I love the creative industry and the smart thinkers that call it home. Working closely with Streamtime customers across the globe for close to two decades, hearing their challenges, understanding their businesses and helping them achieve their goals has given me a unique insight into the industry and made me a passionate advocate for it.
I’ve listened and learnt through customer facing positions like support, training and sales and brought those practical experiences into business side roles helping us build a product that is fit for the challenges faced by creative businesses.
In my current role as Head of Productive Wellbeing, we’re focused on forging a new path for Streamtime and the industry. Having witnessed the industries culture of strict workflows, uncompromising work hours, rigid timesheets and extensive ‘locked down’ permissions in my early years evolve into the more flexible approach increasingly common today, we’re now focused on the next phase of agency life: A world where creative businesses thrive based on sustainable practices that honour their most valuable asset - the talented individuals bringing ideas to life.
The Creative Industry's Hidden Crisis
The most recent 2024 Mentally-Healthy industry survey paints a concerning picture of an industry workforce operating in unsustainable conditions.
Eyebrow raising headlines include:
- 70% of creative industry professionals experienced burnout in the last 12 months.
- Anxiety levels are on the rise.
- 38% of respondents have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
- On average, respondents worked 9.5 days while physically or mentally unwell (up from 5 days in 2022).
Couple that with data we uncovered via a recent survey of existing Streamtime customers showing the amount of investment some businesses are already making on additional services to support their teams wellbeing, and it’s clear that businesses are acutely aware of the importance of a healthy team.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the average response when queried about the connection between team health and business profitability was 8.51. Indicating a strong belief that proactive management of employee capacity and wellbeing positively impacts a business's bottom line.
Beyond the Bottom Line: A New Business Philosophy
The traditional either/or mentality that dictates financial success and employee wellbeing as mutually exclusive is simply no longer fit for purpose. Leveraging our existing project management data, happiness coach responses, data and behavioural science specialists along with soon to be released features, we believe we are uniquely positioned and hugely excited about the prospect of guiding teams towards a healthier, happier business and industry.
We know that it is absolutely possible to achieve healthy profits without sacrificing the wellbeing of your team.
Regulation ≠ Awareness (or action):
Mandatory psychosocial obligations have been established within existing Health and Safety regulations in Australia, NZ and UK (as well as many other countries) in recent years. These regulations require employers to identify and manage psychosocial hazards like bullying, harassment and excessive workloads in their teams. In fact, some of the laws around mental wellbeing at work have been around since the 1970’s with the latest updates a step towards actually enforcing them.
Despite these new obligations, just on half (49%) of business owners/leaders reported awareness of psychosocial hazard legislation, according to the Mentally Healthy survey.
A customer survey conducted by Streamtime revealed that awareness of the regulations was slightly higher and varied across regions: 54% of Australian, 51% of UK and 62.5% of New Zealand respondents indicated they understood the regulations.
Acting on the awareness was less common. Only 22% of respondents said their organisation had a ‘clear plan’ when asked how the business they worked in was identifying and acting on psychosocial hazards. 51% responded with ‘not sure’, 18% saying the business simply ‘was not’ (‘other’ made up the final 9%) - via Mentally Healthy results.
The Data Revolution: Making the Invisible Visible
Marriage of PM Data with People Data
Traditional project management metrics only tell half the story. A hugely profitable job, perfect. All items running on schedule, great. Project deadline met, amazing. Right?
Well, maybe.
The numbers add up, but the health of the team can’t be seen in financial and timeline details alone. The flexibility of working from home or hybrid work can mean team ‘happiness’ indicators that were traditionally gauged through regular office interactions are missed.
How did the project go from the team's perspective? Could anything be improved? Are there any learnings about the client, type of work, budget or timeframe that could be carried forward? What is the correlation, if any, between team sentiment, job success, staff turnover, profitability? If only we could combine productivity metrics with wellbeing and sentiment data…
Understanding What Really Matters
For this, we’ve turned to data. With the support of data and behavioural science experts to help identify the correlation between existing data points/actions in Streamtime and the mapping of Happiness Coach responses to SMART pillars. This correlation analysis work will help surface useful, timely, actionable insights that guide users towards positive outcomes for their team and business.
Innovation in Action: ‘Happiness Coach’ Revamp
The Journey So Far
Launched in 2022 as the first step on our Productive Wellbeing journey, the happiness coach queries user sentiment via the ToDo page at the end of the working week. The emoji responses are mapped to pillars in the SMART work design framework which help identify the drivers of the sentiment.
The 40,000+ responses received by the Happiness Coach provide an excellent foundation for understanding the factors influencing these results. This data will allow us to identify early precursors and guide towards success.
Small check-ins at the end of each week lead to bigger business insights
The data is anonymised and presented back to the business as an overall sentiment indicator.
We’ve built this into a personal dashboard, where team members themselves can see a history of any notes they’ve included in their responses. Importantly, these are only visible to the team member themselves with the entries made at the end of each week kept in the journal section of the personal dashboard.
Innovation in Action: Moments of Gratitude
A soon to be released feature offering an additional path to promote thriving through peer recognition will provide us further insight. Recognising a team mate through a ‘moment of gratitude’ aims to improve happiness and wellbeing within the team by promoting positive behaviours and great work.
Innovation in Action: Pulse Check
Incorporating 'softer' metrics based on team behaviors and actions, introduces an additional layer of insights. By linking moments of gratitude or positive Happiness Coach responses to specific jobs, we can uncover further insights. This will help identify which customers, job types, or specific items are most consistently associated with positive outcomes. The current traditional categories will be expanded to include 'at a glance' team-focused sense checks.
The Road Ahead: Building Sustainable Creative Businesses
We believe the data paints a clear picture - our industry stands at a critical crossroads. With 70% of professionals having experienced burnout, anxiety levels climbing since 2022 and half of business leaders unaware of psychosocial hazard legislation, the status quo is unsustainable.
The silver lining? Within these sobering statistics lies unprecedented opportunity for transformation. An opportunity where data becomes the compass guiding both profitability and wellbeing decisions, where analytics that optimise project margins also help predict and surface actionable people insights. This future uses technology to help humans flourish in their day-to-day rather than just improve operational efficiency.
Most importantly, we see creative businesses thriving based on sustainable practices that honour their team members who bring the ideas to life. The choice is ours, continue down the path of diminishing returns through burnout culture, or pioneer a new model where business success and human wellbeing are inextricably linked, creating an industry that doesn't just survive, but flourishes for generations to come.
The Future is in Our Hands
This transformation won't happen overnight, and it won't happen alone. We need forward-thinking leaders, passionate creatives, and innovative businesses to join us in redefining what success looks like.
Ready to be part of the change? Whether you want to share your experiences, test new features before they launch, or simply continue the conversation about building a healthier creative industry, we'd love to hear from you. Hit us up at help@streamtime.net.
The future of creative business isn't just profitable, it's sustainable, human-centered, and built to last.
Let's build it together.
