For a business built on creativity, agency thinking can be pretty uncreative; we staff up when we win business and staff down when we lose it. Besides being an incredibly demoralizing process for everyone, this crazy job rollercoaster runs completely counter to the challenge of finding, hiring and nurturing creative talent.

I recently read about an agency in Atlanta called the SuperGroup who came up with a much better — and much more creative — solution to layoffs. Instead of letting people go when business is slow, they encourage their creatives to pursue their own creative endeavors. Employees were told that as long as they made client work their top priority, they were free to work on personal creative projects during downtime.

So what happened? Those “personal” projects have helped the agency do better work for their clients and win new business. When the agency was pitching an interactive website for the Weather Channel, it turned out that it was some original music written and produced by one of SuperGroup’s employees that clinched the deal.

This personalization of the creative process has also changed how the agency works. They now hold meetings twice a week where the whole staff gathers to discuss both company and personal projects. And by adding creative freedom to their workplace they have also engendered an incredible amount of loyalty and hard work.

I’ve always felt that agencies were losing out on new opportunities by keeping their creatives so narrowly focused on the business at hand. When people feel empowered and free, amazing things can happen. Google offers its engineers “20-Percent Time,” where each engineer is free to spend 20% of their work day on personal projects. Some of Google’s most popular services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut and AdSense all originated from these independent endeavors. For Google, it’s incredibly innovative. For SuperGroup, it’s downright heroic.

Steven Stark is a writer and creative director with at least one good screenplay in him. You can see his work and read some of his other musings here.

Article Tags: 20-percent time | Advertising | agencies | creatives | creativity | firing | Google | hiring | layoffs | Steven Stark | super | supergroup | the weather channel
Filed under: Advertising, Agency Life, Business, Campaign Critiques, Industry News, Personal Opinions, Steven Stark, Strategy