Some of the most challenging moments in the relationship between your brand and an agency arrive early. First, you spend a lot of time looking around to evaluate whether a new agency is right for your brand. (And, if this is you, hi!) Then, you have to onboard a new partner, which takes time as you both learn how to collaborate and develop a working shorthand together.
Finally, the fun part begins as you work with your agency partner to resolve your brand’s problems. Given the importance of that goal, you need a creative partner who is invested in doing all they can to sustain that partnership and consistently deliver their best work. Relationship retrospectives are key to a successful, sustainable partnership that remains streamlined and drama-free while generating the creative excellence your brand needs.
The idea is similar in spirit to project retrospectives, which look for areas of improvement after any campaign. However, relationship retrospectives are more proactive. Instead of waiting until something has gone wrong, the right agency will consistently look to ensure their connection and communication with your team remains healthy. Fundamentally, these meetings are a relationship-building exercise that ensures you and your agency trust in one another and are in a position to collectively deliver the best work. Relationship retrospectives keep your partnership—and its creative results—running at their best.
Relationship retrospectives are structured, facilitated, and focused
Years ago, relationship-building with an agency probably looked more like “Mad Men." Everyone went out to a big dinner and then experienced whatever team-building results from getting blackout drunk together. Thankfully, these are more sensible times.
Relationship retrospectives are a crucial tool to preserving and enhancing the quality of your brand’s working relationship with its agency. As companies continue to evaluate the role of the traditional office, relationship-building is all the more vital. Remote work is here to stay, and you need to maintain a strong bond with your team despite primarily communicating through a screen. But the process requires more than your agency firing off an email with a subject line like, “Checking in.”
Larger agencies may have built-in processes for evaluating their dynamic with clients, but there’s no substitute for direct communication. At We The Collective, we schedule quarterly relationship retrospectives that provide a consistent forum to examine and improve collaboration.
These retrospectives provide a means to ensure that both sides of the partnership are working at their best. Focusing on continuous improvement also applies to collaborative processes. For example, to streamline a project’s progress, you and your agency can discuss hiring freelancers to tackle production tasks. Ultimately, both sides should come out of a relationship retrospective with tools to make their lives easier — and the work stronger.
Neutrality is critical to keeping a retrospective moving forward
To keep the conversation engaged and productive, your agency should use a facilitator who has some knowledge of the business but is impartial. Typically, we use someone from our agency trained in facilitation that isn’t involved in the day-to-day of the collaboration. Sometimes, at more corporate firms, they may engage a professional mediator who can facilitate a retrospective on any topic.
With a facilitator in place, your agency can ensure everyone is comfortable expressing themselves and identifying issues to improve. The structure of these meetings may resemble counselling sessions, but relationship retrospectives aren’t intended to fix something that’s broken. Instead, the idea is for everyone to focus on areas of improvement in a fun, engaging way so your partnership continues to produce the same high quality of creative work.
Communication guidelines are key to successful relationship retrospectives
When both sides of an engagement are free to talk about their experience, you can uncover the details to help the creative process run more smoothly. As a result, you identify potential issues before they can develop.
Fortunately, we haven’t had to navigate deeper interpersonal issues such as personality conflicts. For us, table stakes are that we all like each other. But we all work a little bit differently, and relationship retrospectives provide a chance to be aware of everyone’s expectations. Like any relationship, it’s simply a good idea to check in.
We commit an hour of our time every quarter to bring people together with the hopes of making everyone’s lives a bit easier. Relationship retrospectives focus on the process, not the people. By maintaining focus on how to improve how we work together, you keep the focus off individuals. And clear communication is kind communication when it comes to relationship retrospectives. After all, the meeting concerns a business relationship. It’s never personal.
Relationship retrospectives lead to stronger creative down the road
To get the kind of work that will make a difference for your brand, your relationship with an agency must be built on trust. Identifying and discussing even the practical process details of how we work together allows creative ideas to flow more freely.
For example, imagine the first brainstorming session with your agency introduces an assortment of roadblocks. One idea can’t be pursued because legal would never approve it, or another approach isn’t viable because the right files aren’t available. A relationship retrospective will allow room to propose new processes like leaving more time for legal review or finding the source for assets. Otherwise, your agency may feel censored before pursuing some viable creative ideas in the future.
You can only discover the right campaign by eliminating any roadblocks that prevent creative ideas from flourishing. Once you remove the stress of process annoyances, duplicated efforts, or other nagging inefficiencies, your agency is better equipped to unlock the great creative your brand needs.
In a healthy agency-client relationship, neither party should be walking on eggshells because you didn't put in the work to fix the issue. The better both sides get to know and trust one another, the more likely your agency will feel empowered to try unconventional solutions to your brand’s problems. And, ultimately, the work grows that much stronger.
Relationship retrospectives save time and money for your brand
Misunderstandings or easy-to-resolve roadblocks in your agency’s workflow take time to work around — and that’s time that could be spent helping your brand. To see the most return on an investment when hiring an outside agency, you need as much focus as possible dedicated to resolving creative challenges rather than procedural issues.
But just as importantly, tending to your relationship with an agency contributes to that partnership’s lifespan. At the end of our relationship retrospectives, everyone who works on your brand comes out of the process recharged. In a short amount of time, we talk about actionable items that will improve how we work together. Then, there’s no dry, drawn-out promise to follow-up on some detail later. We identify issues, and then they’re quickly resolved.
At We The Collective, we view our clients as partners, and those relationships only grow stronger with time. Investing in continuous upkeep of that partnership through relationship retrospectives doesn’t just deliver better work. It also spares your brand from investing the time and energy of onboarding a new agency that doesn't share your idea of healthy collaboration. If this sounds like the kind of creative partnership that would serve your brand, we should talk.
