive time allocations. Plus, fortunately, as a small agency it is easy for us to sense when excessive time is being spent on any one thing.  

What makes an agency agile? 

For me, agility requires two things: a culture that’s open to change and processes that enable it. 

Culturally, as an agency, it’s imperative you accept that what you do and how you do it cannot stay the same for too long. Encouraging people within the team to come forward with ideas of how the agency can change and improve is important. 

That willingness to change must be underpinned by structures and processes, though, even if that sounds counterintuitive when talking about agility. Assuming an agency will be agile and adaptable simply because it has a culture that allows people to freely share ideas for change is not enough. Ensuring there is time set aside for those ideas to be brought forward – outside of fulfilling the day-to-day tasks – is important. As is setting aside time to proactively go out and look for ways to make improvements… such as attending industry events about agency agility. 

Any business seeking a PR agency would be right to carefully assess how agile they are. How quickly the agency can adapt what they are doing for clients and how they are doing it should reveal whether they are able to nimbly adapt strategies, campaigns and practices as required, or if they are just bandying around the word because everyone else does.