Working Well Together: The success stories
The final instalment of the Working Well Together series looking into the newly launched initiative WWT Charter
AURA is a membership organisation for clientside researchers in the UK. AURA’s aim is to allow their members to grow their expertise and impact that they have in the organisations they work for.
In 2024, AURA launched an initiative called The Working Well Together (WWT) Charter. This Charter lists six principles to guide how clients and agencies work together.
The six principles of The WWT Charter are:
We'll respect your time
We’ll commit to open and honest conversations at all times
We’ll leave you to do your best work by managing our side of things well
We’ll treat you as an extended part of our team
We’ll respect your right to disconnect
We’ll commit to proper feedback
Each of these principles aim to help achieve better agency/client collaboration. In this final article of our WWT series, we’ll look at success stories about how using The WWT Charter has supported collaboration.
Creating successful collaboration
One of the challenges The WWT Charter faces, is that insight agencies and clientside teams come in a vast array of shapes, sizes and sectors.
But The WWT Charter’s principles have shown that they stretch across different types of insight agencies and client sectors.
The Charter can work for both private and public sector research teams. Asda and Trinity McQueen note how The WWT Charter helped them shape a more collaborative, agile working style. The WWT Charter can also help drive successful collaboration in the public sector, as described by Holly Exton-Smith from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA):
We collaborated with Savanta to deliver a stakeholder audit within tight timelines. To do this, we spoke openly and honestly about what was possible in the time we had.”
Better collaboration is The WWT Charter’s product. But often what makes success stories in this area possible are the outcomes of: 1) clients treating agencies as an extension of their team. 2) sharing feedback. 3) enabling self-reflection.
Extending the team
Previously, we discussed two challenges agencies and clients face when working together. The first was the gap in understanding one another’s working reality. And the second, was that agencies and clients often don’t have access to the same people or information.
One solution for both challenges is for clients to treat their agencies like an extension of their team. The benefits of which are described by UKHSA’s Holly Exton-Smith:
Recently a member of our agency came to a UKHSA away day. They were able to offer an external perspective during a session where we discussed stakeholder engagement. This was useful for us, but it also enabled them to better understand the networks we work with internally.”
The need for feed(back)
While discussing how successful collaboration is defined, Matt Coggan from Box Clever and Helen Bell from Close Brothers cite the importance of relationships being “grounded in openness.”
UKHSA’s Libby Eastwood also emphasised the importance of openness:
It’s important that we have open lines of communication with our agencies where we explain the rationale for how we’re thinking.”
Reflecting the importance the UKHSA place on this, the organisation has now implemented post-project wash-ups as a standard part of their project process.
Pausing for reflection
While discussing The WWT Charter with Lousie McLaren, Virgin Media 02’s Henry Duruzor notes that The Charter should be viewed as a behavioural framework. Not a compliance tool. The result of this perspective is that his team have found that The WWT Charter encourages them to reflect on their own ways of working.
This in turn caused them to challenge any assumptions they felt got in the way of effective collaboration. The feedback Virgin 02 Media received from their agencies was that the areas they could improve in were small everyday behaviours. These included things like meeting deadlines, giving timely feedback, and holding project completion discussions.
Yes, these are all small areas. But by reflecting on how they carried themselves in the areas the Virgin 02 Media Insight Team felt that the accumulation of them would be significant and have a positive impact on the quality of work they could deliver working with their agencies.
That’s all from our WWT series. You can read more about WWT here.
Previous articles from this series are available here:
Jack Miles
Editor in Chief at Research WorldJack specialises in quantitative research for international clients across an array of sectors. These studies have led him to work with brands such as Jaguar, Navistar and Volvo. His main research interests are brand research and consumer trends, with a focus on quantitative methods and the use of statistics to derive solid strategic planning for clients.
He has a particular focus on developing creative ad-hoc quantitative methods that use a range of data sources. He can also be found writing papers for a range of well-known publications such as Admap, Huffington Post and Research World.
Outside the office, Jack can be found training in martial arts, in which he holds a 3rd degree black belt in Taekwon-do, and partaking in various endurance sports.
