Personnel “turnover” on a design team can’t be addressed until it happens, right? In a literal sense, that is true, but in reality, viewing turnover that way is short-sighted and extremely problematic.   

Before the pandemic, design team turnover was averaging more than 25 percent. Now, after the “great resignation,” it’s like a revolving door. No sooner than you have learned a new name, you are interviewing again, learning yet another new name. There is no continuity, everything is disjointed, style sheets aren’t adhered to, subtle nuances specific to particular advertisers are missed, and learning curve issues are a daily challenge. A publishing operation simply can’t operate within constant revolving door chaos . . . it just doesn’t work!

For smaller teams, a looming hole means panic and stress, with typically only two weeks to fill the position. Being selective and fully vetting candidates doesn’t happen in such a compressed timeframe. Frequently after it’s too late, it becomes clear a candidate oversold themselves, isn’t going to mesh well with the existing team, or has red flags you would have seen if you had vetted them more fully.

If you can’t fill the position in time, existing design team members are forced to pick up the workload, increasing costs and decreasing job satisfaction. Vacation time and quality time with family get kicked to the curb. Outstanding design work doesn’t happen under such prolonged circumstances.   

Let’s face it, “there are other places to work,” and publishing, when it comes to compensation, isn’t the top of the ladder for a talented, experienced designer. Quite likely, the existing team member is leaving for more money. It’s currently an “employee marketplace” so replacing them will likely cost more. 

It’s not supposed to happen, but existing team members often get wind of the new hire’s salary. When that happens, operations can experience a mass exodus that makes the original hole to fill look like a divot — now you have a real problem, multiple holes to fill, a.k.a. catastrophic turnover.

Even though profit margins were already slim, what you budgeted for design team payroll for the year, melts down, and you are forced to step it up to compete for talent.

Let’s assume you navigated all of the above and stabilized the ship until the next turnover bug hits the design team. That exercise costs a lot of money in hard costs such as recruitment ads, background checks, drug testing, etc. Those costs pale compared to the soft costs; however, onboarding time by HR, management time for orientation and workflows, training, etc., far exceed the hard costs. 

Commensurate with their salary, the costs of a new hire can run between $4- and $20 K. Since there is certainly more turnover to come — when you multiply those costs over 5- and 10-year increments [no matter the size of your design team] those dollars add up to a lot of money.

So, when you compile all the above: stress, time, increased chance for more turnover, increased likelihood for errors, inflated payroll, and all the money expended in hard and soft costs — why would you do it once, much less repeatedly, year after year . . . if you don’t have to?