As more cities and states follow California’s lead in shutting down nonessential businesses, and as San Francisco, Boston, and Cambridge halt most construction projects, design firms are lucky that the nature of their work allows them to continue on remotely—albeit with some anxiety about the pandemic’s anticipated economic fallout. We talked to principals at some firms in the hardest hit areas to learn how their working arrangements have changed in response to the crisis.
Between Bay Area traffic, which has prevented people from driving anywhere, and flex-work policies that allow staff to work from home, we’ve been doing a lot of remote meetings already. A couple of weeks ago, we did some advance planning by working with an IT consultant to give everyone remote access to our server from their laptops or home computers. To collaborate with each other, we use Zoom and Google Hangouts, and then with clients, we use their choice of videoconferencing platform.
We’re only a week in, so I can say that it’s been relatively seamless so far. But I think we’re going to start to miss real “face time” pretty quickly. We all know that in terms of communication, email is terrible. Voice is better, and in video you can see smiles and frowns, but there’s still body language and nuance that you’re missing. There’s the chance of miscommunication.
We’ve always had a pretty robust work-from-home policy and are constantly working remotely with partners anyway, so it hasn’t been a reach for any of our staff. But now that all 75 people are working from home, there’s been an interesting shift. You see someone’s personal life in a way that you don’t see at the office—one person is in a 500-square-foot apartment all by themselves and are feeling cabin fever, while other employees are at home with two children that they’re supposed to be homeschooling while they’re trying to work. Instead of being homogenized into the company culture, they’re seen as individuals plugging into the team.
It’s amazing how quickly we’re adapting. On Monday, we had our all-hands meeting with 75 people dialing into Zoom, and by Tuesday there was a “digital lunch” set up. It’s a Zoom meeting where you can have lunch and connect with your coworkers. People are missing those informal connections that they had in the studio. We’re also playing with developing meeting backgrounds in Zoom. The idea is to eliminate the distraction of different backgrounds and create more cohesion for the meeting. So if you have five people in a meeting, you send out the background with the meeting invite and everyone has the same one. [Editor’s note: One of Rapt’s backgrounds can be found at the top of this post.]
These are early days and very strange times. I think there’s going to be a huge shift in the workplace. Clients have grappled with working remotely for years, and this is the first global-scale exercise in what it looks like. I’m excited to see what comes out of this.