The advertising industry has long believed that its people are constitutionally incapable of staying put — that creative restlessness is a feature, not a bug, and that turnover rates approaching 30 percent annually are simply the cost of doing business with people who think for a living.

One agency, at least, has decided this is nonsense.

Mischief, the independent creative shop in New York, reports that it has lost 1 percent of its staff since 2021, a figure that its leadership attributes not to unusual generosity with compensation but to a systematic removal of the things that make agency life exhausting. The list includes timesheets, which the agency eliminated entirely, along with the practice of requiring employees to justify their existence in six-minute increments.

"We thought the people the industry was calling restless were just worn out," said Greg Hahn, a founder of the agency, in a recent essay. (The distinction between restlessness and exhaustion is not one that holding company H.R. departments have historically been eager to explore.)

The agency, which was founded in 2020 and has produced work for clients including Tubi and the dating app Bumble, has also abandoned the common practice of expecting employees to be available at all hours, a custom that the industry developed during the era of fax machines and has somehow preserved into the age of Slack.

Whether Mischief's approach can scale beyond a small independent shop remains an open question. The large holding companies — WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic — have spent decades building compensation structures that assume a certain amount of churn, and their procurement departments have become skilled at pricing work in ways that make long employee tenures economically inconvenient.

Still, the suggestion that people leave advertising not because they are flighty but because they are tired is the sort of observation that sounds obvious only after someone says it out loud.

Original story published in Fast Company: "Free your people and the work will follow"