Page 17 - ADNews magazine March-April 2022

Agenda
world. This is particularly helpful for those with family abroad and who may have been considering relocating back home. It also gives everyone the chance to reconnect with global experiences, and assists with talent retention and attraction.”
Claire Monteilh at UM: “Working exclusively from your bedroom or lounge can feel quite isolating and therefore may seem to offer very little difference for some people to work for agency A or B, hence the ease of movements of some staff in search of connectivity and greener pastures.
“Throw some money at a shrinking industry talent pool and you have a recipe for disaster. Australia, however, is a unique market and the stringency of some of our lockdowns has fuelled generations of dreamers with anxiety and fears of uncertainty stopping them in their tracks of hoping for something better.
“Organisations that continue to inject connection and inspiration in spite of external factors will succeed in keeping their workforce engaged.”
Erin Jakubans, chief people officer, Initiative: “Put simply, isolation has been brutal to our industry. The pandemic has forced life re-contemplation enmasse. People, across all countries and industries, are re-evaluating where they work, reside and live and many difficult decisions to overhaul current situations have been made.
“We are more isolated now than ever.” Claire Gallagher, Principals
“As an industry with high inter- national talent sourcing, combined with a junior workforce who need more than ‘a job’ to keep them motivated, we’ve experienced a real draining of the talent pool.
“This has the unintentional, and somewhat dangerous, side-effect of talent inflation. As agencies fish in the same pond, a talent bidding war ensues. This has resulted in signif- icant, and frankly, unsustainable inf lation in remuneration and role progression, especially at the jun- ior-mid level, with expectations far beyond people’s tenure and capa- bilities. The industry needs to be careful to not collectively set up its future stars for failure.
“In terms of solving this crisis, there’s a few things we need to do as an industry. Firstly, start fishing in newer ponds. University gradu- ate programs are brilliant, but should not be the only source of graduate inflow, especially if we want to foster greater diversity in talent and thinking. This is why we launched our Iso Internship, to get more regional and rural talent into our industry to reflect a more rep- resentative workforce. Through this program we observed 15% of our intern talent coming from com- munities well beyond the bubble.
“Secondly, we need to do better at keeping our people. There are too many systemic causes for tal- ent exodus that simply need to be addressed. ‘That’s how it’s always been’ is not a reason to continue doing it. In 2019, we launched Stay or Stray at MFA EX to diagnose and interrogate the factors behind why people stay and why they stray. Overwhelmingly, the response kept coming back to purpose and empowerment. If people felt they had a bigger role than ‘employee’ in a business and were given the autonomy and support to action it, they were far more likely to weather common triggers for leav- ing such as salary negotiations or difficult clients (which are still important of course). Whilst before my time, the insights gained from this are being used to directly solve our biggest detractors.
“Lastly, we need to re-sell our- selves to the world. Now that bor- ders are re-opening up and people can once again entertain living
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