What if your business had a Moral Compass?
Andy Wright shares with us some of the takeaways from this year’s Hard Refresh session, ‘Can your business have a moral compass’. During this session Tom Tapper, Nice and Serious’s CEO, lets us in on how Moral Compass has changed the way they do business.
Proudly sponsored by Streamtime
What if your team made the decision on which briefs you say no to and which you say yes to?
And what if you only did work that was for good and made a difference in the world?
In what strange, wonderful and far-off Utopia could this possibly happen? Turns out it’s a reality on the other side of the world at Nice and Serious. The BCorp agency in London doing work for the Rainforest Alliance, WWF and Macmillan Cancer Support.
We’ve been lucky enough to call Tom Tapper (Co-Founder) a friend of Streamtime for some time now. Having dreamed the all too familiar dream of running an agency that picks and chooses its clients and makes a difference in the world, it’s been amazing to observe the journey that Tom has taken the business on.
We’ve collaborated with Tom on a number of events and talks and the Moral Compass is always a central theme. What is it? It’s an app. But so much more of course! It’s a tool that’s used for whenever a new brief comes into the agency. A brief arrives, it’s loaded into the app and each and every member of the team gets to rank it against criteria that’s been agreed upon in the compass. Ultimately, every team member gets to say yes or no on whether the business (not just individuals) will work on the client.
The cynics reading this may raise a doubtful eye at this point.
“Yeah, great marketing stunt. Great way to make a client feel good about getting through the Moral Compass.”
But that would be incorrect. As Tom shared with us recently in our Hard Refresh 2022 event, there are times where the Moral Compass has most definitely made his life harder. There have been times where he’s had to have awkward conversations with clients to gently ‘let them down’ because the team said no. And of course, during COVID when surely you’d take any work you can get, again, the Compass said no which certainly added to the pressure.
More importantly, the Moral Compass means that no-one has to come into work and ‘leave their ethics at the door.’
There are no vegans working for KFC, no Green Party members working for Shell and not a brief for a casino in site. More and more of what we value in our work is the impact it can make.
Nice and Serious have found the formula to make sure that their team doesn’t have to make compromises or feel dirty in getting something out the door.
The good news is that now Nice and Serious can proudly hold their heads up high for having stuck to their beliefs and their values, and are now more in demand than ever before.
If you’d like to watch the recap from this live Hard Refresh session, you can find it here.
About Andy Wright
Andy is the CEO of Streamtime. He’s also the Founder of Never Not Creative, a non-profit focused on support and better outcomes for creatives, and the Co-Chair of Mentally-Healthy.org. Ultimately, he’d just like to see everyone in the creative industry, enjoy their work, be treated well and be healthy and happy – can’t be too much to ask, right?
