If you think boredom among your team might have an effect on productivity but isn’t really a significant problem, think again. According to Forbes, Gallup estimates that the issue costs between $450 and $550 billion per year in the US alone! Furthermore, a 2020 study described the issue as “one of the negative and widespread phenomena, where its increasing trend can be seen among employees on all occupational levels.”
With 51% of employees reporting that they ‘often’ hear colleagues express feelings of boredom or disengagement, and 40% of employees in Europe not engaged at work, Forbes have said boredom is more dangerous to your business than burnout. And in a sector like pharma, which has been severely affected by staff retention issues, retaining talent has become an issue for brands and agencies alike.
If somebody gets bored enough to quit—and when there are 1.7 jobs per available job seeker, that’s exactly what they’ll do—it’s costly. In the US this amounts to around $15,000 per employee on top of the lost productivity, so this is absolutely an issue that must be taken seriously. Those most recent studies, however, suggest that’s not yet universally the case worldwide.
Right person, right seat
Retaining talent is one of the main challenges facing content producers in every sector, with the pharma industry one of the categories where this issue is particularly noticeable. In fact, some sector commentators describe it as the biggest challenge facing the industry. So to slow down staff turnover and address boredom in the workplace, you need the right people undertaking each role.
In our Outperform Your Competition with Content at Scale online event, Puneet Srivastava of Roche made it clear that, while it’s vital that informational and communication silos are avoided across the content production process, the right work still has to be placed with the right people. “You need a high-end creative side, to sit down and talk about the next campaign you want to launch,” he explained. “But then you can repurpose that creative a lot, and that’s a second team.” Simply put, creative people will quickly tire of producing multiple versions of the same thing, and are much better utilized doing what they’re good at, with the repetitive iterations from that creative being placed with specific resources.
The same applies in reverse: it makes no sense to send original creative work offshore just to save money, when your own team understands your clients’ cultures and brands better than anybody. Financial success and improved staff retention comes from choosing the right model for content production that enables such discretion. Keep your employees engaged, and you’ll keep your employees.
Save time, save money and retain your staff
Forbes report Gallup figures showing that companies which keep at least 90% of their staff happy and engaged outperform those which don’t by 147% on an earnings-per-share basis.
You can avoid staff quitting by keeping them on the jobs that they signed up for, save time and money and lose none of the critical quality control that’s so important with the right content production model.
That’s where Smartshoring® comes in. If you’re looking to overcome both the specific challenges of the pharma sector such as country-specific compliance legislation, and more general issues like keeping the right work with the right staff, Smartshoring® is the ideal solution. Scalable and flexible, providing access to 24-hour resources and offering typical savings of 40–60% across all service lines, Smartshoring® uses the best talent wherever they may be.
