A conversation with Matt Collins of Platypus Digital

Photo by Ankush Minda on Unsplash.

Brani: Hi Matt, can you introduce yourself and tell us about Platypus? 

Matt: Platypus is a digital marketing agency, specifically for charities. We don't do design and build, or product development, just digital marketing. We do Google Ads campaigns, Facebook and Meta ads, campaigns, digital strategy and some SEO.

And you get direct access to the experts – no account managers, no middlemen. 

You've said “I've become a scarily competent expert at getting the hell out of our team’s way, so they can get on with creating brilliant campaigns.” What is it about getting out of people's way and why does it matter?

Well, that's a good quote, isn't it? I don't remember saying that. But that's definitely what I do. So I can well believe that I did say it!

What does it mean? For me, my style of work is quite delegatory and empowering.

I believe in specialisation. When I hire someone to do Facebook ads, if I try to tinker with what they're doing or even input too much into it, I'm not doing my job, which is other things, and they’re not doing their job, which is Facebook ads.

I’ve worked in organisations and charities where fundraising and communications don't really believe in the expertise of what the other does. They'll have meetings saying: “Well, my team really thinks that this pitch should say this.” And then the other team will say, “Well, we've worked with the people that this content is aimed at and they say the opposite.”

So I’ve seen that lack of belief in the expertise of the other team. And I really want to avoid that.

And I don't want, and don’t have the time, to micromanage people or tell them how to do their jobs.

So I get out of their way, get them to tell me the best way to do things. Then we all get better results.

What I’m hearing in what you said is that  you need to trust your people. How do you work with your team bearing that in mind? 

You do have to trust your team, definitely. I think that starts with a really rigorous recruitment process. 

So we have our interview split between hard skills: can you do the job that you're being hired to do and get really specific evidence around that? And the values elements. 

We have four organisational values that we really believe in. And if they really believe in them, and you can demonstrate adherence to them then we’ll have the solid foundation of trust. One of our values is “constantly improve.”  If someone really wants to improve, they’ll have high standards for themselves. The best people in the organisation just have it in their DNA. They want to do a great job, they can't help it. If I went under a bus tomorrow, they'd still be doing an incredible job, because it's just in them. 

If they have that value, and they fail, which they do because everyone does, then I don't need to have a go at them for failing. 

If someone’s got those qualities then I'm going to trust them to do a great Facebook ads campaign, or to tell clients why campaigns have gone wrong, or whatever it is we need them to do. I think having high standards for yourself is a personal quality. I trust people to do their best. Possibly to a fault – the flipside of that is too much trust means too little oversight. And maybe you can trust people too much, but I've yet to experience it.

You mentioned Platypus’ four values. Can you tell us what they are? And how do you test for them? 

Our four values are:
1. make a positive difference: we want people to improve the world,
2. constantly improve: get better at things all the time,
3. communicate openly: share when things have gone wrong, and
4. support each other: to create a supportive work environment. 

The main way we assess against them is in the interview – asking them to give examples of times when they have done those things. 

For ‘constantly improve’, we ask them to name the professional skill that's essential to getting their job done, and tell us how they've improved it over the years. 

For ‘make a difference’, we ask people to talk about the causes they support, or a project that they've done that made a difference to someone else's life. 

It’s floaty and intangible trying to assess whether someone really believes in those values, but you can hear it. And if someone hasn’t demonstrated those values, it’s probably because we haven’t asked the right questions.

How are you sifting for potential versus what they've done already? 

I think it's really important for equal recruitment, that you don't just rely on what people have done, but focus on what they can do.

If I get a sense from talking to someone that they really want to improve, then everything else will fall into place. They can just be a complete beginner in digital. We’ve hired many over the years. We get them the right training, they shadow the right staff members, and they do great. Hire for attitude, train for skills. 

How do you make sure that you have diversity in your team so you're not employing people who are like you? 

A team of Matts would fail for sure. I think most people in Platypus operate in very different ways to the way I operate. 

I genuinely believe that more diversity – whether that’s in terms of working styles, personalities, backgrounds, experiences in life – makes us stronger. There’s lots of research to back that up. We've made some great progress in this area but we also struggle with it, like any other organisation.

How would you explain what psychological safety is and what steps do you take to create it in your team at Platypus?

For me, psychological safety is feeling OK to be vulnerable with your colleagues. Being vulnerable can mean a lot of differences in people. 

It can mean saying, “I'm really suffering with anxiety at the moment. It's really affecting my work. I don't know what to do about it” and to feel OK saying that and to learn you're not going to get an awful response, and that things can be moved around to accommodate your needs. 

It could just be “I messed up this campaign” or “the budget overran, we have to pay the client back.” If you share those things, it’s better for everyone. 

The way we try to create that kind of psychological safety is to have a very public value that we support each other. If we don't react well to situations like that, then we're not living the values.

I've worked in charities where the leadership team would write the values they wanted, stick them on the wall in big fancy colours, but no one's bought into it because they don't believe it. It's aspirational rather than real.

Our values have to be real. So it’s about how we actually behave, how we react to conversations like that. It’s about accommodating people when they need extra support – like bringing in freelancers to deliver work when they don’t feel able to. And then in the perks sense, we have profit share, and a monthly wellbeing allowance. You can spend  £60 a month on things that improve your wellbeing, so you might get some running gear or some candles, or whatever helps you.

It’s not just the things you buy with the money, but the message it sends about what we value. So when you make a mistake, or when you do have extra needs, or whatever the conversation has to be, it'll be OK, because we live our values.

What does a happy workplace look like in your opinion, and how do you go about creating one? 

It’s important to measure happiness, however you define it. 

Engagement with your work, relationship with your manager, relationship with your colleagues, all of that kind of thing. If that's a KPI that you measure, then that's proof you're doing something right and ensures that you're doing work to change things in a broader sense. 

Work is work, is the other thing to say. It can be hard, challenging, annoying. It doesn't always make you feel happy. That’s why we call it engagement rather than happiness.

And the Pareto principle means that around 80% of people are likely to be very happy at any one time. 

We use a platform called Officevibe, which is an employee engagement tool which sends out questions every two weeks to the team. We ask five or six general questions asking them to rate various aspects of working at Platypus. They fill in those questions and then every week I get an overall engagement score for the organisation out of 10, to one decimal place.

I get this score every week. I can dive into the results to see what questions are creating these sub-scores.

When we see problems in an area, we’ll do a custom survey to get more details. 

What else is important for a happy workplace?  

Just one observation – it’s about the definition of flexible work, and the talent we’re losing to the freelance lifestyle.

I had a conversation with someone recently, who's a freelancer. I was encouraging them to apply for a vacancy, because they have great skills and experience. 

She’s also a parent. She’d had a bad experience at a previous organisation. She felt the only way she could get flexibility to look after her kids was to go freelance so she could choose her own hours. Basically flexitime – choosing her own hours within core hours. She wants to work 9 to 3, maybe do some work in the evenings, and have the flexibility to take school holidays off. She felt the only way she could have that flexibility was by being a freelancer. 

People assume organisations aren't going to be flexible. So they freelance. 

And unless we change that perception by showing people how flexible we are – flexitime, part time, genuinely varied working hours – then we’re in trouble.

Charities and agencies are losing talent, especially digital talent. 

For an agency like Platypus, for any charity, it’s going to be a problem unless we put a big sign in the window spelling out exactly how we can be flexible and supportive. 

That reminds me, I have a client who lost a staff member because they didn't want to allow them to work remotely. The organisation lost tons of institutional knowledge, talent. And at the same time, all my clients are complaining about not being able to recruit. 

Yes, it’s not just digital talent. 

And when you lose talent at a senior level, it can cost ten, twenty thousand just to get someone in the door. To say nothing of the cost of the loss of institutional knowledge. If you want to be a freelancer and you've got specific reasons for it, that’s great. 

But if we set things up more flexibly – whatever that means for people – that would help us prevent a talent catastrophe. A talent armageddon.

Ultimately, the way I think about happy teams is this: you've got to hire people that are motivated to do better all the time, and then trust them. You've got to believe in their skills, and their commitment to learning, and then get the hell out of their way.

Matt is the founder and managing director of Platypus Digital.

Thanks to Ettie Bailey-King of Contentious for writing up this conversation.