Adster Creative’s Unique Company Culture & Perks (Balancing Physical & Mental Health)
Working at a digital marketing agency comes with its own set of challenges—especially when it comes to maintaining both mental and physical well-being. At Adster, we put our team’s health first, making it a top priority to support their overall well-being. In this post, we’ll share what makes our employee-centric culture unique, our vision for a healthy workplace, and how we bring that vision to life.
Our Vision
Leverage digital marketing as a highly effective way to build a great business and career that offers flexibility, choice and freedom (more info about our vision and values can be found here).
Mental health
With a recent study citing that 95% of Canadian employees feel the effects of worker burnout, it’s impossible to deny that stress puts a toll on workers. Spotting this issue early is crucial to ensuring staff remain healthy and safe.
Some signs of workers burnout include:
- Anxiety
- Headaches
- Reduced performance and productivity
- Fatigue
If you see these signs in an employee it may mean there is a larger issue.
Physical health
Working at a digital marketing agency (whether from home, or in office) can also have detrimental effects on your physical health. Sitting at a desk for 40 hours per week can lead to a number of health risks including obesity, increased blood sugar, and high blood pressure.
May we interest you in a quick Adster 24-7™ Fitness Program?
SO! how does Adster, help our team manage their mental and physical health?
Our Unique Culture & How we Balance BOTH Physical & Mental Health:
1. The Dials™
What does balance look like for you? From most people we’ve talked to and most books we’ve read, balance is different for everyone.
One thing we’ve realized, is that unfortunately, balance is never a static line, but rather a ‘wave’:
But is it a dramatic wave? A moderate wave? Where do you fit in?
- Small wave: Work an honest 9-5 in the office and leave ‘work at work’?
- Medium wave: Work ‘smart’ 10 hour days for a month then work remote for 10 days from a beach?
- Big wave: Work 200 hours/m for 2 years, burn out, then take a year off while you are supported by your initial efforts?
All different … all good!
For our leadership team, throughout our entire lives, the motto has been ‘work smart’, and that has always tied to balance for us.
- A smart agency
- A smart model
- Smart process(es)
- Hire smart people
Now…one needs to remember that working smart oftentimes means working extremely hard – but while working hard, there is a clear understanding of WHY one is working hard.
This hard work is not just hard work in exchange for a few extra bucks, but rather it is an investment into one’s version of balance.
Why would we:
- Work hard and build 25 citations in a day
- Work hard and do 8-30 day Google Ads reviews in a day
- Work hard schedule 6, 1-hour client meetings in a day
… when all of the hard work above simply begets more hard work.
As we look to Adster’s future & beyond:
- What does balance look like to you?
- What does your ‘perfect setup’ look like?
Enter the dial system: try and think about this as three different dials, each rotating from 1-100. Where are your dials set? (Understand that we would all love to have each of these at ‘100’, Ultimately the higher we turn one of these dials, the other two must turn down).
- The Job
- Compensation
- Balance
Does a theme of working smart mean we have less volatility in those dials, and can run them all higher, simultaneously? How would you set your quarterly dials at Adster (with 100 total points for JOB / COMPENSATION / BALANCE)
| Category | High Setting | Low Setting |
|---|---|---|
| The Job: Meaning & Purpose, Personal Development, Empowerment & Support | More time for personal development, training, and meaningful work. | Focused on current job responsibilities and daily obligations. |
| Overall Compensation: Wage, Bonuses, Perks | Willing to take on more responsibilities and client accounts in exchange for increased bonuses, perks, or pay. | Content with base pay and perks, prioritizing stability over additional responsibilities. |
| Lifestyle & Balance: Balance, Lifestyle, Commitment | Prioritizing personal life over work, considering reduced office time or additional time off. | Investing more time into work and career growth, with less focus on external commitments. |
2. EBT™ ( Extended breaks):
One perk we have here at Adster is the option to take an extended break, or EBT (extra balance time) during the day. This allows us workers to take an extended 90-minute break (all of our combined breaks plus an extra 30 minutes from Adster) at some point during the day.
But there’s a catch. To take EBT, we MUST be doing something that makes your life better! Examples of this could be:
- Going for a walk
- Fitting in a workout
- Getting a time sensitive errand done (and thus, decreasing your stress!)
- Taking a break from your computer
3. Focus Fridays™
This blog post from Slack says it perfectly:
“…One of the problems with the 9-to-5, five-day workweek is that any of those hours (or worse, all of them) can get turned into a meeting. Our calendars increasingly look like Tetris, stacked full of meetings with perhaps a few 30-minute or maybe one-hour breaks—enough for just that, a break, but not long enough for any deep work.”
The goal of Focus Fridays at Adster:
- Provide flexibility
- Help the team re-frame the ‘need’ for meetings and provide at least one day of that relief
- See if we can (and want to) reasonably make steps towards a 4 day work week
- Minimize interruptions to stay focused on dedicated tasks/projects (It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain focus on a task after an interruption according to this study.)
- Dedicate time specifically to learning and development, if needed
- Encourage and emphasize the urgency vs. important framework and ideally decrease stress due to a sense of urgency
4. FlexDAYS™ & Working Remote
FlexDAYS are basically a mix between EBT and remote working. During FlexDAYS, Adster team members are able to work remotely, but do not need to stick to an in-office schedule. These are typically used when you:
- have an appointment during the day that may take more than an hour
- have to care for a sick relative or pet
- have to care for a child unexpectedly
- need to attend a family event
- have severe weather that prevents you from getting to the office safely
- have an emergency situation come up
Though FlexDAYS can have a flexible work schedule, we still attend meetings and complete the required amount of working hours.
5. AHF™ (Adster Hypothesis Framework)
Happy customers = happy team, or happy team = happy customers? It’s both.
The AHF’s ultimate goal is to ensure maximum chances of delivering on the ‘ultimate’ definition of value: making a client believe that what you are offering is beyond expectation – helping them to solve a problem, offering a solution, giving results, and making them happy.
- Hypothesis & a new framework for strategy
- What’s the goal?
- Client happiness? More leads? Both?
- What are our options?
- Cost/resources vs. impact
- How do we implement?
- How do we measure impact?
- Definite positive impact (high rate of return / progress to goal based on resources in, easily measured; >75% confidence)
- Some positive impact (positive rate of return / progress but confidence in measurement reduced; 50-75% confidence)
- Negligible positive impact (hard to establish rate of return / progress to goal but presumed to be correlative; measurement nominal <50% confidence)
- No impact / inconclusive (no return or progress to goal; little to no evidence to support any changes good or bad; 0% confidence)
- More time required?
- Negative impact (negative progress, assumed this made worse; measurement reveals a loss with confidence in range of 50% )
- What’s the goal?
At Adster, we know that a thriving team leads to outstanding results—for our clients and for each other.
By prioritizing flexibility, well-being, and a culture of working smart, we create an environment where our people can grow, innovate, and find balance on their own terms. Whether it’s through Focus Fridays™, FlexDAYS™, or our unique approach to career development, we’re committed to making Adster a place where work and life can truly coexist.
Interested in joining a team that puts people first?
View open positions or join our careers waitlist here and take the first step in building your dream job today!