Why HR in the Entertainment Industry is Completely Different (And Why That Matters)
Written by Tacita Small
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
If you’ve ever tried to apply a standard HR handbook to a production company, you’ll know how quickly it falls apart. The notice periods do not fit. The contract types do not match. The working patterns bear no resemblance to anything a generic template was designed for. And by the time you have added international crew, multi-project staffing, and a workforce that cycles in and out depending on what is greenlit, you are essentially trying to use a road map of Surrey to navigate central Tokyo.
HR built for the corporate world was never designed for this. And that gap matters more than most people in this industry want to admit.
The workforce model is fundamentally different
Most businesses hire people, keep them, and occasionally manage them out. Entertainment does not work that way. Production companies run on a fluid, project-based workforce where you might have 12 permanent staff on a Monday and 150 people contracted in by the end of the following week. Heads of department bring their own teams. Crew come from different countries. Talent agents are involved. Union agreements sit alongside individual contracts. Freelancers are working across three productions simultaneously, one of which happens to be yours.
That is not a quirk. That is just how the industry operates. And if your HR approach is not built around it, you will constantly feel like you are firefighting things that should have been handled before the shoot started.
Good Production HR anticipates this. It has the structures, templates and legal groundwork in place before the greenlight, not after. It knows that onboarding 40 people in a week is a real operational challenge, not an edge case to deal with on the fly.
Compliance looks completely different here too
In a standard office business, compliance is relatively contained. Employment contracts, holiday pay, a disciplinary policy. Uncomfortable, but manageable.
In entertainment, you are managing actors and backstage crew on the same production. You are working across locations with different employment law frameworks. You are navigating IR35 decisions for people who have worked with your company for years. You are dealing with the realities of late nights, pressurised sets, and an industry that has historically normalised behaviour that simply cannot be normalised anymore.
The legal exposure is real. And it compounds quickly when the right policies are not in place, or when the people responsible for applying them have not been properly supported.
This is not about being heavy-handed with compliance. It is about knowing the landscape well enough that you are never caught out by it. HR Health Checks exist precisely for this reason: to catch the gaps before they become problems, and to give production companies a clear picture of where they stand.
The culture challenge is unique
Creative and entertainment businesses attract people who care deeply about the work. That is one of the best things about this industry. It is also, sometimes, what makes the people stuff harder to manage.
When identity and craft are bound up together, feedback feels personal. Disagreements about creative direction can turn into something that sits in the room for months. A difficult conversation between a director and a line producer can ripple across an entire production if nobody steps in at the right moment.
At the same time, these are workplaces where people do some of the most energising, meaningful work of their careers. The culture, when it works, is extraordinary. People want to come back. They refer their colleagues. They build careers around particular companies.
The job of HR in this space is to protect what makes that culture good, and to deal honestly and quickly with the things that threaten it. That means being present. It means knowing the difference between creative tension and a dynamic that has gone wrong. It means having the kind of relationship with a company where difficult conversations happen before they become formal complaints.
Generic HR will always miss this
A generalist HR consultant can handle an employment contract. They can write a disciplinary procedure. But they will not know that crew on a 12-week shoot have specific working hour requirements that vary by union agreement. They will not have advised on production-based IR35 decisions before. They will not have experience managing the emotional complexity of a long shoot where a team of 80 people has been living and working together for months.
That experience matters. Not because the basics are different, but because context shapes everything. The advice you give, the way you give it, the speed at which you move, all of that changes when you understand the environment you are working in.
Since 2019, The Small HR Company has supported over 300 clients and more than 180 entertainment productions across 13 international locations. That track record exists because the industry requires a very particular kind of HR partner: one that understands how productions are built, how creative teams function, and where the risks actually live.
What this means in practice
If you are running a production company and your HR is either non-existent or bolted on from a template designed for a completely different type of business, the risk is not just legal. It is reputational, operational and cultural. The good news is that sorting it does not have to be disruptive. The right support fits around how you work, not the other way around.
If you want to understand where your current HR setup stands, our HR Health Check is a good place to start. It gives you an honest view of what is working, what is missing, and what needs attention before it becomes a bigger issue. We’re always happy to talk through what that looks like for your company. Get in touch whenever it suits you.
The Small HR Company works exclusively with creative and entertainment businesses. From retained HR to production support, everything we do is built for the industry you work in.