Two important trends for 2024 that VFX senior managers need to get ahead of

1. Retention

From many conversations I've had over the past several months I sense that a lot of long term crew who are currently protected from layoffs during the current slow down, may still be ready to jump ship once the big hiring wave hits later this year.

Most of your senior crew may have stayed loyal through the pandemic slow down, subsequent ramp up, then strike slow down. You may feel that protecting their jobs and income in recent months would be sufficient grounds for loyalty to be reciprocated. I don't believe that will be enough though and some VFX companies may experience an exodus of long term talent. We can see hints of this in the rise of talk and action about unionization. These signals are the tip of a looming dissatisfaction iceberg. Even in facilities where staff have not taken action towards unionizing there is a trend towards rejecting the status quo, especially when their skills and experience will be in demand later this year.

One of the most effective counters to this is to provide growth opportunities. Some promotion opportunities will inevitably open up later in the year, when workloads start increasing as the post-strike productions start ramping up. The smartest companies will?be well ahead of this, providing leadership related training and support in advance, both for new leaders stepping up for the first time and for experienced leaders taking on greater scope of responsibility.

• For emerging leaders, being trained in advance prepares them for the shock to their system when they take on a new role, increasing their confidence and minimizing the chance of bad habits forming when they overcompensate for feeling out of their depth.
• For experienced leaders "going back to the classroom" gives them permission to take off their mask of perfectionism and allows them to objectively examine their leadership style and patterns. This in turn empowers them see some of their blind spots, and self-correct some of the bad habits they may have adopted over the years. (Yes, even if you're running the company, this applies to you too. If the thought of this makes you nervous we definitely need to talk!)
• For teams, having a leader who can take charge without micromanaging or undermining, articulate what they want, inspire and motivate, and be constructive and supportive when giving feedback or hold challenging conversations, makes a such a huge difference to engagement and retention of all the crew. There is truth to the popular management saying that "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses".
• Finally for all staff, investing in training signals to them that you see the potential in them and are invested in their growth and success. The cost of this investment is a tiny fraction of the potential cost of replacing them. Token gestures will have token impact, each person will need to feel genuine investment for their future career path, which can only be achieved by showing that you genuinely care about them and their individuals journey.

2. Running Lean / Efficiency

When projects do start ramping up, the trend I'm hearing is that clients will be expecting a lot of volume, with even more squeezed margins. We will not be going back to "business as usual". We all hope that creative and technical excellence will not be compromised, but the only other sustainable option to deliver more with less will be through improving efficiency.

Our industry has always been innovative in pushing creative and technical boundaries. However, unless we have a huge technological revolution (AI?) it is unlikely that incremental technology refinements will achieve the productivity improvements needed in the next few months.

My belief is that the biggest untapped source of efficiency gains in most VFX companies lies in helping people to work together more effectively.

This means:

• Supervisors knowing what they want and being able to more effectively communicate that in advance, so that less time is wasted on endless iterations or creative blind alleys.
• Artists egos being checked at the door, so that collaboration as a team is more valued than individual contribution.
• Production teams less stretched and overwhelmed, so that they can prioritise proactive scheduling over reactive shotgrid data entry.
• Software development with occasional short meetings rather than busy meeting schedules punctuated by a few minutes of coding.
• Effective delegation without micromanaging, avoiding doubling up on ownership of tasks and decisions, and creating space for productive, creative people to be productive and creative.

Over the years I've witnessed and experienced some amazing examples of great leadership and efficient teamwork, and plenty of shockingly bad examples too. The good news is that the best work cultures rarely happen by chance. They happen because of a choice to make them happen. It takes effort, but the rewards of healthy collaborative teams is greater efficiency, and so much more fun for everyone while they're working together.

Let me know your thoughts. What other common challenges do you see for the VFX industry in the year ahead?? What are you doing differently as a result? What have I missed?

I'm always keen to hear and share ideas about how to proactively support leadership development and engineer creative, productive, and high retention work cultures. Let's talk!

Fred.