Do you ever wonder how people in the design industry really think and feel
about the agency they work for?
We did.
So we asked people who work within design or digital agencies to anonymously share their views on how it feels to work within their agencies right now.
The result is the Design Industry Voices Survey 2009 – a collaboration between
Fairley & Associates, Gabriele Skelton and On Pointe Marketing.
We found that 38% of industry employees who responded are planning to leave their agency when market picks up. They voiced their dissatisfaction in their agency's performance in the areas that matter most to them.
Here's what some of them said:
“Quite a few wonderful colleagues made redundant. Am I safe???”
“Extra workload. No extra benefits. Little thanks for working hard.
Grumpy management. Backstabbing. Anger every day, mixed with anxiety.
An exacerbation of the 'them and us' culture between account handling and creative.”
“[The recession] has put people throughout the industry under a greater pressure. Under this added pressure, often people make unusual or inappropriate decisions.
I constantly see us spreading ourselves too thinly, achieving nothing, upsetting valuable employees and current clients. People are becoming very disillusioned
with working here.”
“I think this recession has highlighted too many examples of bad forward planning and financial management on the part of the smaller agencies. In all cases in this area, the management teams appear to have been taken by surprise by the degree of the slow-down i.e. thought they could weather it by simply sticking their heads in the sand and waiting for work to arrive… Maybe it was just all too good for too long and we all got complacent.”