F8ck all.

Actually that’s not strictly true. Some of the senior people running agencies or teams are griping about it, but I don’t know of any who’ve confronted the issue.

Why is that?
I truly don’t know. But what I suspect is that it either hasn’t been acknowledged as a commercial issue, or managers are pasting over the cracks by suffering in silence.

Is it a commercial issue? Do bears defecate in wooded areas?

PR, agency-side at least, is a people business. Without people you cannot run clients, you cannot develop business. So if social factors are either having or likely to have a destabilising effect on your business, you bet it’s a commercial issue. Certainly HR people from large corporations I have met view it or already treat it as a board issue. If PR is serious about being committed to people and their development, it had better get its head around it.

One notable exception is Lewis, which has at least had the balls to blog (via its San Francisco office) about the problems with recruiting apathetic Gen Yers. Conviction, passion and commitment – all in short supply, say the moguls of Millbank. Fair point. Equally, many agencies could look at some of their senior staff who’ve got it too comfortable and level the same allegations at them.

So not everyone is a rampant careerist and it’s unfeasible for agencies to never hire another person born after 1984. What’s the solution? It does not mean a crisis committee. What it does need, in the opinion of those I’ve canvassed, is recognition that it’s an issue and a managed approach to developing a team with widely varying aspirations and motivations. Sound like a hippy who’s got his head up his buttocks? Let’s put it in commercial terms then. If people now aren’t as hung up about career progression as they generally were in the past, then agencies structured around a ladder of relatively rapid promotion with associated salary increases, with additional bonuses in good times, some nifty perks and the lure (where applicable) of share options should take a long hard look at what they’re offering and how they’re set up in the first place.

Of course if Generation Y is an increasing factor amongst your staff, you can’t afford to keep paying more if people aren’t achieving results for clients. That’s a road to nowhere. Equally, agencies are organisms that thrive on people developing rather than stagnating. And the worst thing you could do would be to shy away from the issue and create two streams of reward and development: one for the career-hungry, one for those who aren’t.

“I turn up pretty much every day. What about a pay rise?”
So the question, probably, is what individual success in an PR agency should look like. There are some commercial fundamentals here that we can’t escape from: everything is about the sustainable growth of profitable revenues, so if you can foster that, you should be rewarded based on your ability to (and achievements in) doing so. That applies both to people who largely work for clients and people who’re wholly unbillable. But if you’re not bringing in the bacon, you shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. More bacon, more dough. Simple. Or at least it should be.

There are a few trends that fly in the face of this logic, such as:
- People getting (OK, a lot of agencies still have pay freezes but some don’t) token pay rises just because the impact of them leaving would be a risk to revenues
- Digital PR specialists being paid way more than their actual market value by agencies paranoid about missing the digital boat
- People who are developing quickly not being given headroom to progress. Sometimes overall agency finances won’t support it because that development isn’t mirrored across the agency at large. Other times it’s because others on loftier salaries have become sluggish and aren’t adding what they should be. Sometimes investments have been made that simply preclude it: regardless, if this isn’t managed, the best people of tomorrow will get itchy feet

I don’t have all the answers here. In fact I’m not sure I’ve given any in the verbage above. Changing the approach to people development to accommodate changing and varied aspirations across a team is not an overnight task. Nor is coming up with a more progressive and multi-dimensional pay and rewards structure.

Perhaps others have examples of how agencies are tackling this proactively. Speed has acknowledged some of the issues, but still quite some way to go. I guess my overall point is this: if Generation Y typically possesses many of the traits I’ve been looking at, then they’re not the people who’re going to tackle this. It’s agencies who have to pull their heads out of the sand and be bold.