Pros
Paid on time Remote working
Cons
There are a number of reasons why I wouldn’t recommend working at Right on the Line. 1. Unfortunately, this agency has an extremely toxic culture. There are a number of factors that contribute to this: - Managers are inexperienced and therefore cannot lead / support their teams leaving large numbers of employees scrambling to try and solve problems with little guidance. - There is a huge push for accountability rather that collaboration, meaning that you will be blamed when things go wrong. Senior management are very happy to blame employees for everything. This blame culture is persistent and at the centre of the agency process. Senior management and HR have been made aware of this on numerous occasions but no real effort has been made to change this. - A certain member of senior management has been reported for bullying staff. This bullying nature has impacted members across multiple teams and got to the point where several individuals were signed off work due to the stress and anxiety caused by working with this particular individual. I personally experienced employees across all teams ringing me in tears following interactions with this manager. - You are actively encouraged to stop building relationships with colleagues as they want to isolate and control individuals. You are regularly asked to express any concerns about colleagues so your opinions can be used to get rid of people. You have to be very careful with what you saying and who you talk to as it will spread and be used against you if they deem necessary. - There is also a clear case of nepotism with friends and family being strategically placed in certain positions across the agency reinforcing the caution about what you say to who. Some of the relationships aren’t obvious making it even more important to be careful with who you talk to. 2. Teams and individuals are not given the opportunities to use and share their expertise: - The strategists create marketing campaigns based on their knowledge and experience and these are ripped apart by the sales team so they can sell in what they think a customer wants to hear rather than something that has the potential to generate real results. This creates campaigns that are destined to fail from the the start. This leads to results focusing on vanity metrics to try and demonstrate value. Not one campaign generated any real results across my time at the agency. - The creative and design team are excluded from the planning and development stages meaning they are left to regurgitate the same content over and over again. Instead, they should be used as an asset to drive more creative and ambitious campaigns with the customer collaborating on the overall concept driving the messaging throughout the projects. - The projects team are micromanaged and under immense pressure all the time. This creates friction with other teams because there is no project planning, just loads of project managers trying to get their actions implemented immediately. This isn’t a sustainable way of working. There is no traffic control across the agency, leading to very overwhelmed teams. - The sales team see themselves as ‘customers’ who should be serviced immediately by each and every individual at all times. Their opinion is above all meaning that creative decisions are usually being made by people with no marketing background, just subjective opinions. They are also the only people who are allowed to talk to customers leaving the rest of the teams in the dark on customer insights. 3. Poor quality of work - As a result of the above, the output is poor quality work. Right from the briefing stage everyone is confused because the briefing documents are void of any useful information. This results in copywriters repeating the same uninspiring content over and over because they haven’t got the right information to create content of value. This then impacts design who have to use the same stale guidance for creative and this in turn leads to underperforming campaigns because the content being promoting is dull and uninteresting to anyone. - There is no feedback loop across any teams on what is and isn’t working (probably because nothing is really working). - The agency doesn’t actually care about making quality content. The sales lead has openly said they think marketing is a waste of time, so this doesn’t set very strong guidance for a marketing agency. - As the Project Management team are under so much pressure, they are desperate to hand things off to other teams so that they can't be blamed for anything. This means that work isn't checked or proof read which leads to mistakes being made all the time. - Errors or poor performance are covered up rather that openly discussed. This leads to the same mistakes being made over and over and customer paying for poor quality work. In some cases, managers are happy to make unethical and illegal decisions to cover up results and ensure they get paid. Anyone who tries to stand up for change, make a positive impact or improve things ends up being shut down, shunned or withdrawn hastily from the company. This leads to a very tense, unproductive, nasty workplace. Many have tried and many have left. You cannot positively impact the culture in this agency until the attitude from the senior managers changes. Until that happens, Right on the Line will continue to have an extremely high turnover of staff because so many people spend each and every day miserable due to the bullying nature from some staff members and also the demotivation that comes from not being able to do a good job. Recommendations 1. Remove certain individuals from senior management and work to build a collaborative culture 2. Failing implementing step 1 - all employees should leave. There are workplaces out there that will value your work.