The Hidden Cost of Bad Design Workflow Is Bigger Than Most Companies Think
A study of 1,200 designers found the average creative professional spends 22 hours per week on operational tasks. For Chicago agencies, that overhead translates to millions in wasted payroll and a growing retention crisis.
There is a number that has been circulating through the design industry since early 2026, and it is making executives uncomfortable. Twenty-two hours. That is how much time the average designer spends per week on work that has nothing to do with design.
The figure comes from a study conducted by Rahmi Halaby, CEO of Philadelphia-based startup Ideate, who interviewed more than 1,200 designers over two years. Freelancers, agency leads, in-house teams at major brands, creative directors managing departments of 50. The finding held across every segment. More than half the standard work week consumed by presentations, feedback loops, asset resizing, file management, and brand deck assembly. A feature in HUGE Magazine broke down the economics in detail.
For Chicago, where the creative services industry employs tens of thousands and agencies like Leo Burnett, FCB, and Ogilvy have defined the city’s role in American advertising for decades, the cost is not abstract. It is payroll.
The Math That Nobody Wants to Do
Take a 50-person design department at a Chicago agency. Average designer salary in the metro area runs between $65,000 and $95,000 depending on seniority, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the midpoint, 22 hours per designer per week in operational overhead represents roughly $14 million annually in salary paid for work that generates zero creative output.
That money does not show up as a line item in anyone’s budget. It is buried inside billable-hour estimates, project timelines that always run long, and the vague sense that the team needs more headcount even though nobody can explain exactly why.
The retention cost makes it worse. Designer burnout is increasingly driven by operational drag, not creative workload. A 2023 UX Collective study found that boring work and ineffective company processes were among the top reasons designers leave, ahead of everything except layoffs. SHRM benchmarks put the cost of replacing a senior designer at $60,000 to $320,000 when accounting for recruiting, onboarding, and lost institutional knowledge.
The companies losing designers to operational burnout are not just losing talent. They are paying a premium to replace that talent, and then putting the replacement into the same broken workflow.
Where the Fix Is Coming From
A category of software called DesignOps has emerged specifically to address the operational gap. The tools are not design tools. Figma helps designers make things. Adobe helps designers make things. DesignOps software handles the work around the things designers make.
Ideate has taken the broadest approach. The company’s Moodboard Studio drew a waitlist north of 4,900 designers after launching on Product Hunt, with signups from Apple, Meta, Urban Outfitters, and IBM. A Feedback Copilot uses language models to translate ambiguous client direction into structured design tasks. Brand deck builders and mockup generators automate the formatting work that used to take full afternoons.
Air, a San Francisco company that has raised $76.8 million, manages creative asset organization for over 2,100 businesses. Smartsheet paid $155 million to acquire Brandfolder in 2020. Figma has been adding operational features throughout 2025 and 2026, including AI-powered tools announced at Config 2025 that push the platform further toward workflow automation.
Why Chicago Should Pay Attention
The Midwest has a different relationship with operational efficiency than the coasts. Chicago’s agencies have historically competed on discipline and process rather than the flash that defines New York and LA shops. Leo Burnett built an empire on systematic creative thinking. That same orientation toward process should make Chicago agencies natural early adopters of tools that bring structure to the operational side of design work.
The city also has a growing tech startup ecosystem that bridges the gap between coast-centric venture capital and Midwest pragmatism. 1871, the startup incubator in the Merchandise Mart, has hosted design-focused companies and events. Illinois’ creative economy employs over 300,000 people across design, media, and advertising.
For the mid-size agencies and in-house teams that make up the bulk of Chicago’s design workforce, the 22-hour finding is not a curiosity. It is a diagnosis. The operational tax has been there for years, eating margins and burning out talent. The difference now is that there are companies building software to fix it, and the economics of that fix are straightforward. If a tool recovers even five hours per designer per week, the savings on a 20-person team exceed the cost of the software by an order of magnitude.
The question is not whether Chicago’s design industry has the problem. The data makes that clear. The question is how quickly the industry adopts the fix.