The Meerkats Staff Handbook

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| Employee handbook

description

The best way to get a feeling for Meerkats is to read the handbook we give our new employees on their first day.

Transcript of The Meerkats Staff Handbook

Page 1: The Meerkats Staff Handbook

| Employee handbook

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Welcome.

This is more than a workplace. It is a safe environment where you can be yourself, open up, ask the dumb question, admit you don’t know absolutely everything. At some agencies, employees feel the need to adopt an act – the comedian, the surly genius, the snappy talker, the boardroom bully. Those acts don’t play here. We like real people. Honest, fallible, what-you-see-is-what-you-get people. Because we’ve found they’re the ones who cut through all the pretence in our industry and do the best work. So relax. At Meerkats you can be You. Better, you can be the You you want to be. Murdoch University The Vow

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When asked What is your own brand promise? a lot of advertising agencies will say things like “Great creative”, or “Effective campaigns”,or more recently “Through-the-line media-neutral push-pull consumer conversations”. We say “To make the world a better place”. Yeah, we know it sounds a little pretentious at first, but we’re deadly serious. Our mission in life is to help make free enterprise work better by helping the good businesses win and the bad ones lose. Because we believe passionately that when good businesses grow, people's lives improve. The people buying a worthwhile product or service feel rewarded because it adds to their lives. The people who own the product or service make profits and grow and employ people who need those jobs to buy their houses and raise their families.

Our brand promise.

Meerkats Warren

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When we say Meerkats is for good business, what do we mean?

By “good business” we mean those organisations who believe they have something to contribute to the world with their product; organisations that are prepared to work harder to create genuine value and communicate honestly about it.

“Bad businesses” are those that are moreinterested in making a quick buck or who

deal in ethically questionable products.

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We find out what an organisation stands for and we help them express that to the world to gain for them a greater share of the future. It’s called the Motivating Brand Idea. And it means that advertising is often the last thing we do for a client.

Because brand leadership is more about how a company behaves than how it advertises. So we do a lot of un-advertising stuff, like create workshops for our clients’ management andemployees, write staff handbooks, suggest new product ideas, plan long-term business strategies, design store fit-outs, create website content, social media programs, branded events, sponsorships, uniforms and vehicle design and heaps more. Oh, and advertising.

HBF Essentials

we are a brand leadershipcompany.

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We are dedicated to the truth here. The true promise of a brand. The true human emotions that our advertising touches. Brand communications don’t work unless they reach past people's natural defences and make meaningful contact with either their hearts or their brains. It’s either an emotional touch or a logical touch. But we gotta touch somewhere, somehow. And people won’t be touched by a message unless there is an element of truth they can relate to. And the truth about Meerkats is, truth is everywhere in our office. In our work, in our meetings, in our dealings with each other, in our brand teams, in our discussions with clients, in our transparent financial dealings, in our sharing of ideas. At Meerkats, you can’t escape the truth.

Westnet Down to earth

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Meerkats Warren

A culture of sharing.Our office is open plan for a reason. We believe everyone is equal. At Meerkats, the boss doesn’t get the corner office with the big windows (he doesn’t even get an office). Sure, there isa certain corporate hierarchy but that’s behind the scenes and is essential to running a profitable company. But when we are engaged in creating brand communications everyone is at the same level. The focus is on the idea. When the ultimate prize is making people's lives better, it’s a lot easier to drop your sense of self-importance. That’s why we have that plaque out the front: “Please leave your ego at the door”. This culture of ego-less sharing carries through everything we do, from setting up a data projector, to taking on a problem one of your colleagues is toiling with, to asking for an honest critique of your idea.

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You gotta believe.We have a theory (one of many you’ll get to learn here): people do their best work for things they believe in. As a brand communicator here at Meerkats, you can’t reach out and touch someone’s heart with a powerful truth that’s brilliantly observed and beautifully expressed unless you buy into that truth. This is why we dedicate so much time and effort to finding those truths, so that we can believe in them first. Whether it’s the fact that your health really is the most important thing in the world (HBF) or the fact that having an open mind is the best way to discover new ideas (Murdoch). We don’t believe that just because you are a professional you should be asked to fake a passion for something. So if you ever find yourself working on something here that you don’t believe is true, sing out. Something has gone wrong.

iinet Hallelujah

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Why the name.We love it when people ask us “Why did you call yourselves Meerkats?”. Because that’s why we did it. To prompt a question that will allow us to explain our brand values. You see, right from the start we wanted to practice what we were about to preach. By making ourselves a contemporary brand with clear values, a memorable brand identity and a great brand story to tell. In the wild, meerkats have four behavioural traits that we believe are great brand communications.

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CuriosityMeerkats are insanely inquisitive. They dig in the dirt and poke around and leap on sticks and nuts and other animals in an insatiable quest to understand their world. We do too. We are fascinated by how humans behave, how they respond to ads, what makes them act on a thought rather than just think about it, how media channels work, what makes humour better than pathos in ads, how to do better focus groups, where the next big leap in brand engagement will come from, etc etc etc ad infinitum. We invite you to be curious too. Embrace your inner meerkat.

Keen EyesightEver seen a photo of a meerkat standing on its hind legs, with its little front paws dangling out the front there, peering out to the horizon? They do it all the time. They even take turns at it to protect their families. They use their amazing eyesight to detect danger at incredible distances; like a tiny dot against the sun that turns out to be a fast approaching eagle. They also do it to detect food, like when an almost undetectable change in colour on a desert landscape turns out to be edible plant life. We employ the business equivalent of great eyesight for our clients. We not only detect threats and opportunities where others see nothing but desert and sun, we also cast our eyes further out, to the horizon, to devise long-term brand strategies.

Family ValuesMeerkats are incredibly social creatures. They not only share their living space and workload equally among their multi-family group (called a mob), they sometimes share their living spaces with other species. They figure animals such as anteaters and moles help them catch food and dig better warrens so why not, hey? We have adopted a similar behaviour in not only creating a work environment of openness and equality amongst our own staff, but one that we are happy to share at any time with our clients’ partner agencies, such as media companies, digital specialists, researchers, etc. Like the meerkat, if the relationship is beneficial to all, we are not territorial.

Fun AttitudeIf you’ve ever seen a documentary on meerkats you’ll know how much fun these little guys are. They play and tease and muck about with each other. They have such human qualities that it’s not surprising to learn that in many zoos the meerkats enclosure is the most popular. Likewise, we always wanted to create a company that was fun to work for. So hopefully you experience a certain playful nature in the meerkats enclosure at No.1 Rokeby Road.

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Murdoch University The Vow

Don’t be under any illusion here. Just because we are a collection of smart marketing minds doesn’t mean we think we know everything. We see Meerkats more as a grand experiment than a know-it-all business. We consider ourselves students of this game; always just one chapter ahead of our clients (and competitors) in the book of modern brand techniques. Always testing new theories as they occur to us. In this business, the moment you believe you have The Answer is the moment you start the steady slide into oblivion. We must keep experimenting and refining.

The grand experiment.

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One of the side effects of Meerkats’ philosophy of equality and honesty and embracing change is a calm, happy working environment. Over the years our office has developed a wonderfully casual and contented air about it. And we love that. But something unexpected has also happened as a result: negative events seem to get magnified. In a normal agency, things like verbal disagreements, or an unhappy client, or even a heated exchange are all part of a normal working day (this industry is, after all, a stressful environment where emotions are heightened). In Happy Katland however, we’ve noticed that these things can show up to our staff as terribly bad events that shouldn’t happen. But really, they’re part of this game. They will happen. They just don’t happen very often here.

Happiness and conflict.

Lotterywest Mystic Money

One of the side effects of Meerkats’ philosophy of equality and honesty and embracing change is a calm, happy working environment. Over the years our office has developed a wonderfully casual and contented air about it. And we love that. But something unexpected has also happened as a result: negative events seem to get magnified. In a normal agency, things like verbal disagreements, or an unhappy client, or even a heated exchange are all part of a normal working day (this industry is, after all, a stressful environment where emotions are heightened). In Happy Katland however, we’ve noticed that these things can show up to our staff as terribly bad events that shouldn’t happen. But really, they’re part of this game. They will happen. They just don’t happen very often here.

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During the space race in the 1960’s NASA spent millions inventing a ballpoint pen that would work in zero gravity. The Russians just used a pencil. It’s amazing how often the simple solutions are overlooked in our industry too. We think it’s because a lot of agencies think the client is paying them all this money so they’d better over-complicate things to make it look worth it. It’s the same with overwritten pitch documents, the use of impressive technobabble, 3 hour long meetings when 30mins would nail it, stuff like that. Common sense avoids elephants in the room and Emperor’s new clothes in the boardroom. We urge you to use yours.

Our 6th sense is common.

Lotterywest Super Sleuth

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We value momentum.We hate twiddling our thumbs. We loathe dilly-dallying. We despise going round in circles. We love momentum. We crave action. We demand impetus. For our clients, for our agency and for you. If you’re not moving forward in this business, you are becoming out of touch with society. And for a brand communications company that is death. This perpetual “what’s next” attitude is why we create long-term brand strategies for our clients, why we often call a new campaign “the next chapter in the brand story”, why we demand that all senior Kats be efficient storytellers and presenters, and why we’re going to end this point here so you can move on.

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Loose Tight.

This is the key to loving life at Meerkats. Knowing when to work loose

and when to work tight. And agreeing that with your team mates.

There are times when we must cast off the self-imposed shackles of

client demands, deadlines, budgets, traditions, rules, fear of failure,

logic, etc, and think freely. And wildly. To surprise ourselves with just

how original we can be. It’s that magical moment when we all embrace

what’s possible, not what’s probable. Tight mode is when the idea

has been chosen and now stuff has to be organised and planned and

costed and scheduled and delivered on. You must be able to switch

between these modes instantly. The bottom line? There are agencies

who operate loose all the time (creative hotshops, for example) and

they burn bright for a while then gradually fail under the weight of

the realities of running a functional business; and there are agencies

who operate tight all the time (some big multi-nationals) and they plod

along making good profits but losing their brightest people because

the management doesn’t let them fly. Meerkats can be the best of

both worlds. As long as you get the whole loose-tight thing.

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Perth is the new Miami.We believe we can do world class work from right here in little old Perth. Not because it would make us feel big and important, but because it would prove that Meerkats’ brand idea is potent. And we don’t mean just the occasional international advertising award. We mean having people in other states and countries talk about our work and our clients and our philosophy. To have them be curious about us and maybe even learn something from us. That’s the kind of legacy we want to achieve. It’s happened many times before.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky began in Miami with a passionate brand idea and achieved global renown. Likewise Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis, St.Lukes in London, Kessells Kramer in Amsterdam. Why not Meerkats in Perth?

Trigg Beach

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You’re the next world-beater.There’s another very important upside to this ambition: You. If you are very good at what you do, you will feel the urge to apply it on grander stages, on bigger brands with national and global impact. You will want to have the chance to create world recognised work. Imagine how cool it would be if you could achieve that without having to move you and your family to some horrible smoggy grey metropolis and work 14 hour days.

Imagine if you could fulfil your potential while living inan amazing place like Perth, with all its sunshine and healthy lifestyle and relaxed pace.

We think that’s a win-win worth chasing.

Police&Nurses The Stand

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Ideas before heroes.

Advertising is famous for creating heroes. It turns creatives into rocks stars and agency owners into legends. So it’s understandable that our industry attracts people seeking glory. But at Meerkats, we put the pursuit of individual glory aside and focus on the greater good of nailing the objective. We don’t care where ideas come from: planners, media,accounting, creative. That’s how we like to play here. No noses out of joint. No egos dented. So resist the urge to be territorial about your role. Keep your mind open to good thinking from others.

iiNet The new No.2

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Suppliers are family.Printers and film companies and sound studios and photographers are our No.1 partners in this grand adventure of ours. On countless occasions they have helped us to prove that our philosophy delivers better work. On time and on budget. We wouldn’t be where we are today without their passion and skill and patience and help. So they deserve to be treated with respect, to be invited to contribute, to be paid fairly and on time, to be listened to, to be consulted and involved. Just as the meerkat shares its home with other species, so too do we consider suppliers a part of our extended family. And will be treated as such.

Stockland Townside

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We’ve noticed that many agencies seem happy to let the little jobs slip out the door with a quality of finish that is lower than the big stuff. On a full page colour ad the copy is perfect, but on that little 10x2 mono ad the copy is not quite interesting enough, the art direction not 100% on brand, that sort of thing.

Like they have all agreed that a lower level of quality is simply unavoidable at the bottom of the food chain.We disagree. We think the true measure of an agency’s performance is the quality of the small stuff. It’s like a secret window to their soul. And we truly believe Meerkats has a higher level in the lower levels.

No bad work, ever.

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We like awards. We like evidence that we are good at what we do. We just don’t think about them until the job is done. We never ask “will this win an award?” at the concept stage. It’s the wrong motivation. We ask “will this nail the objective brilliantly?”. A simple analogy is a football game (either code). You can have one eye on the ball and one eye on the scoreboard, willing it to tick over. Or you can keep both eyes on the ball, play as damned hard and skillfully as you can, then at the end of the game look up at the scoreboard. We all know which mindset will get the silverware at the end of the season.

Westnet Down to earth

On the sensitive subject of awards.

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How many times have you been in a meeting, had a thought pop into your head but kept it to yourself, then later somebody says the same thing and everyone goes “Wow, great idea Tony”. Well we have a rule about that: Never leave a meeting with a nagging thought still inside your head. Get it out. Let it live and see what happens. Ask the dumb question. Go against the popular opinion. If a thought appears, you have a responsibility to voice it. You’ll be amazed how many times it turns out that others were thinking exactly the same thing and not speaking up (especially if it’s to highlight a problem, or burst a client’s bubble). You never know, it might be the thing that makes an idea better, or prevents a catastrophe.

Rule#47

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Meerkats was launched with a public lecture on a research project we did into the buying habits of West Australian consumers. The findings were subsequently printed in the local industry magazine. All for free. All available to anyone who wanted to learn and benefit from it. In other words, we are totally cool with sharing how we work. And why. It’s a kind of commercial karma; let it go and it will come back tenfold. Or something like that. Maybe twelvefold, we can’t remember. The point is: don’t be protective of what you have learned, how you crack big ideas and solve problems, all your clever tricks and techniques. Share it with whoever will listen. That should lead to the gradual improvement in the level of trustworthiness held for our industry, which currently ranks alongside lawyers and car dealers.

Give away everythingyou value.

Give away everythingyou value.

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It’s not about us.

It’s not about the client. And it sure isn’t about the money. Or the awards. Or the fame. This business is about the people who will help our clients grow their market share. It’s about what those people think, what drives them, what they fear, what they hope for, how they see themselves, how they see advertising, how they consume media, how they live their lives. Everything at Meerkats begins with the truth about people.

Some agencies call them consumers or the target audience. We think that’s a trap. Straight away you start to view them as different to you. Dumber somehow, or more gullible. We call them people because the audience is all of us. It’s your mother and your sister and your Uncle Trev and his mate with the chip shop and the guy who sits at the next desk to you.

Stockland Townside

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You have a wonderful opportunity here. To build a home for yourself. To create a role and a career path and a sense of belonging that means you won’t want to leave. Like, ever. Traditionally, ad folkare nomadic. We change agencies like we change our mobile phones. Always looking for that next job title, pay rise, greener grass. Well, here at Meerkats we have chosen you carefully and we want to keep you for as long as we can. We want you to grow and learn and succeed and take over this place one day.

We want to feed your soul, your curiosity and yourambition so much younever want to leave.We want to give you suchrewarding brand projects to work on you can’t believe people from other agencies aren’t trying to bust down the front door to get in. Every employee here has their own annual training budget, so go ahead and use it. You represent the next generation of brandcommunicators and we want you to show the world the true power of the Meerkats way. So, what are you here for- a job or a career?

Career or job?

HBF The Deal

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Cut the crap.

Give ‘em up.

The excuses.

Now.

Before you finish your first day here. Whatever your role is, there are no excuses here. Only learnings. We find out why something went wrong, we learn, we do better, we move on. No finger-pointing, no martyrdom.

We get better, together.

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No.1 Rokeby Road, Subiaco WA 6008 | T: 618 9388 0011 | F: 618 9388 0021 | E: [email protected] | W: meerkats.com.au