2 minute read
Improving Mental Fitness in Creative & Marketing Agencies
Advertisement
Freud was perhaps one of the first to recognise the connection between work and mental health. Now, approximately 100 years on, the worldwide trend towards poor mental health is rising at an alarming rate.
State of Play
The Drum magazine network recently partnered with Opinium research and University of Warwick to conduct a survey on agency mental health and wellbeing. It’s the largest ever survey of its kind in the Marcoms landscape. The findings showed that Marcoms workers have significantly lower mental wellbeing scores than the wider worker population. 85% have struggled with their mental health, versus 53% wider worker population. In response to these statistics and a growing awareness of the sustained pressures people face working in the industry, we’ve created a series of talks, workshops and a 2 night, 3 day retreat to specifically address this.
Where did it all go so wrong?
When we lift the lid and look under the bonnet of most workplaces, we see that staff experiencing job stress, tend to triple their risk of experiencing mental health issues. And with the average person spending around a third of their life at work, it doesn’t take much to realise we’re now facing an epidemic. Chronic stress and anxiety, leading to burnout, is now prevalent in the workplace affecting 94% of employees at one time or another. Mental health disorders are on the rise in every country in the world and will cost the global economy $16 trillion by 2030 – primarily due to early onset of mental illness and lost productivity, with an estimated 12 billion working days lost due to mental illness every year. Employee burnout has reached epidemic proportions and is responsible for up to 50% of annual workforce turnover.
The marketing industry
Arriving into the reception of many of the UK’s leading marketing agencies, what do you see? Bright colours perhaps; a big show of creativity on the walls, and a sparky person to greet you? But what’s behind the façade? Emotional and mental health disorders are becoming more widely acknowledged and less stigmatised in certain industries, but not everyone has woken up yet to the issue that’s right in front of them. So, has the marketing industry? Reports of agency staff experiencing high levels of burnout, along with concerns about their mental health, are becoming more and more frequent. And for some, it’s obviously linked to the very nature of the agency industry itself, which is famed for being relentless, high pressured with long working hours and dependent upon client whims. This sits alongside an increase in uncertainty and potential redundancies over recent years. Because not much has been written about this in the UK press, we decided to do our own research, and reached out to a cross section of under 30s who had worked in several agencies to see how they felt about this topic. You can continue reading about this at https://thelifeadventure.co/wellbeing-for-marcoms-creative-agencies/
