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Thank you for taking the time to leave this feedback on your experience at Outfly. It goes a long way to helping us understand what we’re getting right and where we need to improve. A big part of our M/O is to make agencies fairer, and this counts just as much for our employees as it does for our clients.
To that end, we’ve been working closely with our team over the past 8 months to design a working environment everyone is happy with. This collaborative process has led to a radical rethink of our HR policies across sick leave, clients, flexible working, salary and more. We’re putting the finishing touches to this and will be announcing the full package later this year.
We’re incredibly proud of our client roster and have built up a long tail of purpose-driven organisations, which wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the values of the people who work here. Whether our clients are trying to veganise fast food, support digitally deprived areas, reduce violence against women and girls or create a circular economy for soft plastics (the list goes on), every one of them must first pass the “Value Vote” — where the founder of the incoming client pitches their mission to our team. Every member of the team then gets to vote on whether they think we should work with the client. If the client doesn’t pass, then we pass on the client. In addition, through partnerships with organisations like Hatch Enterprise, we dedicate a large chunk of our time to increasing diversity in the startup sector, with a big plan in the works to launch our own fund dedicated to helping founders from underrepresented backgrounds. None of this comes free — in order to grow our own impact we also need to work with some clients that aren’t purely purpose-driven. We also cannot guarantee an even distribution of purpose-driven clients across all functions of the agency at any one time, though we certainly offer more than the majority of agencies.
On top of being entitled to statutory sick leave and pay, employees at Outfly currently receive 5 fully compensated sick days, which are convertible to holidays if they aren't used. Once all of the fully compensated sick days are used up for the year, employees are still entitled to take unlimited further sick days and receive statutory sick pay where applicable. When we introduced this, the intention was to give all of our employees the choice and flexibility to make time off work for them, rather than being forced to conform to a uniform policy. This is part of a wider shift towards ‘Paid Time Off’ (PTO) across more progressive businesses and does come at a cost, in that it can feel like by taking a sick day, you're losing a potential day of holiday. In retrospect it’s easy to see why sick days vs. holidays are two extremes which are not particularly compatible. As a result, we have decided to rethink the time off package from scratch and try to make sure that our new policy is the best of all worlds (as much as is humanly possible).
Though we would love to be able to offer everyone increasing salaries, due to our purpose-driven focus and commitment to early stage startups, our base pay will never compete with larger agencies. We can take on higher value clients, but other agencies will have bigger budget clients and will always outgun us. That being said, we do offer more in the long term; employees who stay with us 3 years or more are rewarded with the chance to join our EMI (share option) scheme. This means that the longer they stay with us, the more options they get in Outfly and the partners we hold a stake in. Put simply, you can end up owning a stake in the clients you're helping to grow. We also offer an unprecedented work/life balance for an agency, which no competitor can match. Unlike most, we do not encourage late working (which can average at 10pm evenings 2-3 times a week). We also don’t pitch for work, as it’s something that’s traditionally done over weekends and through nights.
We operate a hybrid working policy, where people can choose to work from home for two days per week. Given that we’re a collaborative and creative agency, we need to ensure that there are key hours where we’re all in office together, to maximise efficiency. We chose Monday and Friday, but for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, employees are free to choose which two days they want to spend at home. Studies show that productivity diminishes when Mondays and Fridays are spent at home — but the main reason we implemented this was because we believed it’s great to start the week off and end it together, over drinks. After listening to yours and others’ feedback, we are planning to update this, and will announce the new policy soon!
Thanks again for your review, we hope all is well with you 😊
