It’s no secret that Hollywood’s unique cocktail of high-pressure sets, big egos and freelance workers can produce some pretty toxic work environments. In recent years, news reports have emerged about talk shows, reality shows and scripted TV productions alike that allegedly made cast and/or crew miserable.
Could QR codes and anonymized survey responses help change that? That’s the conceit behind Talent Trust, a consulting company that is taking the approach of partnering with employers to improve their work environments by polling their rank-and-file workers at different stages of production.
For four years, the U.K.-founded firm has quietly worked on more than 100 productions, including some for Sky, Channel 4 and Apple, furnishing leaders with anonymized survey data about their set cultures. The appeal for the employers isn’t purely philanthropic — the company offers them a way to protect their investments, theoretically, if they are able to turn around sets that might otherwise trigger delays, negative press attention, legal threats and/or unhappy talent. Using the service is also a way to demonstrate a company cares about employee welfare beyond just providing some written rules and platitudes.
But the company’s founder nevertheless believes that its program offers a way to create real change in the business. “Policies are great, but you can’t policy your way [into] a safe set, you have to have culture in there as well,” says Elizabeth Peyton-Jones, who previously founded Models Trust, a separate nonprofit that uses data reports and surveys to improve workplace safety in the modeling industry. “And it starts with listening.”
Here’s how it works: The company provides QR codes, which are typically disseminated in emails, on call sheets and within hangout spots on the set, that direct workers to surveys about their experience. The survey questions are different depending on the phase of production: if it’s pre-production, workers might get asked about whether they feel prepared practically and mentally for the job, whereas a mid-production survey might focus more on communication and turnaround times (the rest periods between when a production wraps for the day and when cast and crew are expected back).
After the company’s data analysts read survey responses, “we feed back that information to the company [with] very simple things to do re-address the culture on set,” says engagement manager Aida Axakalova. The analysts create a data report, scrubbed of any workers’ identifying information, that measure these sets’ performances on various culture metrics like physical safety, psychological safety, sustainability and preparation.
The idea is to make worker feedback less intimidating for companies by turning it into easily comprehensible data and action items. Employers can see what they are doing right (in Talent Trust’s viewpoint) and what to improve on. “We take the sting out of some of the comments so you hear what needs to be done,” Peyton-Jones says.
Dialogue about toxic work environments in Hollywood exploded amid the #MeToo movement and the racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, both through news stories like the blockbuster 2020 BuzzFeed News piece that investigated the treatment of employees on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and social media accounts like IATSE Stories. In 2021, the accidental shooting on the set of the indie film Rust renewed conversation around set safety, with some segments of the industry instituting new safeguards as a result.
Peyton-Jones points to data the company has amassed so far to make the argument that major incidents can be prevented by paying attention to smaller details. Talent Trust Services has worked with 143 productions, across film, television and commercials, union and non-union. The company defines an “unsafe set” as one where the cast and crew express that they felt either psychologically or physical unsafe, a safety incident occurred, misconduct took place and/or major red flags came up.
Early indicators of an unsafe set, the company posits, can include not giving cast and crew enough time to review workplace policies (which was the case on 27 percent of the “unsafe sets” they found) and ineffective communication of safety protocols (applicable to 29 percent of these sets).
During production, red flags that Talent Trust Services pays attention to are workers complaining about working hours and work-life balance (29 percent of unsafe sets had this issue), communication and information flow (15 percent) and, perhaps un-intuitively, catering and food quality (16 percent had this issue). (A film set performs better when people are given high-quality meals and are well-hydrated during regular breaks, Axakalova explains.)
As freelancers in an exclusive, creative industry who rely on good word of mouth and personal connections to be hired, production workers can be prone to staying quiet when work environments get rough. Still, they do have recourses when faced with serious issues on the job: State and federal occupational safety offices and unions and major Hollywood studios’ hotlines offer some safety reporting mechanisms, while for more interpersonal issues, workers might use MyConnext, a one-year-old tool from The Hollywood Commission that allows workers to anonymously report misconduct and confidentially get questions answered about workplace abuse.
Talent Trust Services is taking on the grayer areas, focusing more on culture and potential prevention than incident response. For their model to thrive, freelancers will have to trust the system enough to be honest and a critical mass of employers will have to see value in hearing their feedback. The latter is not a given at a time when studios and streamers are laser-focused on trimming costs.
Says Peyton-Jones, “People want to see the sofa on fire because they know to [take action]. When you say ‘Somebody’s coming with a match,’ they don’t want to react immediately.” But, she argues, “If somebody is complaining, it’s already an issue.”