Why did your agency pursue Accreditation when it wasn’t mandatory?
At We Are Social, we spend our days understanding people, what they care about and what makes them tick, so it makes sense to bring that same attention to our own team.
We want people to feel supported, have the opportunity to make career-defining work and have fun doing it. That’s a big ambition, and it comes with a responsibility to create the right environment for our people.
We wanted an external benchmark to help us assess how we’re doing, especially around our people, wellbeing and professional standards. Accreditation gave us a good reason to take a proper look at what we already had in place, what was working and where we could improve.
We’re proud to meet recognised industry standards when it comes to looking after our people, from clear employee policies to mental health support and training, and we’re always looking for ways to go further.
Describe one moment from the past year when your investment in your people’s wellbeing actually mattered.
You can have all the benefits and social events in the world, but the moments that really test a workplace are often the difficult ones.
We’ve had people in our team going through tough times this year, and it was reassuring to know they could access professional, confidential support through Sonder, without having to explain what they were going through to their manager first.
That’s when you really see the value of having that support in place.
What would you want someone reading a job ad from your agency to understand about what Accreditation signals about how you run the place?
That there’s some rigour behind what we say about our culture.
Anyone can write “we care about our people” in a job ad. Accreditation means we’ve demonstrated that we have the right policies, wellbeing support and training commitments in place, and we’re willing to have those reviewed every year, because we know there’s always room to improve.
Ultimately, we want people considering joining We Are Social to feel confident that what we say about working here is backed up by how we actually run the business.
What would you say to an agency that hasn’t applied yet?
Go for it.
The process makes you take a closer look at things that can sometimes get overlooked when you’re busy running an agency. Even if you feel you’re doing most things well, it’s useful to have an external benchmark and see where you could improve. The more agencies that take their people’s wellbeing and professional standards seriously, the better it is for everyone.
There’s also real value in ACA’s training and events, giving our people opportunities to learn from some of the best in the industry and keep developing their skills.
