Collective Resilience: Jill Nykoliation, Juniper Park\TBWA

кем India Fizer , AdForum

Juniper Park\TBWA
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Toronto, Canada
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Jill Nykoliation
CEO Juniper Park\TBWA, Toronto
 

We spoke with Jill Nykoliation, CEO of Juniper Park\TBWA, on the future of work; rebuilding after a collective trauma, creating collaboration spaces, and taking the time for weekly gatherings dedicated to personal discussions.


Over the past year, work environments have had to change drastically. How has your agency taken employee feedback, coupled with what’s appropriate for the company to create a work plan going forward?

The pandemic has caused a collective trauma, so we’ve focused our efforts on building collective resilience. At Juniper Park\TBWA, we ask each other how we are doing every single week. We call it Pulse – weekly texts where staff can provide anonymous feedback about how they are feeling. We then share this feedback agency-wide every Monday morning, raw and unfiltered. We actively practice empathy, honesty, humanity, and patience to address the issues our team cares about, including what our post-pandemic work environment will look like.

We have developed our return-to-work plan with our employee feedback in mind. Although comfort became the norm while we isolated at home, we have to remember that this was a holding pattern. It is now time to lean into growth. Creativity is a collective sport, so while workplaces of the future will be hybrid, offices still play an important role. We have transformed our office to be a place of collaboration. We’ve removed all individual offices, repurposing them into 18 new collaboration spaces, and introduced hot desks to further embrace agility. Our sole objective is to encourage creative ideas to flow.

 

How has the changing work landscape affected the way pitches and campaign briefs are approached and conceptualized?

Pitching in person is like performance theatre. Without being in person, we had to reimagine how to perform theatre to a virtual audience. Our production company, Bolt Content, has been essential in this transformation. We’ve had great success creating videos that intertwine humanity and technology – introducing our team as people, not talking heads, in order to build chemistry, an important ingredient in any pitch.

We pushed ourselves to break convention in our one-hour pitch meetings, so they’d feel distinctly different from the other 39 hours of video calls our prospective clients had that week. Instead of inviting them to our virtual pitch room, we found a way to place ourselves into their living rooms. We created video synopses of our submissions, so potential clients can feel our thinking and sense our passion, rather than merely reading about it.

This has created true engagement through sincere emotion and intimacy, which has worked well for us – 2020 and 2021 have been our most successful years since inception.

  

In what ways has this impacted the work-life balance of your employees and what steps have been taken to mitigate that?

It’s a universal truth that personal boundaries were challenged during the pandemic. Working in isolation made it feel like we were carrying our responsibilities in isolation too. To tackle this, we made a deliberate decision to put mental health at the forefront. We ensured that every member on our team felt seen and valued. We started Pirate Huddles, an intimate weekly gathering of the entire agency where instead of discussing work, we talk about us. I personally lead the discussion. I talk with a mixture of brutal honesty and incredible hope, and invite our team to look inward to build their resilience muscles.

Each week is a new lesson. We’ve explored Gretchen Ruben’s “Four Tendencies”, the Omega Institute’s “Vibration Funnel”, Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s book on burnout, Esther Perel’s take on social atrophy, Matthew McConaughey’s take on rebranding by unbranding, and what we can learn from Netflix’s culture of personal autonomy from the newest book “No Rules Rules”. 

We chose not to sit still in the stillness, but instead to collectively grow. We’re at 72 huddles and counting. This weekly ritual has become a touchstone of our culture.

 

Given that each work environment can look a bit different, what has helped in creating a cohesive working relationship with clients?

Our clients hire us because we are sharpshooters. We must drive results even in the throes of massive uncertainty. The power of our TBWA collective set us apart during the pandemic. From day one, the leadership of the top one hundred countries met weekly to share information, strategies and to keep each other abreast of the local cultural changes as they happened in real time. As soon as the pandemic began, our teammates in Asia shared their experiences from being nine weeks ahead of us. When the world went hyper-digital overnight, we did too. We put data at the forefront of our agency through the creation of our new precision marketing practice, Scalpel. Our global cultural engine, Backslash, was updated in real time to reflect cultural shifts and branded examples. Our commitment to gathering collective intelligence was invaluable to our local clients and gave us confidence to move boldly into the new future.

 

What changes that have been made over the past year do you see sticking around for years to come?

We’ve never been more acutely aware that the well-being of our people is instrumental to the performance of a company. Working through a pandemic has given us a fuller appreciation for the lives of our employees – their personal circumstances, their underlying fears, their talents beyond their roles, and the dependents they proudly prioritize. We’ve seen into people’s bedrooms, basements, kitchens, and attics. This lens into people’s lives has made us more human, flexible, and ultimately, stronger as a team. People are now more apt to bring their whole selves to work, which is both beautiful, and also results in richer creative ideas. We hope that bringing your whole self to work continues in our culture post pandemic.

As Wayne Dyer says, “what you focus on expands”. Despite the pandemic’s challenges, we have intentionally and continuously shone a light on gratitude. During our weekly Pulse meetings and Pirate Huddles, we’ve introduced shoutouts, where employees are invited to thank their team members for actions large and small. This reinforces that everyone personally matters, their work matters, and their effort is appreciated. It is a fundamental human need to feel seen, but this can be difficult to achieve through a computer screen. Through our twice weekly, public shoutouts, we have found a way to ensure that our team knows they are valued. It is a cherished practice of our culture that I hope will continue as we move into the future.