Back in 1999, “being different” for us meant creating an agency that was about independence and agility. We’d all come from a large networked global group, where we didn’t feel in control of shaping the way we worked around our clients – where bureaucracy got in the way of creating change.
Being free to create the agency we wanted meant one with no rules, borders or boundaries. We were all united around one common goal: to blend disciplines to create something completely new.
Diversity for us means diversity in culture, communications and commerce skills to do anything – be that creating content, conversations, experiences or communities. That’s why we call ourselves a creative innovation network rather than an agency.
Innovation requires diversity
If you want diverse and innovative outputs, you need to attract talent from weird and wonderful specialist backgrounds, who can bring different inputs to the table. We started to fuse a range of unique creative talents and, at the same time, recruited expertise in PR, experiential, product innovation, social, strategy, technology, data analytics and management consultants.
We’ve developed many ways of finding talented and passionate people from a variety of backgrounds. Having a degree is not a necessity and we run apprenticeships, a very creative placement scheme for creatives called The Bunker, and internships with the Miami Ad School.
Staying Diverse
We work hard to unlock the potential from our talent and to ensure we all stay fresh and think different. We purposely mix it up with our active rotation programme that has seen people move discipline, department and location to different iris offices around the world to expose them to different cultures and experiences.
Making diversity work
Diversity on its own doesn’t create difference. In fact, a workforce of diverse skills and experiences is difficult to manage. What makes the magic happen is creating a culture of true collaboration that leads to better work more often.
Our internal culture is the lubrication for “different”. Diversity becomes powerful when you create the conditions for the free expression of opinions, putting client problems in the centre of a room and approaching that problem with no bias about the answer.
It’s about uniting people around an entrepreneurial spirit: making sure that people feel like they’ve got permission to go for it and try something new. More importantly, it’s about giving them permission to fail.
Making diversity rewarding
Being different meant setting up iris for our people as well as clients. Our aim was to make it more democratic and meritocratic than any place we’d worked before. To motivate and retain key talent, we’ve set up a pretty unique equity structure. There are over 60 equity partners across the network, which means we’ve given a great number of people a say in how the business is run.
It also means you are never more than five metres from someone who is actively making it their mission to make iris more successful.
Claire Humphris is founding partner of iris
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