Agencies have an opportunity to be the first line of support for the working parents in advertising, leading to a better work-life balance and retention of talent. Speaking with Alex Bernardi, Senior Account Director at Critical Mass, we learn about the formal and informal ways the agency is providing benefits and support to parents with flexibility.
Tell us a bit about your role. How does your experience as a parent inform your work?
I’m a Sr. Account Director at Critical Mass, a global digital marketing agency. My days are spent working on a U.S. plumbing manufacturer and a global healthcare client. I love my clients and how they challenge me, and I get really vested in our work with them and what we’re trying to accomplish together.
And how does my experience as a parent inform my work? It has taught me two key things:
- Keep calm. Nobody benefits from emotional roller coasters (unless you’re in a reality TV show, which, thankfully, I’m not).
- Work is just that — work. My family always comes first, and while I occasionally compromise and multi-task to hit deadlines, I embrace the fact that I’m fully replaceable at work but not at home.
As a client services lifer (I’ve been doing this for a few decades) so much of our job is listening, making everyone happy, and taking care of everybody’s needs: client teams and their bosses, and internal teams as well. Needless to say, there are more than a few parallels between being a parent and being a client services pro.
In what ways does your agency support flexible work arrangements to accommodate the diverse needs of working parents?
The arrival of Covid was terrible for the world, no question, but for working parents, there were some unexpected silver linings in my opinion. For example, remote work highlighted how critical daycare workers are and how amazing it can be for fathers to be more present and active in the day-to-day care of children, home, and pets.
Our agency has been very gentle and flexible in our return-to-office transition and has given working parents time to reestablish some of the support networks needed for before-school and after-school care.
Finding informal community also helps. At Critical Mass, we have several employee resource groups devoted to parenting, which we primarily access through tools such as Slack and Teams. Not only are those tools a useful resource for creating and participating in active communities of working parents, they’re also important for communicating last-minute schedule or work location shifts, which are driven frequently by those we care for.
I also think workplaces have an opportunity to offer or facilitate support for working parents in formal as well as informal ways. On that note, one of my favorite, more formalized programs at Critical Mass is Keep Co. In a nutshell, new parents have questions and worries about taking parental leave, returning to work, and balancing their changed home life with work life. So, Critical Mass created a mentorship and agency-sponsored support program that helps parents navigate those often-difficult transitions, which includes some special (and additional) benefit programs and resources. If you ask me, knowing that my employer cares and provides benefits and time that support the creation and wellbeing of my family is comforting and crucial in the maintenance of work-life balance.
Advertising plays a vital role in influencing public perception. How are agencies and brands adapting ad comms to inclusivity around parenting?
Ideas about family are always evolving. No two families are the same or have quite the same needs. Besides that, what we consider important about a family has less to do with fitting a traditional mold (i.e., two parents plus two or three children) and more to do with what family provides and represents: love, trust, and safety for its members.
As agencies working with brands (and promoting products and services), we need to shine more light on that evolution and embrace the changing make-up of the modern family. In the 1970s, the unconventional Brady Bunch family made for great sitcom material, but they weren’t who many people wanted as neighbors. Simply showing people a non-traditional idea of family is not necessarily the same as helping them both see and celebrate a non-traditional idea of family.
Just as we’re making efforts to concept, write, and cast for diversity in gender, race, and age in our work, we must also bring the picture of the modern American family into households: multigenerational, multiracial, same-sex couples, and blended families are more the norm today than ever. Families of all kinds are amazing and deserve to be supported, seen, and celebrated. By leading brands down this path, it invariably opens new growth opportunities for products, services, and public perception.