An interior design studio sells taste and delivery, with creative people in the office and site staff in the field. Good studios often lose their best designers to their own start-ups, so the growth path matters as much as the portfolio.
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Share your requirementsAn interior design studio is usually led by a founder-designer whose eye and relationships are what clients buy. Around them sit junior designers, visualisers and draughtspeople who produce drawings and renders, and project managers and site supervisors who coordinate carpenters, painters, electricians and suppliers. Projects run for months, overlap each other and change with every client revision. The studio switches between creative work in the office and fast-moving site work, and the two groups often see each other as the problem. Many studios also work with freelancers and outside vendors. See also HR for professional services.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
Every design decision goes back to one person, so projects stall when they are travelling or in meetings.
Drawings reach the site late or change after work starts, and each side blames the other for rework.
A designer who has learnt the studio's process and met its clients is likely to start their own practice.
Clients keep changing their minds, and nobody tracks how many revisions a project has used or whether they are billed.
Supervisors split time over several sites, attendance and responsibilities are informal, and quality depends on who happens to be there.
Outside designers and visualisers come and go, and the studio's way of working is learnt again each time.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; Career and Succession Management; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a interior design studios business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Decide which choices a senior designer or project manager can close and which need the founder, so the founder reviews key milestones and not every detail.
What this coversHideDecide which choices a senior designer or project manager can close and which need the founder, so the founder reviews key milestones and not every detail.
A fixed point where final drawings are issued, a named person signs them off and changes after that follow a short change note.
What this coversHideA fixed point where final drawings are issued, a named person signs them off and changes after that follow a short change note.
Stages from junior designer to lead with what each can run on their own and how pay follows.
What this coversHideStages from junior designer to lead with what each can run on their own and how pay follows. The role design work builds it.
A simple record of revision rounds and hours used, so scope conversations with clients rest on facts.
What this coversHideA simple record of revision rounds and hours used, so scope conversations with clients rest on facts.
Named supervisors per site, attendance recorded on site and a weekly check-in with the project manager.
What this coversHideNamed supervisors per site, attendance recorded on site and a weekly check-in with the project manager. The attendance and leave process can cover them.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Clear roles and approval levels between the founder, designers, project managers and site teams.
A growth ladder for designers and clear duties for project managers and supervisors.
A view of who leaves to start their own studios and what would have kept them longer.
Simple site attendance so supervisors and site staff are accounted for across projects.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
6 min readRead article
A flat structure works until the founder becomes the only route to a decision. How to tell when you have passed that point, and how to redesign without a reorganisation.
8 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead article
How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
5 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Write down which decisions others can close, train a senior designer to those standards and review at milestones. Expect a few mistakes at first and fix the checklist, not the person.
Not entirely, but a visible path, real project ownership and fair pay delay it. Some will go, so keep the relationship friendly and be ready for the next batch.
Give each a short brief on your standards, file naming and review process, and keep a list of reliable ones. It saves the learning each time.
Usually because drawings change after work begins or the supervisor never saw the latest version. A handover point and a change note usually cut it.
Agree the number of rounds in the proposal, record each round and discuss extra work when the limit is reached. People lose heart when revisions are never counted.
Typically with three things: which decisions currently wait for the founder, how drawings pass from designers to site supervisors, and what your juniors would need to see to stay another few years. A first piece of work might be approval levels or a designer growth path. We write the scope down and agree it with you afterwards, before anything begins.
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