Best Agency Culture

We are a video games creative agency who make award-winning creative campaigns. We’ve partnered with the world’s most prestigious game publishers, developers, and brands. Our agency is centred on culture. Under new senior management, we reenergised our team and modernised our agency's operations, doing away with the traditional agency (old-school) manner of doing things. We won a coveted CIPD award for our ‘Happy Working’ at Maverick in 2022 – judged by the HR institute themselves. There are two areas we strive to continuously improve: employee engagement and work-life balance.
Employee Engagement
We work hard to foster a workplace where everyone has a voice. To build relationships and morale, we have regular company socials. HR have also introduced committees consisting of a variety of employees from different departments and backgrounds - the ‘DEI (Diversity, Equality & Inclusion) Dream Team’ and the ‘Wellbeing Warriors’. They have helped employees to feel included and represented. This was done by celebrating different cultures, raising wellbeing awareness and taking feedback after each initiative to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Work-Life Balance
Overtime has dramatically fallen during the past two years, falling by 26%. Maverick adopted the mindset of treating overtime as the exception, not the rule to ensure a healthy work-life balance. A daily non-meeting time block from 10am to 11am has been introduced in order to make sure everyone can catch up on their particular work objectives instead of being in constant meetings. If any overtime is encountered, the employees are entitled to ‘duvet time’ to compensate. Senior management also made sure to turn off their computers and stop working by 6 o'clock at the latest, leading by example for the workforce.
Results
The incremental changes lead to phenomenal results, not only are the staff much more engaged in the business but the financial metrics have been positively impacted; amazingly, the revenue increased by 86% in a single year. Valuable feedback was received: “Always thought HR was a pain with processes, but our HR actually cares”. A clear example of the increased credibility and integrity between HR and the employees.