The remote work movement is hurting small PR agencies

When everyone is remote it works seamlessly. People effort to collaborate and connect both for work and non-work conversations, but for every person who doesn’t work remotely the formula shifts. At Caster, we are a 12-person team. While four people are on our full-time remote team, the other eight are commuting distance to our office in RI. Out of that eight, and at their choice, four of them never or very rarely work remotely. Now, remote work is changing the agency dynamic and it's been like letting a fox in the hen house.

Before the pandemic, when we used to hire, our hiring pool was limited to a reasonable commuting distance. We were not used to having a scaled remote team, so we always sourced local talent or grew them from the ground up. This is evidenced in many of the onsite Caster team today, every one of them, aside from my SVP, Alexandra Crabb, came with little to no PR experience. We have made them tech PR mavens, and it’s not going unnoticed.

In the past 12 months, we have lost five team members, four to other agencies. I lost two of my team to a directly competitive agency (that laid off five people during the pandemic) and now they’ve been directly poaching my team. I’ve been surprised by these choices from my former employees. By no means do I think Caster is a utopia -- far from it, but I believed those people when they said they were happy at Caster, that they loved their team, and the work they were doing. I thought they were part of the future here and they wanted to be a part of a smart, dedicated group of people who have each other’s backs, care about our clients, our results, our reputation, our culture, and our individual and collective team careers. Except, I learned they don’t. Or they do in a moment, but when they think someone else will do them better, they swipe left and think of themselves and not the wake they leave behind.

I’m not a cult leader. I understand some people need to do something else. For several of my past employees who have left, some of whom I helped to get positions at Hasbro, Crestron, Surgex, Schneider Electric, Pro Audio, SVS, and still others who went on to agencies, education, and non-profit jobs, I’ve been supportive. These moves were properly timed, well managed, and even mutually beneficial. They certainly weren’t a thanks-for-everything-you-did-for-me-but-this-is-better-for-me, #sorrynotsorry. How you leave a job is as important as how you start a job.

I expect people to leave. With stats like 90% of Millennials anticipate job changes in their first two years and end up with four different jobs by the age of 32, I know people are transient. A?recent Gallup report on the millennial generation?showed that 21% of millennials say they’ve changed jobs within a year, which is actually more than three times the number of non-millennials who report the same. Gallup estimates that millennial turnover costs the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually. It costs Caster $65k every time a tenured team member leaves, it costs us $36k to onboard a new team member to 6 months. With eight new team members in 12 months, including three college grads who only stuck around about 90 days and one terminated in 30 days, plus the loss of 5 people. The formula looks like this:

• 5 x $65k = $325,000 (departed)
• 4 x $18k= $72,000 (new people that didn’t last more than 90 days and never realized billability but were heavily resourced in training, currently have two new members in the pipe, so their costs are not realized fully, thus I did not count them)
• 3 x $36k = $108,000* (new team at one year)
• Total equals $505,000 over 12 months. Ouch.

I know that I am supposed to be here to help people learn and grow. But I can’t understand why their growth can’t happen here. Why is different better? I take the initial risk and burden. I invest in them and reward them financially and personally for their successes. I open my door to conversations. I am transparent. I give kudos and other feedback. I provide paths to their future. I care deeply for them. Caster has always nurtured mutual respect – it’s why we have clients that have stayed with us for nearly 20 years, and we’ve had long-tenured team members, although right now in the wake of this year, we only have four long-term employees. We promote creativity, curiosity, adaptability, and we give people the room to decompress when they need to, and we give them personal control and flexibility in how, when, and where they work. We let them try new things, and we rarely, if ever say no. We try so very hard to work it out.

But none of that seems to matter much. And now, we must compete with every PR agency in the country (dare I say world?) to keep our own people, because the big-name agency employment pool has grown, while ours, which has traditionally been strong, has dwindled. Remote work opportunities are hurting us in a way I never saw possible. We offer remote work to our employees too, and we have a remote team, but we also offer a physical hub for those who want that – weekly, monthly, quarterly. Whatever. Yet, no matter what we do, no matter what we pay, no matter how much we show them their opportunity path, employee loyalty is only as strong as the next occasion. Employees think it is easier to start fresh than to grow within. They think more money comes with moves (that’s not true here), they are deeply attracted to the idea of a clean slate, and they fall for the romance of the grass is greener. And truthfully, sometimes it is. Agency work is not for everyone. So, when someone on my staff says they need it to be different, they want a different pace, they want different people, they want different work, I get it when they go corporate, but I am genuinely baffled by their choice, and disappointed in them, when they tell me they’re going to another tech agency.

PR daily recently shared a piece called The Big Quit, and in summary: Hiring is tough right now for agencies—and big firms have the power to entice. But they are also struggling to retain their new hires because remote work is creating a team culture gap that is being felt even more for newbies. Big agencies are failing new employees, without direction and still living in a partially remote world, they feel aimless and undervalued. It’s creating the boomerang employee. The big-name PR agency they join lacks the processes and personalization necessary to get them up to speed and fails at connecting them to a team they spend little face-to-face time with. It doesn’t take long for the aimlessness to morph into feeling defeated and detached. So, they call their former employer.

Something new doesn’t mean something better, so when someone leaves Caster, we look inward deeply for things we can improve, and we are always focused on retaining our team. Right now, I am at a loss. When employee zero left, right after the hiring of three new team members in 2020, I said to my SVP Alex Crabb, “Quitting is contagious, we have a lot of team members turning five this year. It's going to look a lot different here a year from now. We should put some aggressive moves into place to make sure everyone is happy." So, we did just that. We hired. We promoted. We increased performance bonuses. We closed for a week over the Christmas holidays. We added both personal and vacation days moving forward. We made remote and in-office optional and discretionary. We added wellness days and upped the employee wellness and education budget. Everyone got raises. We held team review sessions. We planned culture days. We’ve been planning our 2021 all-team week. We tried, and despite every article on the workplace saying we are doing it right, clearly, none of it succeeded. I have whiplash from the exodus. I have burnout from the onboarding. I fear that I can do nothing to stop this, and the cycle is exhausting.

I’ve worked at five agencies, I’ve worked with close to 100 corporate clients over the years, my SVP has worked at another three agencies and nearly as many companies. I started my own PR agency because I wanted to respect my team, and I wanted the opportunity I wasn't getting elsewhere and despite asking. Switching jobs is a lot like having affair. People want a taste of something new, it seems exciting and full of promise, and better than what’s in front of you. But ultimately what was built is lost, whereas had you trusted your employer as a partner, communicated honestly, and worked together, you might have come through it better, stronger, and in a much better place.

P.S. We are hiring, so if Caster sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, please reach out.