At PRINTING United Expo in Las Vegas Sept 23-25, a group of experts came together to discuss some of the biggest trends, truths, and takeaways the print industry is facing right now. The packed panel, moderated by Ashley Roberts, content director of Printing Impressions, covered everything from economics, to OSHA, to HR — and beyond.
For Adriane Harrison, VP of HR consulting at PRINTING United Alliance, human resources is no longer something companies can afford to treat as an afterthought. For many, when business gets leaner, the tendency is to shrink the workforce to save on costs, but the problem is that once those people are gone, they might never come back.
Layoffs, she stressed, can cost more than what is saved in the form of lost institutional knowledge, plus those workers will then move on to other industries, especially higher-paying roles in places like data centers and construction that are often competing for the same talent.
“What happens when there’s economic uncertainty or the perception of economic uncertainty is that there’s two things,” she explained. “One, real economic uncertainty means that people will reduce their number of employees either through attrition or through layoffs because they just can’t meet the margins. … And it’s a really tough thing to deal with because you lose institutional knowledge and you lose the opportunity perhaps of rehiring those same people later. So that’s a real catch 22.”
Read the rest of this article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
