We are delighted that Vicky will be participating in our afternoon Leadership Panel at our People First Summit later this month. Vicky and her panel will be discussing: AI at Work – What an Age of Machine Thinking Means for Wellness. The panel will be seeking to answer:
- How will AI impact strategies that drive productivity, lower healthcare costs and increase profitability without making the shape of the human future increasingly opaque?
- How will AI help humans live well at home and at work in an increasingly complex world?
- What are the moral questions related to AI that seeks to achieve stronger engagement, lower turnover, and higher innovation?
We caught up with Vicky to see how she’s feeling in the run up to the summit:
Hi Vicky, we are thrilled that you are joining us at the People First Summit in November. Our first and most important question is, how are you doing today?
Honestly, busy and energised. We’re 4 years old as a company and we are shifting to our next chapter of growth. Lots of team changes but my role is to hold the vision of what the business needs for the future, and harnessing the potential AI (in creative marketing) is a big part of that. Being part of a panel like this is a good excuse to step back from the day job and think about why we do it.
As a leader based in the region, what are the main challenges you are facing when it comes to employee wellbeing and mental health?
The pace of AI change. Our people work in creative and marketing teams for regulated industries, and the tools shift month to month. That brings excitement, but also a quiet worry about what it could mean for their craft and their careers. The other challenge is connection. When work gets more efficient and high volume, it can also get lonelier, and that’s easy to miss – especially with remote working still very much part of our working culture.
What strategies have you seen developing over the past 6 months, both internally and externally, that are moving the dial on wellbeing in the workplace?
Giving people time and space to learn together rather than alone. We’ve sent teams to events like WACL Scotland’s Festival of Talent and brought what they learned back into LOOP. Externally, I’ve seen businesses provide approved AI tools so staff aren’t left using free ones in secret. At an event we co-hosted recently, the estimate was around 80% of employees do this when nothing official is offered, which is a wellbeing issue as much as a security one.
Why is employee wellbeing so important to you personally?
Because the business belongs to the people in it. LOOP recently became one of Scotland’s earliest Employee-Owned Trusts, and that changes how you lead. I want to build a place where people genuinely want to work, for the team today and those who are taking the company forward in the future. We started the company from a place of protecting our own personal wellbeing and not creating a culture where that was at risk for us as leaders or the team.
What impact is AI having in your organisation and how are you managing that?
We decided early not to wait for AI to settle. Ed, my Co-founder and CTO, now leads our LOOP Agents team building solutions for clients that weren’t possible a few months ago. How we manage it matters more than the speed. AI should clear space for human judgement, taste and craft, not squeeze more out of people. An Amazon warehouse story is a useful warning: the robots made it safer and more productive, but one worker asked to go back to his old job just to have someone to talk to.
Other than AI, are there any challenges that you are seeing for the first time and how are you addressing them?
Confidence and a growth mindset, particularly for women. Women-owned businesses contribute £8.8bn to the Scottish economy, yet the number of women-led businesses that grow to employ people is falling, and Scotland’s gender pay gap is widening again. We’re addressing it by creating opportunities for the women in our team to step forward, speak, and back themselves out loud – with specific mentoring and training.
What areas do you think employers should be focused on over the next 12 months?
Hilary Cottam’s research with hundreds of workers provides a good checklist: fair basics done properly, real meaning, time that fits around a life, care built into the working day, play, and a connection to place.
Add one more for this year: train people on AI properly, so they feel in control of it rather than replaced by it.
Do you feel that investment in employee wellbeing in the region is increasing or decreasing and is that a direct reflection on HR leaders’ increasing ability to demonstrate effective returns of their strategies to leadership?
The best leaders I know treat it as part of how the business runs, not a line item to justify. People are your biggest asset, especially in a service company. That’s my personal approach, I don’t have data for my region to expand on this.
How has your organisation been leading the way?
We moved the company to Employee Ownership, early in our growth. We’re moving fast with AI for creative marketing, but with people at the centre of how we use it. And choosing our home deliberately: being based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute means we are surrounded by tech, talent and conversations about the future of work, which helps us be the different type of agency we set out to be.
Vicky will be speaking at our People First Summit in Edinburgh on November 23. Click Here to visit our website, find out more and book your place to join us.
