The Agency HR and People Conference
Tuesday 20th June 2023, 1:30pm to 5pm
Techspace, Shoreditch
• This is your chance to hear how other agency HR and people folk are getting on.
• Be inspired! Take away ideas to implement in your agency.
There isn’t much that doesn’t fall on your shoulders when you lead HR in an agency.
Dream Team is an afternoon where you can learn from – and be inspired by – others within the HR and people function who are striving to make their agency and teams the best they can be.
- You’ll hear candid stories of failure and success from other agencies on a path to recruit and implement new cultures, while also dealing with the tougher side of agency life.
- You’ll also get to talk confidentially about your business with people who know what it’s like to walk in your shoes… because they’re currently doing it.
Who you’ll hear from 🎤
How Should You Approach Implementing Change When You Can’t Please Everyone?
When John Stacey joined Social Change last year, one of his challenges was to improve the team’s overall productivity and ways of working.
“I tried different types of feedback, curious questions, productive conversations. It was months filled with attempts to please, littering the team with micro-changes,” he explains.
“People would say they were worried they didn’t have time to implement something new. At times it was difficult to make the team see that any changes were for them, and purely to improve their productivity and life at work.”
👉 At Dream Team, John will be sharing more about his frustrations and successes in improving his team’s way of working, and how changes in operations and process can have a real human effect.
Who is There for You When You’re There for Everyone Else?
“I love my job, helping and developing people, and I think it’s great to be a trusted advisor that people can come to when bad stuff happens. But where do I go?”
Being an agency’s HR person can be a rollercoaster of emotion and stress – something Debbie Bissell, HR and operations director at Clickthrough Marketing, knows all too well.
“Business owners should support their HR leader or ‘people person’. And that doesn’t mean things like counselling necessarily, but just some recognition that actually, things can be pretty tough on you too.”
👉 At Dream Team, Debbie will be talking about the realities of being in HR, and the toll it can take on the person who is there for everyone else.
“How We’re Making the Four-Day Week Work for Our Agency”
“A wise man once told me, ‘Work isn’t a place you go, it’s a thing you do’,” says Gareth Hoyle, MD of Marketing Signals.
“So why does turning up for work and sitting at a desk for 12 hours put you ahead of someone that does 6 hours, but is still achieving their goal?”
Their approach is to have two teams who alternate their working weeks – and so far, it’s working well.
👉 At Dream Team, Gareth will be going into detail about how he implemented a four-day week within his PPC agency, and why his flexible working approach means his team are in it for the long term.
“Transparency Around My Own Diagnosis Helped Create an Inclusive Environment in My Agency”
In 2022, at the age of 40, Paddy Carey, was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
“The diagnosis helped me to go to the other directors and say, ‘Here’s something that I’m facing, here’s what I’m doing about it, and here are some things that I might need from you to help me with that’,” Paddy says.
“Being able to have that conversation was really helpful – and it made me kind of think more about how we can make changes in the agency to accommodate that for others.”
👉 At Dream Team, Paddy will be sharing how getting diagnosed with ADD as an agency founder helped him foster an inclusive environment for neurodiverse talent – almost accidentally.
💬 These are the people we’re spotlighting so far. Like all our events, Dream Team is heavily participatory – when you get a ticket, we’ll capture your questions and include you in the afternoon.
Meet people who are interested in your story
Dream Team is an afternoon that will helps you get inspired, and meet other people you can learn from. We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Dream Team – FAQs 💬
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.30pm, so try to arrive by 1.15pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive. The schedule doesn’t leave us time to serve lunch, unfortunately.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from all have interesting stories about HR and people, and how things are going in their teams.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured. We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is for anybody in your agency who cares about their HR and people function.
That might be the HR person, the people manager, the founder or owner, or it might be somebody else.
