Q&A: Charting the way for mental wellbeing in insights

Suzanne Lugthart is an independent consultant who started out as a media buyer but found her niche in research and consumer behavior after obtaining her Marketing MBA. This led to her first research role at Reader’s Digest, followed by a global role at Sony Ericsson and senior roles at ITV, eBay Europe and Rightmove. She took a year off to follow a creative path and design jewelry but missed research and so, she told us, “My freelance life began.”

She shared, “I love steep learning curves and consulting requires you to get up to speed on new sectors very fast. Ultimately though, whatever your business, the business questions will be similar. People never fail to surprise me, and I love being reminded I don’t know everything and never will. It keeps me grounded and curious in equal measure.”

I wanted to interview Suzanne to hear more about her freelance journey in the world of market research, especially her work on the AURA Working Well Together Charter. 

The Market Research Society (MRS) has run some much-needed research into mental wellbeing for several years. Yet despite driving awareness of the issue and encouraging workplace initiatives, the research showed things weren’t improving much. As a researcher, I naturally started to question why that was. My hunch was that initiatives introduced by employers were helping with the symptoms, but weren’t necessarily addressing one of the root causes, which was the way clients and agencies work together.  

Mental wellbeing is a topic close to my heart. My dad’s life was blighted by years of workplace stress, and the multiple breakdowns he endured left him unable to work or engage in many aspects of normal life beyond his 40s, at which point his employer threw him on the scrap heap. 

Fortunately, catastrophic experiences like dad’s are still the exception, not the norm. But experiences like his all start somewhere. Preventing things from getting worse is way more important than having someone pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong. 

And that’s what’s at the heart of the WWT Charter. It’s a blueprint for considerate, effective working relationships between agencies and clients. Central to those principles is empowering both sides to have open and honest conversations. How many times have we all plowed on in quiet suffering, when finding time for a quick chat could have made life much easier for everyone?

We interviewed insights professionals from AURA member brands, such as Legal and General, Vue, The Post Office and English Heritage as well as a range of agency partners to understand the pressure points. The headlines of the resulting six pillars are as follows:

• 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

Most people already try to operate according to these principles, but we all face pressures from time to time and things can slip. 

We launched the Charter at Quirk’s in May and have been blown away by the support for it from agencies and client-side teams. The plan is to continue to get the WWT message out there to even more people. AURA is keen to gather stories of where one or more of its principles have been successfully applied. Ultimately, we see this as the client side’s contribution to better mental wellbeing within our industry.

Our sense from the research is that much of the pressure on client-side researchers comes from stakeholders. They may be too demanding, occasionally interfering, sometimes not delivering their part and causing delays. Stakeholder management continues to be one of the most important roles in client-side life. We hope that sharing the Charter internally will be the catalyst for client-side teams having those conversations with stakeholders, who almost certainly have little idea how their behavior affects projects and those working on them.

For example, one contributor shared a story about a stakeholder who would send emails at all hours as they were working around childcare but had no idea of the impact on the team who felt that they were expected to reply at all hours. By having that conversation with the stakeholder, the situation was resolved immediately. 

The other practical thing client-side teams can do with the Charter is share it with Procurement. We have examples of AURA members who have done just that and by creating better mutual understanding, some of the more onerous demands placed on the process have been loosened.

One of the things we heard during our conversations is that there’s no real training to be a client-side researcher, particularly on those softer, people management skills. We see a longer-term role for AURA to help land the principles of the Charter particularly to people new to the client-side or new to management or leadership roles within it.

We’re keen for client-side Insights professionals, agencies and indies to sign up to show their support for the Charter’s principles on the AURA website. It’s a voluntary code but one which signals a willingness on both sides to engage and agree ways of working up front that will deliver both for the teams involved and the work itself. You can also read the research report that led to the charter’s creation.

I married a Dutchman. The Dutch have a great outlook on life, and I've learned not to fret about the things I can't control. My husband tends to say, "Things will work themselves out in the end" and annoyingly, he's usually right. My jewelry business helps me switch off one side of my brain and I'm a keen cyclist, a regular pub quizzer and love live comedy. I also travel a lot; we did an amazing Brexit tour visiting all 27 EU countries in less than 2 years before we left the EU.

I have some general principles which are as follows:

• Life won’t come to you; if you want something, work hard then go ask for it  

• Treat people as you would like to be treated (this is implied in every line of the Charter)

• Feedback is a gift; give generously

I also have some sector specific principles:

• Be bold: ask the difficult question everyone in the room wants to ask but doesn’t have the courage to. You’ll find it’ll be better received than you think, and it can signal to stakeholders you might be an ally worth talking to.

• Be careful if you work for your passion brand: you might be blinded by adoration. It might sound counterintuitive but the roles where I was most effective were the ones where I was less engaged with the product because it made me work harder to understand the customers.

We’ve loved hearing from Suzanne about the WWT Charter and how insights professionals can sign up to help improve wellbeing in our sector — something that, as a B-Corp, is close to our hearts too. If you’d like to learn more, we encourage you to check it out on the AURA website.