A study in (work/life) balance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A study in (work/life) balance

By Stephanie Schulman and Cassie Lau

Editor’s Note: Two longtime employees of TBWA\WorldHealth reflect on their careers and their lives in the healthcare advertising industry, and why they started the agency’s Balance initiative to address quality of life issues. Stephanie Schulman is president of WildType. Cassie Lau is a senior project manager at TBWA\WorldHealth. 

 

Stephanie: I went to school for advertising, and when you go to school for advertising, no one really tells you that there’s this whole second world of professional-based pharmaceutical advertising. At my first job, at a consumer agency, I became aware of pharmaceutical advertising because on the same floor they were creating the consumer DTC television ads that were the newest rage and the hottest thing. So I really made it my mission to pursue opportunities that built up my healthcare experience while on the consumer side. At first nobody wanted to meet with the girl that didn’t know what the FDA was or what supporting claims or referencing was, so I pursued opportunities that helped expose me to those types of things. I worked on animal health and did all the commercials that you see with fuzzy dogs and cats, and helped to create the materials for sales reps to use with veterinarians.

Cassie: I always knew I wanted to work in advertising. If you’d asked me as a little kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say that I wanted to make commercials. It took a few steps before I got to health care. First I worked in the marketing department at an architecture firm. Next was as an account executive at a digital agency. After that was an in-house agency at a financial services firm, which was a nice stepping stone into health care because it was so highly regulated. I had known about Omnicom since I was in advertising school, it was one of the pinnacle companies, and so when I saw the position that was available at TBWA about four years ago, I jumped at the opportunity.

Stephanie: I just really love learning, learning about different disease states and patient types and medicines. I don’t have a high science background, but I do just love learning about all of these things. So I kept working my way towards health care, and, finally, found an opportunity in oncology. It was a period of time when oncology was beginning to blow up with innovation and new drugs and new mechanisms of action. I kind of fell into that spot and have stayed with oncology ever since, for the last 12 or 13 years of my career. 

Cassie: One of the things I love the most about TBWA is the people. Everyone here genuinely cares about the work. But it’s not just about the work. They genuinely care about each other too.

Stephanie: We started the Balance initiative because we as an agency were not very balanced. The agency is full of passionate people wanting to do good. They were putting in long hours – weekend work, holiday work, after-hours work. And somewhere along the way we recognized that we were doing a disservice to our clients and ourselves because in order to get the best work, you need to be able to find a way to disconnect and recharge and refuel. You need to have enough gas in the tank in order to keep going. We’re all type A personalities, always on, wanting to do the very best work. But in order to do great work, you have to find a balance in your life, you have to enjoy what you’re doing both inside of work and outside of work in order to bring your best self every day. Sacrificing one for the other is ultimately self-defeating. 

Cassie: You can’t pour from an empty cup. 

Stephanie: Work-life balance can’t be dictated from the top. No one is going to listen if someone just says, “I am mandating that all of you find balance.” So instead, what we decided to do was try to identify where the greatest pain points were, where the agency structure and leadership could make the greatest impact, where we could help drive a change in the culture and drive a change in our behaviors and our beliefs.

Cassie: We have five or six different Balance workstreams and they are all led by small team groups. I personally am coordinating an initiative that focuses on meeting and email hygiene. We’ve conducted surveys with the team to figure out what the pain points are regarding meetings, what’s working, what’s not, what’s possible. Meetings and emails and time zones, these are all such basic things that you don’t necessarily think would have an impact, but their actual impact is enormous. 

Stephanie: One of the teams is working on a negotiation workshop to help train and navigate difficult conversations, both internally and with clients. They’ve also created a comprehensive office tool so that when people take their PTL, they can really truly make sure that everything that they’re working on is covered. So when people take their vacation, those lines between work and home and free time won’t be blurred. Just another small, simple step we can take that can have a major impact on everyone’s day-to-day lives.

Cassie: One of our initiatives is “Meeting-free Fridays.” It’s an agency time block on everyone’s calendar at 1:00 PM local, no meetings after this point in time. If you just want to set yourself up for a positive Monday morning to get your work done, clear your calendar out, and be able to sign-off for the weekend and not have to sign-on and check on things on Saturday or Sunday, that’s fantastic. Brain breaks are another popular one, in all different flavors. They’ve been a godsend during the quarantine and the pandemic and everyone being stuck in work from home. We’ve had mid-day 15-minute yoga breaks that are led by people within the company who have yoga certifications. We’ve done a couple really fun show-and-tell activities. We did an MTV Cribs-style house tour. “Oh, look at my cool plaque collections. These are all of my…” 

Stephanie: Those are the sorts of activities that really bring us together and keep us united as a company when we’re unable to be with one another in the office. And we’ve seen a number of our clients jumping onboard with these Balance philosophies. It’s hard to maintain a balance if your client counterparts are not also practicing the same kinds of behaviors or values. So we’ve been very fortunate to see that many clients have recognized and are struggling with a lot of the same issues. I’ve had a lot of conversations with senior leaders on my teams about burnouts, the blurred lines between professional and personal when you work from home, the ability to shut off, especially in these COVID times. So we’ve been sharing our best practices around meeting management, email management, all of it, in order to improve overall team performance, and that has been welcomed and adopted by our clients as well.

Cassie: The focus on balance really speaks to TBWA\WorldHealth’s overall value proposition and the agency’s core values. Most any agency can make an advertisement. But not every agency considers the long-term value of proactively supporting its employees’ work-life balance and emotional health and makes that a part of its day-to-day operating procedure. 

Stephanie: At the beginning of the pandemic, my own lines were really blurred between working hours and my personal life. But after being involved in the Balance initiative, I really was able to differentiate those lines, and I can tell you for a fact that my family did notice. When I first started working from home, it was so easy to just stay online all the time because I want to do the best for the clients. I wanted to make sure to be there for my team. Having never navigated the challenge of full-time work from home and a global pandemic before, I personally didn’t quite know where to draw the line. It was extremely helpful to have these ground rules in place, so we could turn it off and relax for a moment without feeling guilty about it. Then you come back to work the next morning and you’re refreshed and you’re ready to put in your full effort as opposed to being completely burnt out because you’re just sitting on your laptop all day long and carrying it around the house while you’re making dinner. Nobody wants that. 

Cassie: Many of us have this fear that you don’t have enough time and you have all these deadlines, and so we allow the work to fracture our personal boundaries. So we all need to be reminded – you can do it tonight, but do you have to? Does it really have to happen now? Is it really more important than spending time with your partner or your child? Six months ago, I was about getting it all done all the time. But this experience has put me into an entirely different mindset. 

Stephanie: We’ve done a lot of work on things that people can do themselves, steps that they can take individually. What’s next, I think, is starting to tackle some of these interpersonal boundaries and conversations, whether those are with clients or with agency counterparts and companions. Making sure that we can help build up each team member’s confidence and skillset, and being able to manage their balance in accordance in working more closely in a team environment.

Cassie: At the start of this initiative, we really wanted to make sure that everything we were working on would be evergreen, that it wouldn’t be, “Set it and forget it.” Because everyone is changing. The agency is changing. The world is changing. We have to continue to change and evolve so our people can have the best balance possible. This isn’t a problem that just gets solved once. It’s a challenge we need to face every single day, today, next week, next year, in five years, in ten years. 

Stephanie: We know Balance has made a difference for our people because they’ve told us so. We get scores back from our surveys. We have shown improvement numerically in the scores just from a quantitative perspective. But also, qualitatively, we’re getting a ton of feedback from individuals as we’re rolling out each of these cheat sheets, opportunities for learning and development, life hacks, all of it. We’re just getting a tremendous response from the agency about how much they appreciate it.

Cassie: The changes that we’re making are coming directly from the source. Everything that we are striving to change and make better is based on feedback directly from our peers. It’s so cool to me that we’ve been working on this for less than a year and we’re already helping with onboardings for new employees, we’re already teaching this to people. It’s become part of the culture from the get-go.

Stephanie: What we want to do is make sure that anyone who might be looking to work with us in the future understands that balance is a priority for us. We want to communicate externally to the industry and everyone in it, to be sure that they know that this is a priority for us. This is a fundamental part of our culture. 

Cassie: The inertia in our business is not to think about balance. It’s to do what needs to get done right now, what needs to get done today. But all of us have a vested interest in changing that. We want to do great work, but we also want to have a great personal life, have healthy relationships and activities outside of work. People genuinely care about those things. And we know deep down, even if we sometimes forget in the heat of the moment, how important that balance is.