PODCAST: Christine MacKay on Agency Culture

What is agency culture? What does it mean to say there’s a great culture in a business? Is it a table tennis table and free beer on Fridays, a fancy coffee machine, or the fact your team can make toast at your expense 24/7? Maybe it’s flexible working or the open-door policy with the exec team.

Well, yes, some of these contribute to culture. But they’re pretty standard offerings from agencies. Culture is so much more. It’s the way you do things. It’s how you look after and develop people, how you communicate. If you research company culture, you’ll probably find all sorts of frameworks, like the cultural web, which can be helpful. But it’s much better to speak with someone running and growing their agency business to see what culture looks like in practice.

Welcome, Christine MacKay, the founder and MD of animation studio Salamandra.

Christine set up the agency eight years ago and now has 16 staff in three locations. Pretty good going, especially considering two years were during the pandemic.

So what makes the culture at Salamandra? It seems to be principally about good communication and taking the time to build personal relationships with your colleagues. At Salamandra, this led to the creation of universally accepted company values that informs how people work and behave, proper onboarding, L&D and a people-centric approach to management.

Listen to our conversation, and you might get some insights into what it takes to build a good agency culture without the need to drop a couple of grand on a coffee machine.

Enjoy the show: