A couple of negative experiences this year at bookings have prompted me to write about what it’s like to have a grievance with a colleague but not really have the ability to do anything about it. Being an artworker can often make you feel like you’re at the bottom of the pile in an agency, and being a freelance artworker can make you feel like you can only dream of being at the bottom of the pile.
During my ‘career’ (hah!) I’ve worked with some good line managers, who have somehow extracted up to 20 hours of work from me in one day. Also, other line managers have pushed me to the brink of despair/rage/violence. Of course there would have been external factors as to what made these people good line managers; the demands and complexities of projects at the time, the colleagues involved, whether or not they were a sagittarius etc.
When I say ‘line manager’, remember that’s not always a studio manager; it could also be a creative director, client services director, account/project manager, or working as a freelancer, it could even be a lead artworker. It’s likely that what these people have in common is a lack of people skills (or an abundance of them of course). In larger companies, they may well have had the benefit of training from an HR department, but I’ve worked with people like that before and they just come across as smartarses who still lack people skills.
Hopefully if you’re in a full-time role you can approach someone in your job that will listen objectively to your grievance, but my past experiences haven’t really shown me that will always be the case. Hey! You can always leave, right? (see the link below for more on that little beauty). Then you can go freelance and leave your grievances behind at the end of the booking. Just don’t have too many grievances or you’ll run out of bookings where you get on with everyone. Here’s a few ‘gripelights’ I’ve had over the years, that I was on the wrong end of:
An account exec who wanted to skip a stage of creative approval, for reasons unknown, and that I was going to help facilitate that by keeping the senior art director out of the loop
A designer who wouldn’t work late, but would complain about client services fiddling with her work when she wasn’t around to oversee it
An account manager who thought all of his work was more important than anybody else’s, and I would find sat at my Mac if I left the office, doing copy amends directly into InDesign
A director who complained one evening that she wouldn’t get home ‘until 8.30’, despite knowing full well that everyone else in the office that evening was working on a pitch and wouldn’t finish before midnight at least
Repeat to fade. The point being that I was not the cause of their problems in these instances, but they took it out on me.
OK, enough with the self indulgence. These are all examples from my full time days and at least I could mention them to my line manager in my annual appraisal. As a freelancer, I either put up with it or I leave. And lose money. And never go back. And I can’t have an off day. I need to deal with sketchy briefs and get it right. And even if I do get it right, who’s to say i’ll be invited back again? I suppose that design businesses on the whole will have an HR policy but whether that policy extends to temporary workers is another matter. Is your attitude to treat your freelancers with a modicum of respect and make their place of work a nice place to be, or are you more of the opinion that freelancers are there to work, and should expect a bit more heat?
I am grateful that some of my bookings have been incredibly positive experiences, and the people at those bookings have been generous and inclusive. Dare I say it, I suspect being a freelancer has helped in those situations. Unfortunately, I’ve also discovered this year on a couple of different occasions that some people have taken advantage of my ‘outsider’ status to be dismissive of my role at an agency. I’ve raised concerns about things and been palmed off, not believed, and talked down to, which has made my job difficult at times. I’ve felt the best decision was to conclude the booking at the most convenient point for all parties, which in reality has just meant seeing the whole thing through, and making sure I won’t be put in the same position again. There were no procedures that I could have followed to resolve the problems; I had to rely on my own diplomacy skills (skills that everyone needs in the working world, of course). I must also be honest with myself and ask if there was anything I did that exacerbated the problem, and perhaps there was, but I always try to commence a booking with maximum politeness and a willingness to be flexible. At the end of the day though, they are still there, and I’m not.
Couple of links for you:
Constructive dismissal
https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals/constructive-dismissal
Leapers, a sadly now defunct website looking out for freelancers, but the site still retains lots of useful links, making it well worth a visit
https://www.leapers.co/
Edit: Matthew Knight, Leapers founder, tells me to check out his new site:
https://www.freelancing.support/
you are not special 