Marketing Agencies: 3 Risks the Office Assessment Misses
If a marketing, creative or communications agency has a health and safety document at all, it usually describes an office: desks, screens, a kitchen, fire exits and a first aider.
That document is not wrong. It is simply about the least risky part of the operation.
Agencies are structurally unusual. They run to external deadlines they do not control, they staff flexibly with people who may not be employees, and a significant share of the work happens at locations belonging to somebody else. None of that appears in a standard office assessment, and all of it is where the exposure actually sits.
Three risks.
1. The deadline culture is the risk, not the office
Start where the volume is, because this affects everyone in the agency rather than a subset.
Agency work concentrates into pitches, launches, campaign go-lives and client-driven turnarounds. Those periods produce long hours, compressed sleep, weekend working and sustained pressure, and they are followed by another one. The pattern is not incidental to the business model, it is the business model.
Three points make this a health and safety question rather than a cultural observation.
It is inside the assessment duty. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to employees' health and safety. Health includes mental health, and HSE's Management Standards identify demands, control, support, relationships, role and change as the six areas an assessment should cover. Read those six against a pitch week and most of them are engaged simultaneously.
Working time is not optional. Regulation 4 of the Working Time Regulations 1998 sets the weekly limit and its averaging arrangements. An agency where a signed opt-out is treated as resolving the question has addressed the paperwork and not the pattern, and the opt-out does not touch the health and safety duty at all.
A young workforce absorbs it silently. Agencies skew junior, and junior people in a competitive industry do not tell you that the pace is unmanageable. Absence of complaint is not evidence of absence of harm, and where the people most affected are least likely to raise it, the organisation has to look rather than wait.
What to do is unglamorous and specific: know which teams and which periods concentrate the pressure, look at the actual hours worked around them rather than the contracted ones, plan recovery deliberately after a peak rather than moving straight to the next, and record what you decided. Where a pressure is inherent and being accepted, record that with a reason, because an explicit accepted risk is defensible and an unexamined one is not.
2. Half the people in the building may not be your employees
The structural feature agencies rarely examine, and the answer is not what most assume.
Agencies run on freelancers, contractors, associates, interns, placement students and people supplied through production companies and agencies. The commercial arrangement varies enormously. The safety position varies much less.
Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires every employer to conduct its undertaking so as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons not in its employment who may be affected are not exposed to risks. A freelancer working in your studio for six weeks is squarely within that. So is a production crew at your event and a student on placement.
Two further points sharpen it.
Classification is decided by substance. Whether somebody is genuinely self-employed depends on how the relationship actually operates rather than what the contract says. Where the reality is employment, the full set of employer duties attaches, retrospectively.
Information has to flow. Regulation 12 of the Management Regulations requires employers to provide the employers of visiting workers with comprehensible information on risks and emergency procedures. In practice that means anybody working in your space gets the same induction as your staff: evacuation, first aid, who to tell, and anything specific about the building.
The failure pattern is consistent. A freelancer who has been in the studio for four months, has a desk and a laptop, and has never been shown where the fire exit is or told who the first aider is, because they were not on the onboarding list.
3. Most of the work happens somewhere you do not control
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The third exposure, and it covers the activities agencies think of as the interesting part of the job.
Shoots, events, activations, conferences, client premises, venues, studios hired for a day. Your people are there, frequently junior, frequently for long days, frequently travelling home late afterwards.
Two things are true simultaneously. The venue, production company or client has its own duties in respect of its premises and its undertaking. And your duty to your own employees is unaffected by the address, which means you cannot discharge it by pointing at somebody else's risk assessment.
What a proportionate arrangement looks like, without becoming an events company:
Ask before you commit. Who holds the risk assessment for the location, what the emergency arrangements are, who is coordinating, and what your people need to know on arrival.
Address the journey. Early starts, long days and late returns are the predictable part, and driving after a fourteen-hour shoot is the specific risk. Where people drive their own cars on mileage, that is a grey fleet with everything that follows.
Address the evening. Client entertainment, launch events and hospitality with alcohol are work-related activities the organisation arranged. From October 2026 the preventative duty on harassment rises to all reasonable steps and employer liability for third-party harassment returns, which reaches exactly these settings. Acas publishes guidance on sexual harassment.
Name somebody. For any event or shoot, one person is accountable for the people rather than the deliverable. That is a different role from the producer, and in a small agency it is frequently nobody.
The three, in short
| Risk | What the office assessment says | What is actually needed |
|---|---|---|
| Deadline culture | Nothing | Hours and pressure assessed by team and period |
| Non-employees | Nothing | Same induction, correct classification, information flow |
| Off-site work | Nothing | Location questions asked, travel and evenings addressed |
The pattern is that an agency's document describes the safest eight hours of a week that regularly runs to sixty across four locations.
For agencies operating internationally
Two points worth carrying, and both are more demanding than the British position.
Deadline culture is regulated elsewhere. Sweden regulates workload and working hours as part of the organisational and social working environment. France requires psychosocial risk in its mandatory assessment document. Brazil brought psychosocial factors within its risk management programme, enforceable since May 2026. Taiwan names illness induced by exceptional workload, shift work and long hours in its safety statute. An agency with a Stockholm, Paris or São Paulo office cannot treat this as culture.
Freelance-heavy models attract attention. Several jurisdictions impose express duties towards people engaged under contracts for service, and some regulate platform and flexible work directly. Egypt's 2025 framework covers remote, flexible and platform-based working expressly.
Holding assessments, inductions and event records for every location in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits establish how much of the operation the current document actually describes.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with organisations whose real risks are organisational and whose people are frequently somewhere else, which describes agency work precisely. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work with marketing agencies alongside IT and software and professional services businesses facing the same pattern.
Where an agency network spans several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish which entities face express psychosocial obligations, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If your agency's health and safety document is about the office and your last three campaigns were not, a free gap analysis will show you what it is missing.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
