New Realities: Employee Wellness and Organizational Culture in Design Firms

A I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain. We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

B Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to Practice Disrupted. Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

A Hi, Evelyn. Hi, disruptors. We're welcoming Saskia Dennis Van Dale and Annalisa Pitts to the show today. We've known these 2 guests since the missing 32% symposium in San Francisco ex that eventually evolved into the equity by design group. They've been active in advancing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion inside the AEC firms and across the industry at large. In June of 2023, they copublished a report titled new realities, employee wellness and organizational culture and design firms. This study sought to collect data on how design professionals are experiencing the workplace today explore about how organizational dynamics might be tied to social and emotional well-being at work. The study was sent to a 159 firms, ex and 57 firms participated with 2,750 individual responses.

A Ex I'm so excited to get into the data today with them and learn what they discovered.

B Today, we'll learn more about the results and observations from this ex survey and speak with Saskia and Annalisa, who have been working directly with firms on EDI and culture issues. Welcome to the show, you 2. This has been a long time in the making.

C Thanks for having us. Thanks. Thanks for having us.

B We didn't do formal bios, I think, partly because I feel like we've known and all ex worked parallel with one another for quite a while. But for those listeners who are hearing from the 2 of you for the first time, Saskia, why don't you jump in and tell us a little bit more about yourself?

D Yeah. I know. We've been friends for so long that it's hard to do an introduction. So I'm Saskia Dennis Bandel, and I am a principal consultant with the Cameron McAllister Group. I'm ex Also the executive director of the Global Design Alliance, and I'm also a a mom and a wife and the parent of a very loud dog who you might ex So as a management consultant, I work in the AEC space. I work with firms around the country. I come out of the world of marketing and BD, but I've become more and more interested in culture and in leadership and leadership development and ex Helping firms really think through intentionally what they would like their culture to be. I've also forever been passionate about ex Issues of inclusion and diversity and justice, and I was able to kind of channel that into my work with Annalisa extend the many other folks from Equity by Design, which is now 10 years old.

D I can't believe it. So that's me, and, I'll hand it to Annalisa, I guess. Thanks, Saskia. My

C name is Annalisa Pitts. I'm an architect and associate with Shepley Bulfin. For For those of you who don't know, the firm is sort of a little giant. We're a we're a firm of about 200 people, but we practice nationally offering services primarily in health care, higher education, urban development, science and technology, and with a practice group called LENS that I'm a part of as well as my work in higher ed. So LENS is a design strategy research and innovation practice group within Shepley vol Bulfinch. Ex And with Lens, I'm offering clients participatory visioning and planning, change management, and organizational development services, really focused on helping clients to think through how a single project might start to inform a holistic response to some of the issues that are near and dear to my heart and near and dear to my client's heart and my, colleagues' hearts. So sustainability and resilience, health and wellness, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And for us, this project was important because we really believe that we can't achieve justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the built environment ex If the built environment isn't being designed by diverse professionals who are fulfilled and happy and connected at work and having really positive social relationships.

C And too often, I think we've taken the experience that designers have as just sort of something that happens by accident. And this study for us was a chance to to think, more strategically and more intentionally about these issues. Annalisa, I can't help but observe. You've been really instrumental in some of the research that's been developed over time, this being one of the research reports, but also dating back to the equity by design.

A If you don't mind me asking, has your interest in that and also your, I guess, learning curve grown by participating in these different processes with the industry.

C Yeah. So about ten and a half years So I started as a pretty entry level designer at a design firm that I really respected in San Francisco. And in the bathroom, ex I ran into a woman who was heavily pregnant, and I said and she said, hey. I'm going out on leave. And I go, oh, cool. I'll I'll see you back. I'm excited to work with you. And she said, I'm not coming back.

C And for me, that was this moment where if we didn't do something to change the industry, I wasn't gonna be able to have the life I wanted to have. And so I totally the Equity by Design study. I happened my project manager at that firm happened to be Rosa Shang, who introduced me to Saskia and Lillian and eventually Julia and Antonia who formed the core team of Equity by Design. And and we each came to the project, I think, with our own observations, concerns, curiosities. Ex But then we got to work with people across the country to understand some of the roadblocks or pinch points that were in their way as they progressed through the industry, and I think that we eventually came to the realization that there were a lot of stories out there, but there wasn't data to help people have meaningful conversations at work about how the things that were happening to them individually connected to a bigger picture and were something that we didn't need to solve as individuals anymore, but that we needed to respond to as the industry. And so Equity by Design worked over the course of we did 3 surveys biannually from 2013 to 2014 through 2018 and learned a lot about how the industry needed to change. But, ex you know, 2020 came around. I'm still a practicing architect.

C George Floyd is murdered. Arch you know, women are leaving the industry in droves. BIPOC professionals, especially black professionals in our industry, feel alienated and don't know what to do.

B Ex I hit a point where I I'm just

C having a crisis of faith in the industry, and I had the chance at this moment to talk to Saskia and sort of hit up my old friend, and she convinced me that the thing that we needed to do together was actually start working with firms individually to make change because simply advocating industry wide wasn't enough anymore. We sort of took that idea of equity by design, and we started doing national research together in an industry benchmarking studies and then working with firms to help them understand where they fit into that industry picture, and more importantly, helping them to grow their capacity to make change ex as a response to the data that was was being collected.

A I so love that you all are driving this outreach ex and collecting data that's really helping firms understand the realities and the conversations that are very complex and sometimes hard to see. I wanted to shift into what this research project is about. And so, Saskia, maybe you can help us understand ex what you were seeking to explore and how you went about this process and how it ties back to the issue of wellness an organizational culture.

D Yeah. In 2022, coming out of the pandemic, we were hearing from our clients from firms that they were really trying struggling to figure out what was going to be the new normal for themselves, for their staff, ex for the work, and we were also hearing a lot of concern around employee productivity, around mental health, ex And kind of layered on top of that, this this kind of narrative around firm culture, that ex Firm culture had really suffered in the pandemic, and how were we gonna come back and restore firm cultures? And so we were we were hearing ex Just a lot of stories and anecdotes about how firms were kind of experimenting and trying to figure out. But as had been true 7 years earlier, there was a lot of stories, and there was no data. Nobody was actually measuring what was happening for people. Either what was happening for individuals in the profession and what things were in fact working that firms were trying. And so We've learned a lot about research. We haven't learned a lot about, like, our capacity for research. So as is often the case for Annalisa and I, we thought, ex Oh, well, we'll do a survey, and then we'll figure it out.

D So, of course, that turned into a huge undertaking. With the team at Cameron Macalester and at LensStrategy, we decided to kind of focus on a couple of questions, like, ex What are people really experiencing in hybrid work? What does it actually feel like? What are the elements of an architectural workplace that are ex Good for a healthy culture, what are the elements that are not? We wanted to understand, are there differences in how different people, experience workplace culture, and finally, what are firms doing right? Because for us, it's all about Improving. Right? Improving the industry, improving organizations. So it's always about building on what's going right. I did wanna say, Annalisa and I are both obsessed with definitions because language is so important when you talk about this stuff. And I think it's important to define culture because people define culture in a 1000000 different ways. And so culture is not like ex Taco Tuesday, or do you celebrate Christmas in the office? Right? And I personally always go back to the AIA guide for equitable practice ex because I think that's a really good definition. And so just as a reminder for listeners that when we use the word Culture, we mean, and this is directly from the guides, the tacit social or order of an organization, the shared patterns of behaviors, attitudes, expectations that determine what is viewed as appropriate behavior of individuals and the group and that help us make meaning of our collective environment.

D The other term that actually also has definition is wellness. And, so I've actually, kind of gotten interested in the work of the Global Wellness Institute, which is a thing. And so wellness has some specific definitions too, and it's they define it as the active pursuit of activities, ex Choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health, and they have, like, 8 circles of health. Ex What I also think is important because I often get questions about this, like, how much is wellness the responsibility of the firm, and how much is wellness the responsibility of the individual. And so I remind people that wellness is an individual pursuit. Right? We do have some ex Self responsibility for our choices and our behaviors and lifestyles, but we know from research that it is significantly influenced by the physical and cultural environment that we're in. So as an industry and as a culture and as organizations, ex We really do have direct impact on people's well-being. So I just wanted to kinda get our definitions straight before we launch further.

B There's so much that I love about what you had to say, because I think I've talked to so many leaders who is, like, worried about ex Getting people back to the office because the culture went away. And I was like, but the culture never truly went away. It shifted in probably a way that you cannot put into words ex right now because you don't have these events these social events happening around it, but it never went away. And then the other thing about wellness as I was in a recent panel, and they were asking, you know, what is the firm's responsibility similar to what you said around this? And I was like, well, I will tell you ex My manager's responsibility in in tech is to make sure that the work pipeline that comes down to me is reasonable within my responsibilities and what I'm supposed to do, and the deadlines are reasonable. And he very much is a great model of, you know he takes a vacation every quarter, and he makes sure that his team takes a vacation every quarter too. Ex So yes yes to both.

D Yes. That's great. That's a great model.

B I'm so glad this work is finally being done specifically within the AEC industry, ex Partly because I feel like there are some of these research this research happening elsewhere, but architects don't like to listen to Research that isn't that doesn't include them because they don't feel it's relatable. Yeah.

A It's not sanctioned by the AEC industry.

C Expect We're unicorns. We're special.

B Yes. We're unicorns. We're extra special that way. But why don't you begin, and and maybe this is diving into immediately, but telling us about the competing values framework that was set up, the 4 types, and and go from there.

D Yeah. We love to nerd out on social sciences, and because what we're doing is social science research at the end of the day. Ex And so this was a framework that we both kind of became fascinated by. And, you know, it's work that was done by someone named Kim Cameron, and There's books about the competing cultures framework. And so it comes from outside of architecture, but we both saw a lot of resonance. So let me just really basically describe it. It's a framework that is based on the idea that organizational culture can be kind of understood based ex how organizations define effectiveness, like effectiveness of culture in the face of their own strategic objectives ex In, across 2 sets of what competing demands. So it's, you have to kind of picture Two axes crossing.

D Right? And so 1 axis says flexibility and discretion versus stability and control. That's one line. And then the other one is external focus, you know, market differentiation, competition versus internal focus an integration, and these 2 axes then define kind of 4 basic culture types. And the first one is what is called the create culture, which architects all are like, yay. We wanna be create culture, which tend to emphasize flexibility, individual achievement, very entrepreneurial. This other quadrant is the collaborate culture. That's another ex Popular one, which very much kind of imitate families, right, where it's all about internal cohesion and teamwork extend lots of focus on employee involvement and connection. Then there are control cultures, which the minute you say control culture, architects get ex Super anxious, which are all internally focused and are very much about stability, efficiency, and predictability.

D Ex And then finally, there's the compete culture, which are externally focused and are about profitability and productivity and results. Now here's the thing. Organizations exist across all 4 cultures. And just as a reminder, like, why the control culture might not be such a bad extend many of us who work for an organization. We do enjoy ourselves a four zero one k plan, and we do want to get paid on certain dates, and we want certain things to be reliable. Those are aspects of control culture. Compete culture, which might also sound negative. It's all about getting great work and competing in the marketplace and being externally visible in the marketplace.

D So I just remind people that there's no good or bad cultures and that we all exist across all 4 cultures. I will say That according to the respondents, the dominant culture in the industry is collaborate culture, which is closely followed by compete culture. Those are the 2 that just the respondents. I'm gonna let Annalisa talk in more detail, but the fact is that where this becomes interesting, Besides a lecture on culture, is that different people based on identity experience the cultures of their organizations differently. And that's where this becomes a really interesting area for firms to explore. Why is it that a 30 year old woman Might be experiencing a very different culture than a 62 year old man. Ex And what can we do to bring those experiences into alignment?

C So I think the other thing that for us is really interesting about culture is that culture isn't static. It's something that's actively managed and shaped by an organization and its leaders over time. And the computing framework gives us a way of thinking about how culture will be changed over time in response to both internal and external pressures. And so at this moment of really transformative change in our world, in our industry. We were curious about what culture was doing. What does it look like today, and where is it going in the future?

A I'm so excited about this because I feel like Evelyn and I have spent 3 years building anecdotal evidence about some of the things that ex I'm hoping that your data is gonna allow us to point to and say, it's not just qualitative. There is some actual data behind this. And so ex I have a lot of interest in what the results say. So let's talk first about the cultural tensions in the industry based on this framework and how they relate to employee well-being. So, Annalisa? Sure.

C That's a great question. As we started to analyze the data, we thought back to that competing values framework recognizing that we were seeing firms negotiating these tensions in real time, and we started to use the competing values framework as an armature for understanding what may might be happening in the industry today. Ex And so if you think back to what Saskia described in the the quadrants, the first tension that we saw was the one that we were hearing a lot about from firm leaders. It was the tension between create and collaborate culture. On the one hand, we want in this hybrid world, we wanna let people start their own paths, do what they need to do to be as creative as possible. And often that does mean setting their own schedules, working from home, doing the things that support their work in new and exciting ways. But then on the other hand, there's this real desire to be together and to feel like a family as a firm. And and for many firms, that comfort place is in a physical physical space together.

C So that's tension number 1. And that, you know, that manifests itself in many ways, but we heard it often manifesting when people talked about, so how how are we gonna do mentorship in a hybrid world? How are we gonna figure out schedules? Things like that. The next tension that we heard about, and this one was sort of reading between the lines, but it was actually a tension between control culture, which, you know, Saskia said nobody actually wants to admit that they like, but it's important, and create culture. Ex and so, again, as an industry, I think we really like to say we're designers. We do whatever we need to do. We we create our own culture. You know, we create our own reality, and, ex therefore, we're not gonna reuse details from a project in the past. We're not gonna, god forbid, learn anything and make our next thing better.

C We're not gonna put any systems in place. Ex but I think that the reality is that after a couple of years of disruption in the industry and in the world beyond, people were really craving some certainty about things, and and the lack of certainty was creating real stress for workers across the industry. And then the final tension that we saw was between collaborate culture and compete culture. And as Saskia said, these are the 2 cult culture types that were most emphasized in the survey, and we actually think that it's because this is the tension ex that may be the most alive in the industry today. And so how do we care for our employees? How do we invest in their in their well-being and encourage them to stay and become a part of the firm over time so that we can grow together as an organization. And at the same time, in a sort of zero bottom line economy. How do we remain competitive, and how do we keep our fees low enough that we can go after that project we want. And, I mean, we're not gonna talk about it here, but it's it's not a race to the bottom.

C And so what is the right balance to strike there?

D I think one of the things that I think both Annalisa and I have become interested in that we didn't explore or that we do explore to some extent, but we don't dive deep is also generational differences. So for instance, in create versus control, ex We got a lot of feedback that people want more clarity of roles and clarity of responsibilities and clarity of expectations, ex Especially in the early years of their careers, and I think architects of an older generation like more fluidity. They like to be more Ambiguous about those things. So there's kind of multiple layers of dynamics happening, and some of them have to do with generational shifts of how how different people look at career.

B I wanna say it's so great to hear you guys say this All because, I swear, every other research out there points to these exact same things even though it's not affiliated with the architecture industry. So I do feel like it's, like, ex A reconfirmation that even though we may start feel certain things in a very particular way being ex in the AEC industry that this is this is not just an industry problem. This is a problem that everybody is holistically struggling with 2 right now. It's kind of like a we wanna be a unicorn, but we have to acknowledge that everyone else is going through the struggle too, and the switch to hybrid, ex The, you know, the new terminology coming out in the tech field is is flexible work and what that means.

A So yeah. I wanted to ask a couple clarifying questions. So it was individuals who participated in the survey. Correct? And so from that data, you generate a different cultural profiles based on their data. So does that mean that based on their experience in the firm, each of those profiles represents a different type of firm. So the way that this works and we did not invent these questions.

C They, in fact, come from Kim Cameron's research, but we provided a series of 4 statements that each represented one of the culture types. And we asked we asked participants to allocate a total of a 100 points across those 4 statements based on how strongly they represent their firm today as it is today. And what happened was that we then sort of took the averages of all of those responses across across the industry and then across every firm that participated. And the averages sort of result in a in a shape, essentially. If you imagine plotting, you know, 60 points in 1 quadrant, 20 points in another quadrant, 10 points in another quadrant, and 10 points in another quadrant. Ex and I you know, architects can't do math, and so we did end up sort of then correcting all of everybody's responses and weighting it to a100 as you see me struggling to do the hypothetical profile. But what we found was that there is a lot of variation in terms of the the profiles that firms have. I mean, we had firms that were, like, very, very strongly collaborate culture and very and didn't really have a lot else emphasized.

C We saw firms that we're pretty even across all 4 types. We saw firms that were strong create. We saw firms that were strong compete. We saw firms, did we see firms that were strong control? I think there were at least 1 or

D Yeah. I think there were. So just to be clear, when we issued the survey, we issued it to ex Folks and asked them to distribute it to the firm to the members of their firm. So we sent it to firm leaders and or HR people. Certain firms decided to participate at a level where we were then able to do specific customized findings For those firms, I think they had to be at a 70% response rate. I can't remember exactly. But for some firms, we were really able to dig deep and say, here's what this looks like for you. And some of those firms have been able to then, you know, really address specific kind of pinch points in their cultures.

A The other question I had is about bias. I would assume different leaders want their firm to be different things or may filter it as such. And I think that maybe you're gonna answer this through the breakdown of different variation based on gender, race, age, and seniority. But how how does that translate into how they see their firm culture.

D So I actually would answer that with, It is about bias, but at the end of the day, what healthy culture means is when everybody is in alignment and is connected to the culture. So the problem is not what is your culture or what what your culture is. The problem is if different people are not experiencing the culture in that same way. Right? That's for us the diagnosis of a problem. If everybody in the organization is in alignment, and and I'm I can talk later about what that means. But if everybody feels connected and in alignment with the culture, great. That's a healthy culture. Now it may have other issues, but from this framework, we're looking at I mean, there may not be wellness, but there's a healthy ex Culture.

D Right? There's a there's an alignment there between everybody's experiences. That's in fact not what we're seeing, though, ex In the industry, what we're seeing is misalignment.

B An interesting cross section for me, and I would be curious as to whether or not you guys looked at it is also tenure. So I know you were looking at generational differences, but tenure for time at the firm. Right. Like, the cultural difference between somebody who has been there 1 year versus and they might all be the same age. Right? Ex and same have the same demographic background and the person that's been there 5 years, and then how and how how essentially indoctrinated have you been After the 1 year versus the 5 or even, like, the the lifer. Right?

C It's funny because there are so many different cultures. When we looked at this as so many different descriptions of culture, and they vary so significantly from firm to firm. When we we did look at our data by tenure, and we can talk a little bit the 10 year dynamics, if that's interesting because we thought it was interesting. But I don't think that we were able just by sort of comparing 1 year versus 5 years, 10 years to say whether experiences of culture are stronger one way or the other because it's sort of muddy because there are 4 types, if that makes any sense. But what we did find, you know, like many industries. We had a major reshuffle in the years after the pandemic where a lot of people changed positions. And so I I can get the exact number for you, but I I think close to 3 to 5 years. So it's really short.

C And what we found was that ex on average, people who had been with their firm for a year or less and people who had been with the firm for 20 years or more were the most satisfied, most likely be engaged most likely to believe organizations, leaders cared about their well-being. We saw that in that 3 to maybe 10 year age group, there were actually still some people who were having some pretty unsatisfying personal personal dynamics in their workplace that were experiencing really serious burnout issues, mental well seeing issues and even an increased likelihood of thinking about leaving their firm due to mental well well-being issues. And so I think that ex if economic conditions remained even and if there were still positions widely available, I think that we would continue to see shuffling. It's not done yet ex based on what we saw.

A I do wanna go further into the misalignment. Tell me more about what the data revealed in terms of misalignment.

C So the data showed a couple of things in terms of misalignment. I think I think the biggest one for me was expect or for us was that we looked at this model called the SCARF model that was developed by the NeuroLeadership Institute, and it basically says that there are a number of sort of interpersonal conditions that you need in place to be mentally healthy in the workplace. Number 1, you need a sense of status. Number 2, you need a sense of certainty. So do you sort of know what to expect from encounters? Number 3, do you have a sense of autonomy? 4, do you have a sense of relatedness? Do you feel connected to colleagues. And finally, is there a sense of fairness? It is what what's happening in the worst workplace just. And what we found was that of those 5 things, certainty was ex was really not prevalent at all across our industry. And so knowing that people don't know what to expect, and that's essentially what culture is its shared expectations made us think that there wasn't a lot of clarity around around what culture was supposed to be or what what people were supposed to expect from one another.

C I think the other piece that shows potential for misalignment is that we often did see when we looked within firms ex that, senior leaders tended to experience stronger cultures, so cultures that were more weighted in one direction or another, ex and younger staff tended to have more even culture profiles across all of the quadrants suggesting that, you know, for the senior leaders, they might really be able to say what their firm is pretty definitively, and the younger staff think they work in an architecture firm. Ex and that's tough.

B It isn't surprising. I mean, I think it's all kind of reaffirming. And that goes back to everything that you guy that Saskia, I think you started mentioning at the front where people were like, how do we how do we train, right, all of these younger people coming in into this flexible ex and hybrid work environment. And the fact is that culture is a part of that and understanding who and what the firm is. Ex But we're so used to throwing people in the deep end and just saying, like, here, get into the drawings, that we actually don't spend time to talk about the culture and the firm and and the output and, like, the mission and the vision and the values in greater depth with them. So I don't know. For me, this is all just such an affirmation of everything that we Janine have been saying. It has been we've kind of been, like, saying anecdotally, and we now have, like, proof behind the words.

A I wanna follow that up with asking there's a couple of specific data points in the report that I wanna point to. One of them being

C ex a figure about burnout and engagement, which are 2 issues that I keep hearing about repeatedly across firms. Ex can you tell me more about that as well as the related chart that talks about leaders caring about my well-being or feeling connected to my colleagues? Burnout, I think, we often associate colloquially with being really tired. And burnout is actually a it's a condition that only occurs within the workplace. Place and only exists within organizations, and it's actually defined as a sort of state of malaise that occurs as a result of sustained interpersonal stress in the workplace. Place, and so it is actually directly coming out of the kind of culture that we cultivate and the types of relationships that we foster in the workplace. And burnout is characterized by 3 key traits. Number 1, depletion or complete exhaustion. And that's usually the thing that sets in first, which is why we think about burnout as being really tired, but then 2 other really important things happen.

C Number 1, we start to feel cynical about our work, and so we actually doubt ex we doubt its value. And then finally, number the third thing that happens is we actually become ineffective at our work. We start to and so for, we couldn't go and look at performance reviews for all 27 100 people. We didn't want to nor does that make sense. But in social science research, there are questions that we ask about see. And interestingly enough, in architecture across equity by design and the work we've done with Cameron McAllistery on this study, we typically use a question, my work makes positive impact in the world. And when people start questioning that, that's that's getting to the core of what we do as architects, and it's a problem if you can't say yes to that. It it we've seen over years of studies that that's an issue.

C And so so when we say burnout, that's what we mean. Engagement is closely related. Engagement is is characterized by being energized your work. It's characterized by being dedicated to your job, and so that's the opposite of that that cynicism. And then the third the 3rd characteristic engagement is different. It's characterized as being absorbed in your work. So having that flow state. And so, anyway, ex that's all a long way of saying.

C We looked at it. That's the framework we used. And what we saw about burnout and engagement was that 16% of people in the industry are suffering from burnout. And remember that meaning that they said no to at least 2 out of 3 of those questions or they had a sort of neutral response to all 3. Ex What that means for us, like, by the time you say no to 2 of those things, it's pretty hard to come back from that.

D Well, the flip side is that 63% ex of respondents indicated that they were engaged. I somehow remember that in the data set in my brain, Which you could pretend, you know, you could say, oh, that's a good number, but that's still a really high number, 37%, ex Who are saying no. I'm not engaged. So you've gotta kind of layer those 2 together and say what's the impact of that on well-being and wellness ex of the folks that work for us, and there are differences demographically on who's feeling this way.

C Yeah. And so, actually so so one quick statistic. We did find that 60% of people who qualified as burned out based on the characteristics that we just listed said that they had considered leaving their job in the last 6 months, specifically to address mental wellness issue concerns. Just 15% of people that were engaged in the workplace, meaning that they said yes to all 3 of the things that I said characterize engagement, said the same, and so it has a really profound impact on retention and therefore on our bottom line. So now into the sort of scary thing about demographics. The reality is that we're not all equally likely to experience engagement in the workplace. There were significant gender, age, and seniority dynamics that we observed. And this was the 1st study that I know of that's looked at this in the industry, but we saw that non binary professionals who are far less likely than others to experience engagement, far more likely to experience burnout.

C Fully 29% of our nonbinary respondents experiencing burnout in the workplace compared with just 16% of others. But there are also significant age differences. And, again, we saw that that group that Saskia was talking about, those that I think Janine, maybe Evelyn, and I all fall into 30 to 39 year olds, I I'm not gonna call your age out on on air, Evelyn. But we saw that millennials were less likely than others to experience engagement in the place, and and we can we can get into some of those dynamics. But I think after talking with firms, after looking at the data, this is a group that in other industries would be moving into leadership positions. And in our industry, they're still paying their dues, but with increased responsibility. And so ex there's tremendous stress. These are the people that are you know, they're the day to day people on your projects.

C They're carrying them forward day to day, ex and they have all of that responsibility without a lot of authority, and we saw that stress really profoundly for that group.

D Expandly. So the other stressor we and this was this were we see this in our work with firms. That's also the age. So the majority of our respondents came from the places where architects are most are the most architects. So the 2 coasts, Texas, Chicago. Those are also the areas where financial stressors on architects are higher than for many professionals, and so we're dealing with that as well in that age group. That's the age group that Tends to maybe be having a family or tends to maybe be considering buying a house or settling down in a place. They're also living in some of the most expensive places, And I think that directly financials is a key component of wellness.

A A research effort that I really hope somebody invests in at some point is to look at the impact of the recession on that age demographic ex because anecdotally, I can't back this up by data, totally, but I would estimate about 30,000 graduates with NAB degrees ex were negatively impacted by the recession, and that had significant consequences on our field. And I think ex a lot of them left. And I wish I had the data to point to that there are so many fewer of us in the field than there could have been. Ex but I do think that that's one more pressure that firms are experiencing is that missing middle of the people that they need right at that point that can hold ex the middle ground on the project. That was my soapbox.

C I will.

A Get off of it.

D Don't tempt us. We are so tempted by soapboxes.

B I wanna do a dissect of, like, all of your findings and line them up ex With the future forum findings and even Slack's state of workplace because it's not it lines up. I don't know how else to say that. I am not ex A millennial, and I've said that multiple times on the podcast. So I'm mid forties now, so I fall outside of that. But ex I think across the board, middle managers are struggling the most because they're the ones that are stuck with managing these hybrid teams with extended expectations of the quality of work and things like that. We've just hit the architecture billings index where we're ex Billings are softening for the 3rd month in a row. Tuck just went through this giant layoff at the beginning of the year. So everyone's kind of doing more with less right now, so I think we're all we're all feeling a bit of that crunch right now.

C And I think generationally having you know, this is a group that lived through the recession or hid out in grad school during the recession and then entered the workplace during explore this is a generation that paid their dues, that worked really hard, and then a generation that said we're not gonna do that to the next generation. Ex and so often we hear from these people from people in the sage group that they're really trying to figure out how to manage expectations that are unchanged without perpetuating a destructive culture. I don't have great answers about how to fix it, but would love to dig into it.

B Ex What's interesting at what we do is because we just finished the our our global insights survey, our GIS survey at at Salesforce In the middle of announcing a CEO change, so that we'll be addressing for Slack. But another thing that we do is we narrow it down ex all of the responses by your your manager. So, right, like, how is your team in particular responding? Like, are you a manager that is building a certain, like, micro culture in your team that is at least in alignment versus versus the the bigger. And we don't do that in a way necessarily to ex the managers, but to understand which managers might need greater help through this to carry their team along. Ex I don't want this to be all doom and gloom, though. So I think, you know, Saskia, you talked a little bit about, like, what a healthy culture is. So is there ex What are some happy findings from this survey about what's being done well right now, even if it's not holistically? But, like, what what are the where ex pockets where things are being done well, and you see the greatest areas for improvement or greatest momentum for improvement.

D Well, like I started to say, healthy culture really focuses on 2 key things. Right? It focuses on alignment, and alignment means ex A culture where everyone can positively state that they know what the culture is, first of all, That they believe that the culture is the right one for the organization and that everyone in the organization demonstrates behavior that's in alignment culture. So that's what alignment means to us. Connectedness, which is the other important aspect of healthy culture, is ex Do you personally identify with the culture? This is the whole idea of belonging and inclusion. Is it a culture that you feel like you belong in? Ex And is it a culture of care? Remember, one of the big findings from the survey was that one of the things leaders can do to build healthy culture show that they care. I can't forget that I presented these findings to the Texas Society of Architects board, and somebody said, ex So I have to go hug everybody? And I said, no. You don't have to go hug everybody. That'd be weird.

D But I think just Asking people how they're doing and and meaning it and taking the time to just connect with everybody. Ex We're rushing. We're hybrid. We are on Slack or on Teams or we're, you know, we're not taking the time to really connect, and that's such a big part of it. So ex Where are firms doing it right? I think firms that are crystal clear on what their values are And not the values that are like collaboration and integrity. No. Not the baseline values. The real values that drive the organization, ex What you believe, what you fundamentally agree with each other are kind of standards of behavior.

D I think the firms that are really clear about that ex are doing better. I think the firms that where everything they do is in alignment with those values, Their policies, their social events, the way they communicate, the projects they go after, extir The way they structure their teams, the way the teams interact. I love that you said that, Evelyn, ex Because one of the things that Annalise and I emphasize over and over again with organizations is that The bulk of people's work experience is at the team level, and I think part of what's happening is ex The teams are not empowered in architecture to represent culture. The project managers in architecture aren't empowered to represent culture and to build culture within their teams. And then the final thing I think that firms ex That are doing a great job or doing well as their commute they're talking about culture. They're actually talking about values. They're actually Having ongoing dialogue with staff, with each other about what could we be doing better, what are we learning, and how could we be better. Ex It's that kind of humility of self exploration that is super important.

D But there are firms that are doing the hard work And I think are willing to explore it. And some of them are kind of unexpected, the firms that are doing really well in this.

C Can I add 1 more? Yeah. So so the last thing I wanna say about things that are going well or one thing I wanna say about things that are going well is that when we asked people. There was a a short response question that said, what is your firm doing really well right now to support your social and emotional well-being in the workplace? And by far in a way, the top response was offering flexibility, and and there are lots of different variations on that theme, everything from hybrid work to letting me work a a shifted schedule or a part time schedule, but ex People really appreciate the flexibility that's come out of the last few years. I mean, 2 thirds of our respondents were working in a hybrid fashion, and I think the median number of days in the week was 2 or 3 days a week. And so the world has shifted. And by and large, ex We saw that the number of days that somebody worked per week in the office had no impact on their well-being in the workplace. It had no impact ex On the relationships that they cultivated with their colleagues or how they saw their culture. And so I think that the reality is that people wanted this, and we've we've done it as an industry, and we're actually doing pretty well with it even if it can feel hard, especially at a leadership level because we have had to change rapidly.

C But I I think that it's let people become intentional.

D Yeah. I will say so you get to hear us have our own dialogue. But I will say that flexibility is great, but then as a leader, you have to model it. Saying that you're flexible and then having all the partners in your firm show up to work every day, that's not flexibility. You have to model the behavior. That's what I mean when I say alignment. Ex Everybody has to show demonstrate the value. So if your value is flexibility, it has to apply to everybody.

D And that's what happens when policy and culture aren't in alignment. Because I know a lot of firms right now say, Yeah. You know, we have a 3 day flexible policy, and all the partners are there Monday through Friday. Yep. I say you have to model it. If 3 days or what you are really encouraging to people to do, then you've gotta be there 3 days. Even though for you, it might be more comfortable to be in the office because now you're just saying, yeah. You can do that, but I don't really think it's Right idea.

D That's the implicit thing. It's a challenge. And I thinking back to something Evelyn said earlier about culture and, ex Right. Like, culture continued to exist. And I know Annalise has heard this quote a million times, but I'll never forget this moment at a SCUP conference where people were talking about explore. And this young woman stood up and said, you know, this was right after the end of the pandemic, and she stood up and she accept said, you know, my firm leaders make us come to work because of culture. And then I sit down, I put on my headphones, and I work on a Revit model all day. Show me where the culture is.

D So I would say to any firm leader, if you're saying people have to come back to work because of culture, ex Make sure that you're true to that.

B Absolutely. One of the craziest, most wonderful classes that I took at Slack ex By our own learning and development team with literally how to communicate in Slack. And I think, like, we always say hi, we always use an emoji, ex But it was just like letting everyone know what the Slack the internal Slack voice is, and how we communicate with each other. Ex And you can tell when somebody comes in new, and it looks a little bit more like an email, or like it's just like the seriousness, like, they get right to the point. And we're like, oh, they they haven't taken the the Slack. But we did those things because it means so much to the aggregation of who we are and how we all get there similarly.

C And one of my favorite things that we've been doing at Sheply in the last steer in a number of ways. I mean, thinking about our studio spaces and our virtual studio, which I'm a part of, meaning that I'm not near a physical office. We've done a bunch of exercises as a firm over the last year that are just about thinking about what our shared purpose is. What is it that we're all aiming towards and what are we becoming as a firm? And that time to reflect not just as a leadership team, but with everybody across the organization has been really powerful. As somebody who's only been there for a few years, it's given me a really profound sense of who the firm is and helped me feel good about things. Hopefully, it's done that for other people as well.

A Annalisa, from your experience working in architecture, are there any tips that you could give someone else who's managing a team to help younger professionals kinda find their purpose within this work. Because sometimes it just gets really overwhelming. Like, when you're in the slog of it. You're picking up red lines, and you lose sight of the bigger purpose. So what what are things that managers might be able to do or even firm leaders?

C You would have to talk to some of the people that I I have that relationship with because I I don't wanna assume that anything that I'm doing is working. I I will say that things that have worked for me and things that I hope work for other people, I take the time when I start working with somebody to ask them about their work experience, what they're hoping to get you know, where they're hoping to go and what they're hoping to get out of this particular work experience, whether we're gonna be working together for a couple of days or for all of years, and I think it's important to keep track of that and keep track of what their what kind of experience would be meaningful to them and try to try to get those experiences as you can and and give people stretch assignments. I think it also it's important to take the time not to just hand somebody a pile of red marks, to tell them why those red marks matter. I mean, architecture can feel, especially when you're first out of school, like somebody's just arbitrarily having to shift line weights and align things and blah blah blah blah blah. And if you don't know why that matters, it feels pretty bad. And then I I think there's also just demonstrating that you think the person matters beyond their ability to do those red marks for you. I mean, it's it's people that you're working with, so you have to get to know people and you have to figure out what makes them tick outside of work. And, you know, one of my early project managers, I mean, that was as simple as just talking about at the beginning of the year.

C Like, what are our goals for the year professionally and personally, and can we calendar some of that stuff and make sure that we're scheduling, you know, we're scheduling work around the life stuff that's important rather than expecting life to happen around work, and I think that it makes a huge difference, and it's a it's a tone shift on the team. In a virtual world, I think the last thing that really matters is, like, remember that there's not, you know, there's not the bumping into people when you get coffee or they're going out to lunch anymore. And so you have to save a couple of minutes on meetings to do that stuff because that stuff is some of where culture happens. It's it's showing what your shared expectations and beliefs are beyond the context of an a certain set of red marks or whatever it is that you're gonna be talking about that day.

A Yeah. I love that. I mean, it all centers back to communication. And I know for leaders, it can get particularly difficult when you're facing really monster challenges in your day to day with clients and construction sites or regulatory issues, but really taking the time to know your team and to create a safe environment for them to feel comfortable ex and that they're communicated with is so critical to make sure that the work is great and that the team feels supported. Ex I wanted to bring it back to the other piece of your work, which is about justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. And so I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about some of the systemic issues that support or hinder wellness in the workplace.

C So I think that it's important to know that architecture exists as Evelyn has said a couple of times during this episode in this broader world. And the reality is accept. We live in a world with systemic racism and systemic sexism. And there's actually profound research showing that just being a woman or being a person of color in the world is so stressful that it actually shortens our lives. Ex I know that that women actually live longer than men, but being a woman is actually a social determinant of health. It it actually increases your likelihood of of ex suffering certain conditions, especially autoimmune and stress related conditions. Just being black in the United states actually has been shown by social health researchers to to raise physiological stress levels and to to create sort of, increase one's likelihood of getting certain chronic conditions again because of just the chronic stress of living with living with bias and living with racism. And so we're operating within that context, and I think it's important as colleagues to know that these are not only do we have to check our own biases and do what we can to be inclusive within the environment, but I think we need to know ex that there is a broader context that we're operating in that that has profound impacts and to to be cognizant of that and to be curious about that and and to ask, I think always ask what we can do what we can do better to lighten that load and share it.

A To close, I mean, I could go on and on. I feel like there's so much talk about here, but just to bring it to a neat close. I wanted to discuss the need for additional creativity in the way we're thinking about designing and leading AEC practices. You state in the report, to comprehensively address these issues in a time of ongoing disruption, firm leaders will likely need to invest in holistic yet flexible action plans that align firm and team culture, organizational strategy, in work life policy and practices. I wanted to talk about this because I totally agree. I'm ready for new. Tell me tell me what you guys think.

D I think as an industry, overall, we haven't really thought about the that issue of alignment across every aspect of our organizations. We think that Culture is driven by the work rather than all the other behaviors and things that happen around the doing of the work. Ex But I will also say to kind of address our industry within a broader context, I think that we have to consider wellness ex Of the people that work for us at every scale, we have to think about them individually. We have to think about relational wellness, how we interact with each other in more inclusive, just ways that support psychological safety. We have to think about organizational wellness. What are we doing as Just the way we do the work to support individual wellness, I think it's a new idea for us. I think we come from a tradition of ex Apprenticeship and that doing whatever it takes equals excellence. You know, all these ideas that I think are outdated.

D Ex So that's 1. I think we have to learn to be more agile and experimental. Architects suffer from the need to have everything planned out perfectly before change happens, and other industries, I think, have shown a a willingness to to try stuff, to just try something. If it doesn't work, try something else. So agility and experimentation, I said, I think is something we need to treat it like a design problem ex and use our design thinking to think about our own cultures. I think we have to embrace both and thinking. I get a lot of response to the data that's like, well, you know, people want they want job descriptions, but they also want flexibility. And I'm like, uh-huh.

D Yes. They do. That's both and. You can actually have both and. We're not very good at that, and I think we could start to embrace that kind of thinking. And finally, ultimately, just always asking yourself, ex Is my culture is my culture of my team? Is the culture of my firm, whether it's 30 people or 1500 people, is it a place where ex Everybody feels that they're treated with respect, where everybody feels valued, where everybody feels connected, where everybody feels safe and secure. That doesn't mean that everybody feels like they're gonna stay in their job forever, but at least feeling secure knowing that they're gonna be Treated respectfully and with fairness and that everybody feels empowered. And, again, that doesn't mean everybody gets to design.

D It just means that everybody feels that they have a voice and that their voice will be heard. I mean, that's ex Ultimately, if we can get the industry to move in that direction, I think we'll see real change. At the end of the day, we're in a crisis point In terms of the number of architects entering the industry. I just recently learned that Texas is losing architects way faster than it's gaining them, ex And yet the population of Texas is is growing exponentially. So in a couple of years, there literally won't be enough people to do ex The work that is there and that is needed. So we have to find a way to attract people, to retain people, and to allow people to thrive in, You know, it's a great it's a great profession.

A Anything to add, Annalisa?

C I think Saskia said it. That's why I love working together.

A The last question I wanna ask in case anybody's wondering it is, can firms still participate in this survey or or not the survey, but at least the assessment piece if they wanted to.

D If, firms are interested in the assessment, they can certainly reach out to me or Annalisa. We can kind of talk about what the process would look like. This survey itself has been closed down, but we continue to do as culture assessments with firms, And we'd be happy to talk to folks about that. And Lisa might just reach through the thing and hurt me, but I would love to see a way to continue continue this survey, but I will say that like equity by design, which just started with a bunch of people doing it, ex A bunch of people can't do this. It's too much work. So we're exploring partnerships with AIA groups, other groups to figure out a way to continue this work because like equity by design, we think it could really be valuable for people to kind of understand where the levers of change are.

A Thank you both for being change agents and for leading the ex effort on all of this data. It's amazing to watch both of you have had such a profound impact on this industry. So thrilled you were able to come on the show today.

C Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having us. It's been so much fun to spend time together.

D Thanks, Janine. Your support's always so valuable, and I love what what you're doing and, you know, just giving a platform for people to speak out is great.

A Thank you.

D Shout out to leader Flo too.

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