Designing a Successful Hybrid Practice

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Li, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're diving into the evolving dynamics of the hybrid work model, a challenge many architecture firms face as they rethink what it means to be both flexible and connected in the workplace. Joining us are 3 exceptional leaders from Shepley Bullfinch, each bringing unique insights into designing a successful hybrid practice. First, we have Jen Zagarella, vice president of administration.

A Jen leads a diverse team dedicated to driving efficiency, innovation, and inclusion throughout the firm. Since 2014, she's championed continuous improvement, fostering a collaborative culture that bridges empathy and consensus across departments. Next, we're joined by Jim Martin, Sheply's vice president and CIO, who brings over 3 decades of experience in in information technology. Jim's expertise lies in strategizing the technology tools that enable design, collaboration, and delivery. With a strong foundation in architecture and a 6 sigma green belt, Jim knows the power of leveraging technology to streamline processes and enhance the design experience. Finally, we have Jim Chambers, vice president of practice management. In his role, Jim provides leadership on design performance, working closely with business operations to refine processes that elevate every aspect of Sheply's design practice. He's committed to ensuring that the firm standards and management and delivery remain at the forefront of practice innovation.

A Today, we'll explore their experiences navigating Shepley Bulfinch through the pandemic, the transitions they made to hybrid work, and how they're shaping Shepley's future with a balanced mix of flexibility and structure. Hello. Welcome to Practice Disruptive. Thank you all for finding the time to

B be here with me today. Yeah. Of course.

A So we'd like to kick it off with a little bit of an icebreaker, but also to help familiarize our listeners with who you are. So Jen, why don't we kick it off with you? Is there anything that you're excited about either personally or professionally coming up in the near future?

B Yeah. So I love to travel and explore new places and cultures and document all that through photography. So I try to take a big trip each year, and my next trip coming up is actually in Japan. This March, I have a friend running in the Tokyo marathon, so that's gonna be really exciting.

A Amazing. Have you been to Japan before?

B I have not. I've never been to Asia, so I'm really, really excited about it.

A How about you? Let's throw it over to Jim Martin. And we have 2 gyms on the show today. So how do you guys usually distinguish between yourselves?

C Well, it's usually not a problem for us because if we're referring to another gym, it's generally not us in our 3rd person. I'm Jim Martin. I am the the geek around here. So I look forward to technology stuff, and I think the the things that are coming out in AI is really interesting. And it's a really interesting time to try and figure out how value can be delivered in a safe and reliable way, and it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there. So I'm looking forward to the challenge of unraveling that and trying to make it do good things for us.

A Yeah. How about you, Jim Chambers?

D I love building things, so I'm looking forward to doing that around the house because like other architects, I am constantly tweaking our own home. But I'm also looking forward to building further building our hybrid practice and just getting stronger as a business.

A And thank you for that segue to the hybrid practice. That was perfect. You know? So, obviously, I'm super excited to have you all on here. I serve on the board at Shepley Bulfinch. And one of the reasons why I was excited to join the board of Shepley is because of your move to hybrid way of working. Who wants to jump in and talk to us about what it looks like to work at Sheply pre pandemic and what it looks like to work at Sheply currently?

D So I joined Sheply in 2007, obviously, pre pandemic. At that time, we were a single studio. So we're one office in Boston. We had a 180, a 190 people there. We practice fairly typically from our design perspective. We were all mostly in studio. There were people traveling periodically to project sites. On any given day, maybe 20% of us were were on the road.

D And then in 2010, we merged with MERS Project out in Phoenix, and so we began sort of our cross project, cross studio journey. Things changed a little bit then. There were a small number of teams that were staffed across office, but for the large for the most part, we were working out of 1 physical studio. But the the migration to cross studio work definitely started to happen then. And I think one of the other things that I would articulate about pre pandemic Shipley was sort of a culture that Carol Wedger, then president, built around us. She really worked from a place of trust. So she trusted all of the employees to be responsible with their time and to get the work done that they were expected to get get done and granted us a lot of flexibility with the ability to kinda work around and navigate our own lives as it relates to to work. At the time, there were definitely some people that worked remote, and they had all slightly different working hours that our our staff tended to start to learn how to do to work with.

A And if you don't mind me asking, what was the impetus for those individuals going remote?

D A lot of those individuals were really talented people that worked with Shepley prior to what drove them to relocate for for primary life reasons, and we really wanted to maintain to keep working with them and to have them on our teams. And so we sort of stretched at the time. We stretched our abilities to work with them virtually.

A And I don't know if anyone else wanted to pick up, but how did that continue to evolve?

B I would say that just off of what Jim was saying, what was important is that we had a transition in leadership during that time and Angela Watson, our new president, carried on those traditions of working with flexibility and really taking people's work life balance into consideration. So it was really important. Major changes can happen when you have a change in leadership, but it was really great to have that kind of smooth transition and and thinking.

A Was there ever a question of bringing people back after the evolution of what it took for you guys to work through the pandemic, or was there kind of a natural adaptation of how do we continue to adapt and move forward?

C It's interesting. I think in some ways, work from home during the pandemic was actually a better experience for a lot of people than what we were trying to do ahead of earlier, which was hybrid. We had a lot of people in one office and a few people in another office. We were starting to make kind of judgment calls about how we might configure things to make it the best possible experience for all the people who are working both in a physical office and the several people who are kind of satelliteting in from remote. Once we went work from home, a lot of things just got easier because the the magic of a single camera, a single face was crazy compared to what we were trying to do with point source video cameras and 18 people packed into a conference room. And if you're on the other end of that video conference, you had no idea whose lips were moving because there weren't enough pixels to show whose lips were moving. So unless you knew the person's voice, you had no idea who was talking. So that was a there were some things about it.

C They were like, oh, this solves so many of the problems we've been banging our heads against. So when we decided, you know, okay. Well, we can make a go at this. It really came down to how do we keep the things that are working better now and do the things that were not working as well before better now that everyone has a little more empathy for what everyone else is kind of experiencing and going through. Because if you were in the Boston office at in 2,000 18, you just went into a conference room and you were talking to your colleagues that were sitting around the table with you, and sometimes you were not as clear about the experience the people on the other end of the video conferencing system was having. And once everyone was kind of locked into little boxes in teams in our case, people got a lot more a lot more experience that they could use to bring to bear on, oh, what is everyone else experiencing on this? Oh, I should do this instead. Oh, okay. Here's all the things that annoy me.

C I'm gonna make sure not to do that to other people.

A As an introvert, I have to say, and I don't think this often gets talked about enough is I really enjoy the chat aspect, and like Teams or Zoom or other virtual meeting conference room settings. Because I feel like it gave me another outlet that I was more comfortable engaging in, especially if the room was full of 10 people who are, like, superior to me. And I'm afraid to vocalize the question out loud, but I'm less afraid to type it into a window.

C It's a way to be heard without interrupting.

A Yes. Absolutely.

C Yeah. Our town halls that we run every other week are our chats are sometimes hilarious, insane, and crazy, and amazing. We'll typically do an icebreaker. In fact, this week was what was what was your favorite thing you did over the summer? Include photos if possible. And we ended up getting probably 30 or 50 photos of random things and some of the really cool stuff that you get to see people do without really knowing ahead of time that that was a thing that they we weren't thinking about.

A So I want to back it up just a little bit. So, obviously, you were in multiple offices prior to the pandemic hitting. What was some of the really quick decisions that you had to make for everyone to work remote from from home, like, even around hardware, for instance, that, like, everyone might not have been equipped with?

B I was just gonna say, I I think there were some things that were really easy for us in the transition and some things that were, you know, a little bit more challenging and maybe still are challenging. So as Jim had mentioned earlier, we already had a really strong foundation of leading with trust, and we had a lot of practice collaborating with each other from afar. And the more we evolved into our nationally distributed practice over the years, we gained a lot of experience, you know, breaking down those geographical boundaries and really building bridges to tap into our national expertise. So I'd say those two things had a major impact on setting us up for maybe a smoother transition, but, you know, we're not perfect either. So I think for us, consistent, equitable, hybrid meetings are something that we're still trying to figure out, you know, as Jim Martin was saying. We do it really well on the smaller scale, but we're still trying a lot of things to improve the quality of our larger meetings. So, really, like, the ultimate goal is to provide an equitable experience for both people that are in person and joining virtually. So it's it's an experiment that we're we're still working on.

C In some ways, we are pretty fortunate. Sheply has been on laptops since, like, 2010 or something before I even showed up at the firm. And having a population of people that was used to managing the mobility of a laptop once work from home started in 2020, that that was really helpful. It is from an IT perspective, it is amazing not to have to answer any questions about how to join a Teams call anymore. That was something that routinely happened before everyone went from home and started getting the daily practice of how to kind of configure your things and get all your stuff working and all the rest of that fun stuff. The biggest change I think that we made is, you know, how do you use Revit as our primary tool for production when everyone is geographically spread out everywhere? And in 2020, late 2020, we ended up migrating all of our infrastructure to Azure. So everything we have is in the cloud now. Part of that was accelerated by we were losing our lease our lease was up in 2021 in Boston, and that's where our data center was for the company.

C So we didn't know where we wanted it, but we figured it would be better to put it somewhere else where we could point generally its location, but wouldn't have to worry about moving it if we had to. So we, through an enormous amount of effort by some of the folks on the IT team, put together, you know, cloud desktops for everyone. So just rolling our own stuff, building the cloud desktops, and then everyone uses their laptop, remotes into the cloud desktop, does all their their work on a daily basis, and then logs off when they're done, rinse to repeat. The other thing that was nice is that we had a lot of confusion around data living in multiple offices. We had 5 offices, and every office is like, oh, our data is on the p drive. And we thought it was helping people to to name the the the project folder consistently across multiple offices. But as soon as you're working on a cross office project, it's like, oh, that's the Phoenix p driver. That's the Houston p driver.

C That's the Hartford p drive. And it got very confusing. So we took that opportunity also to consolidate all of our data. So every we just have one p drive now, and it's just the place where you go to find any project for Shepley, and it's really brought the company much more together as a whole entity rather than a bunch of you don't feel the fractional kind of, oh, this is this office, this is this office, this office reinforced by the technology. I think it's helped us a lot kind of get closer as a company together and feel more connected to each other rather than the physical space that we're going to on a daily basis.

A And this is a question that I didn't necessarily prop for, but I we have a lot of firm leaders that tend to listen into the podcast. What does that do, the move from a physical server to the cloud? And even well, I know Jim Martin, you said that they everyone was on laptops previously. But what has your tech budget spend, like, look like over time as you have to take on more of these? Is it is it relatively the equivalent? You're swapping one for another? Or or how has the firm had to think differently about how that plays into the larger finances?

C Yeah. It it is my tech budget has gone up, not, like, doubled or tripled, but it is definitely more. When you go into the cloud, you're basically renting someone else's hardware, and you're using their infrastructure. And in some cases, their infrastructure is better than ours, which is great, so there's added value there. But, you know, we're we're basically using what we what we use. It's kinda like, you know, if you have got solar on your roof, then you're generating your own power. But if you've gotta go buy power from the from the grid, then you're buying their power generation infrastructure. So for us, we could certainly buy servers and storage and all the rest of that fun stuff and keep it for longer and make it last more from a budget perspective.

C But now we basically just use what we need. And as the firm's needs change, we use more or less of it, and we, you know, find ourselves in a lot more parity with the firm's needs and the costs that we actually have. But it is not less expensive to go to the cloud. It's just way more flexible.

A So what does hybrid look like now? I mean, you have some people that were remote. You had some people before the pandemic that were remote. But what is when you talk about hybrid, what does it look like for somebody in California where you don't have an office to work for Shopley, or what does it look like for somebody who is near one of your offices to to go in potentially on a more regular basis?

B I think it's important to clarify our definition of hybrid because I think it means something different for everybody. So for us, hybrid means a combination of in person and remote. It's not one or the other. It's really a partnership of both. So our version of hybrid doesn't mandate any days in our offices, and the strategy behind that early is to provide every employee with an equitable experience. We're trying to give people the ability to work effectively and generate quality work from a wide range of physical locations. So that could be your home, that could be one of our offices, it could be a job site. But in some cases, our offices are the best place to work effectively.

B So all of our locations are open and available for anybody to use at any time, but we also have established expectations around hybrid by developing a hybrid vision. So we are giving individuals and teams the autonomy to make choices, but we still expect people to be present when it makes sense. And really just kind of circling back to that leading with trust, and and we've really found success in that. We've also been able to save finances in certain areas of, like, our leases, you know, for some of our locations. And so we've allocated a lot of that money to providing a cross office travel fund. And so, basically, we are giving people and teams the ability to gather when it makes sense and really kind of just be present when we have a client meeting or if a team needs to gather and have a workshop or at those critical points in the project when it really makes the most sense to be in person. So we're funding that so the the projects don't take a a hit there. So I think we're still trying to find some creative ways to to manage some of that, but I think that's that's the gist of how we're working.

A How do you guys just, you know, the workplace strategy historically workplace strategy in the Visual and Me then, like, wants to ask, how are you guys deciding what size your offices need to be going forward and and what they look like from a spatial perspective?

D We actually have been tracking usage rate of all of our studio spaces, so that is one point of information that we use. We also we underwent a what we call our studio visioning strategy workshop a couple years ago, with our entire firm and mapped out a a lot of the needs and aspirations that people had for our studio spaces. So some of that dictates that we want collaboration spaces of multiple scales, phone booths, or quiet spaces for individual work, that kind of stuff. So we kinda triangulate that based on the local region's historical use rate of studio spaces along with what the additional spaces that we would want as a design firm to have to come up with sort of a compromised square footage. It has certainly reduced from pre pandemic based on just the sheer number of people that are now in our studio versus what was before. But there's there's a little bit of a judgment call on how many of our people do we wanna accommodate at any given time. We also think about what are the events that we might wanna encourage and and be capable of hosting. So if there's a community space or community event that we wanna host, we'll we'll consider how big that that might be and what kind of space we would need to allocate for that.

A One of the biggest struggles I hear from principals then is how do you train or how do you edge like, what's the education mentoring process when you can't you you know, when a person can't just walk over to your desk? Although I have to say, in every instance where I was trying to hunt down a partner in my firm, they were usually on a construction site. So even when we were all in person, I had problems hunting people down. But, you know, I I feel like that's a common theme. You know, how how do you train the next generation of architects if especially if your your leaders aren't showing up to the office and the younger generation is?

D I think what we've seen from the younger generation is they're more apt to reach out virtually than maybe maybe in person. I know that, historically, architecture has been kind of a lean over to the person next to you business and ask the question. We have done a lot of work to try to communicate and remind people that if you're working in that manner, you have 2 options. Whoever's sitting next to you to the left or whoever's sitting next to you on the right. Oversimplified. But in a virtual world, you have the entire organization that you can ask a question of. So we have a on our internal Internet, we have a hashtag that we use and a posting method that we use to ask questions, and we really encourage people to ask the questions. Don't worry about it coming off as too simple, but and then we'll backchannel and really drive for people to address those questions.

D It's really interesting because a lot of the questions that get asked, there's not one true perfect answer. And so asking it in the social Internet our internal Internet allows for multiple perspectives to weigh in to talk about the pros and cons of doing the things one way or the other.

C So the problem mentoring is has not ever been not a problem for us. As soon as we decide to have multiple offices, someone who whose ideal mentor is in another studio, you know, same problem existed. And I think, honestly, the biggest problem these days for mentoring is how busy everyone is and how our calendars seem to have gotten completely filled up by these little one hour meetings of random things. There have been several people who have started to make an effort to make meetings 45 minutes or 25 minutes or whatever and kind of not fill up the entire block and leave up some time for people to just reach out and and say hi. We've also got some people who leave office hours on their calendars specifically for people to kinda remote in, And we've also got people who are doing things like, coffee coffee chats and other things. So I think the opportunistic, oh, hey. I'm not doing anything important right now, and that person seems to be not doing anything important right now. You know, those maybe don't exist so much anymore.

C But if you make intentional processes to allow people to connect with others and make sure that they understand that it's desirable for them to do so and not an imposition, that goes a long way.

A What is your technology stack when it comes to collaborating with one another? So obviously, teams, are there any other things, you know, a lot of firms have you moved to MURAL or MURO? You know, what are what are the things are you guys using to kind of build in that collaboration and and shredding experience into the virtual environment?

C Yeah. I would say we have a healthy addiction to MURO. We use it a lot for a lot of different things. I am frankly very concerned if we ever stop using Miro because I have no idea how we will extract all of the information that's in it. But that actually has been really effective because that's that's allowing us to communicate visually in a way that we are all very comfortable and very much replicates, you know, the the pinup board, which, you know, if you're a multi office firm, you know, back before we went work from home and we started using Miro for everything for doing this sort of collaborative pin up stuff, there was no good way of actually replicating that experience for anyone who happened to be not in the office at that moment to experience that particular wall with all those pins in it. So, again, it was one of those things that the way that we're doing it now is very much more effective. It may not be as satisfying for some, but it is more effective because it allows us to have artifacts of the process built in. You don't have to remember to take a picture of the whiteboard.

C And then where's that picture? It's all just kind of in a place, and you're able to pin that into teams. So it's a part of the team's sort of record, and anyone who joins a team at some point can go back and kind of see the history of the evolution of the project over time. So Teams and Miro, I think, are are definitely 2 of the most key, pieces of technology that we use and have really helped teams kinda come together and have a digital workspace that works for all the people who need it regardless of where they physically are located.

A Yes. I think we so often forget, especially when I worked in a smaller office, that the lack of wall space and pinup space was always an issue, even in person, right? If you're working on enough projects, there's just not enough walls. So I agree. You know, new tools are coming online all the time, though. Is there a culture of experimentation? And how do you kind of continue to evolve what working in this environment looks like at Sheply?

C We do a lot of experimentation. We've done a lot of experimentation with VR, with VR collaboration tools, with, you know, all kinds of other stuff, anything that we can kind of think of. We get we get little tablets for folks so that they can draw on things. We were initially thinking, oh, our laptops, you can draw on those. That's fine. But when the camera is on the surface that you're drawing on, it gets a little bit shaky, for anyone on the other end, and people are less likely to be impressed with the architecture if they're trying not to blow chunks. So getting an external tablet to allow people to kind of sketch at the same time as they're making eye contact with other people in the team or our clients was kind of key. And that was something we're like, alright.

C Well, let's try this out, see if it fix fixes that problem and ended up being great. And so we'll just make that available to anyone in the firm who needs one if they need to draw, and they're gonna be remote primarily. Other things like, we've got some interesting things with collaboration and things with VR, and it's got some legs, but I think the hardware just needs some more time to bake even with some of the newer stuff that's kind of out at the moment. It just isn't quite good enough to be able to collaborate with, I think, in a kind of cocreating environment of geometry. So we're keeping a close eye on it, checking out the new stuff whenever it comes out, and seeing if anything changes. We have a tendency to experiment quite a lot, kind of find out if it is great, then we'll adopt it as quickly as we can. And if it isn't, try and anticipate what would need to change in order for it to be great So we can look out for things that might happen in the world that might change the equation for us.

A I was looking through the website, and you do and Shepley does obviously have a few job openings posted or open recs posted to the job board. They're all seem to be location based, but I have been on there previously where they actually indicate, like, remote or more broadly. How does the firm make decisions about its needs and its need to be based in a specific location?

D Generally, those are driven by the project work, the ongoing project work that we have near to one of our studios. So it's a client kinda working with, the needs of a clientele particularly. And then also, we do place a lot of emphasis on trying to find work within our local communities so that we can kinda play a role in in shaping those communities. And to do those, having people that are familiar with that that community itself, is important and helpful in the long run. So we try to maintain a balance of what we call a critical mass in in each of those locations. And if we find that we need a specific scale in a specific location, then we'll we'll pull that trigger and look for that higher. But a lot of times, we have seen the success in being able to build our teams just nationally from wherever. And so if we think that it's more of a translatable skill that can kinda move anywhere within any of our project locations, that's when we would look for, like, a hybrid hire.

A Jen, you talked a little bit about how you how some cost savings from offices and other areas went to bringing people together more often.

C Mhmm.

A I found that a lot of lesser so in architects, but at least when I was definitely in tech, you know, the managers are used to running structured meetings. But I think now that when you're bringing these people together, it's more about team bonding and even exercises and empathy, and not everyone is necessarily trained to run those type of meetings. So how do you all work to facilitate more meaningful interactions when you do bring everyone together?

B Yeah. So we tried again, we are we have a culture of experimentation, so we tried a lot of things. So some of our teams were doing daily 15 minute huddles, and that could have been just to check-in on people's mental health. It could be to see what people were struggling with, and really just trying to figure out how we can support one another. And then we also were trying to find new and creative ways to continue to have fun together. I mean, that's really important to us to be able to stay connected in that kind of way as well. And so we were doing virtual celebrations and for personal and project milestones, we have gone all in on icebreakers, like Jim had mentioned about our town halls to start pretty much all of our meetings. And then, again, introducing the the town halls and and kind of staying with that format.

B And most of those things have stuck and turned into changes in the way that we manage and communicate our communicate with our people. But one of my favorite tactics for building empathy is doing persona work. So as we were trying to make some critical decisions, we had a firm wide virtual workshop. We asked people to build a team of fictional employees, but using real life experiences that we actually gathered from the employee surveys that we were putting out there. So the only catch was that you couldn't build yourself. So it was a great way for individuals to really, like, step outside of themselves, out of their own experiences, and also give insight into for us to help think about how we manage our teams and how we can start to think ahead about challenges that people, might be facing within the teams. So persona work really is one of my favorite tactics to really build empathy and and and gain consensus in a way.

C One thing for any managers who are trying to do this kind of kind of team building focused meeting, avoid at all costs packing the agenda with content. Early mistake I personally made when we did our one of our geek retreats is I was like, we've got everyone here. We have to make sure that they're they've got lots to do. And I simply did not leave enough time in the agenda for people to chat and make up that social connections and simple fabrics that was the whole point of bringing everyone together. So every subsequent opportunity I had to bring teams together is like, okay. Make sure that there's enough gaps in there. We will not run out of content to talk about. So don't try and force it to happen.

A I'm definitely an over planner even when it comes to my kids. So I appreciate I appreciate that lesson. I I've similarly had to learn that lesson.

C I don't know if I've learned it, but I remember it. Take it as you can get.

A So one question that I had, you know, what we did, the the way you you use the same structure that we did at Slack, maybe the semantics and what you call things are a little bit different. You know, we had guidelines or guardrails that we kind of put up at the the company level, and then we left it to the team and individuals to kind of figure out how to work within one another. Is that become kind of a the process that happens now during a new project kickoff when a new team is introduced to to one another? How do you build it into the culture and the process that happens, like, if I'm a new project manager that's coming to Sheply from another firm?

D We've actually we have developed a sort of a standard list of questions that we ask teams to go through, leaning into our, I guess, healthy addiction to Miro that Jim described. 1 of the it's actually put together as a Miro board so we can have teams just copy paste duplicate it from themselves, and it'll lead them through the the conversations that we have historically found to be really important to talk about. What are your what are your outside work conflicts? What are your travel restrictions? What's your preferences for communication? Those sort of things. So trying to leave less of that to relying on the experience of a particular project manager and trying to really provide people with a better starting point, more comprehensive starting point to lead those conversations. We try to to build a lot of templates and tools that are available when needed and not necessarily when we're around to provide them. That template for questions to ask is a perfect example that whenever somebody joins, we can kinda hand them a little mini toolkit of of tools to use when working with their hybrid team. The fact that it's used and kind of expected on multiple project teams also helps new people to the organization understand, like, this is something that we typically do. And the one of the things that the using it as a Miro template has allowed us to do is to keep it as an artifact.

D So you may do the exercise when the team first starts, and there might be 10 and 12 people that run through the exercise together. But a year goes by and you have a new person join the project team, they can easily pop into that board, see the history of the conversation, challenge things, or raise other questions that they might wanna talk about.

A And then I guess, given to that point, how do you let them know that they're allowed to challenge those things? Is that ingrained into the culture? Because I feel like especially for a lot of younger people that come into that type of environment, unless you encourage them to to ask the questions, they may not feel ready to to ask those questions.

D Yeah. I would say even if you encourage them, they're not ready to ask those questions. I think they have to kinda see it in action. I think the culture that we have both in the town halls as well as on our internal Internet, it's it's pretty often that somebody challenges something or asks a a semi tough question or even tough question. So I would like to think that seeing that type of behavior in action encourages and sort of authorizes new employees and emerging professionals to take the same approach.

C One of the things that's nice about having the documentation of those decisions of agreed upon behaviors and and rules for the project is any new person that comes in can kind of see what that is, then understand, does that work for me or do we need to have a conversation about, oh, well, this doesn't really work for me. Is there any way we can find some accommodation so that it can work for me? And those conversations are upfront and theoretical as opposed to in the moment in an emerging situation where someone's losing something. So the documentation is really helpful because so much unsaid stuff leads to so many unpleasant conversations. So the more you can kind of daylight whatever expectations are and it's not just everyone who comes onto a project gets to do whatever they want. It's everyone who comes onto a project can start to figure out where there's gonna be conflict that is foreseeable and start to figure out how to address it. And where can everyone find compromise nor allow everyone to be successful in this a little bit chaotic kind of everyone is gonna be working from wherever that they happen to be, which maybe at a client site, maybe at a different client site, maybe at a train station, maybe in an airport, maybe at their home, maybe a library. Who knows? It's wherever they're gonna be.

A And I appreciate the openness. I I mean, it may be obvious, but for somebody who, for instance, is dealing with the sandwich generation and the arrangements around needing to be home, depending on what's going on with my parents' home being Los Angeles, New Mexico as opposed to Bay Area, California, it becomes even nice for not only the new individuals coming into that team, but for long time standing team members who just have changing family dynamics or personal dynamics to be able to say, like, I have this coming up, how do how do we continue to work? So we've talked a lot about how the culture of Shepley has made it and and asking questions, I think, has made it easier to work within the hybrid model. Is there anything that has come out of the hybrid model that has kind of informed the culture or or helped how Chef Lee thinks about its culture going forward?

D I think our hybrid model has helped to really reinforce and, in some ways, formally articulate the the flexibility and the trust that we place into our people. It's helped us to be able to hire people that just don't happen to be close to one of our studios. It's actually, in a few cases, allowed us to bring people back that we were sad to lose. But now that we're capable and comfortable working in a different different manner, we can we can bring them back. I think it has ultimately resulted in a lot of goodwill and trust and and it has, again, reinforced the culture that we have long driven or strove to to be. A lot of trust and a lot of, I guess, leeway and, grace to give to each other and expect that people are gonna follow through on their their promises, and they might not have a you know, there there might be unpredictabilities along the way, but in the end, we all kinda trust that we're gonna be able to deliver the product that we are saying that we're gonna be able to do.

A Now you guys have taken the show on the road a little bit, and I'm sure you've talked to other firm or you've been in around other firm leaders who are still struggling with with what this looks like. You know, I've I've asked some questions about what I hear regarding training new people. What are other similar questions that you hear from leaders are struggling with with how they structure their return to office or hybrid models, and how do you respond to them?

C Yeah. It's it's interesting. I think, ours is a generational firm. Nobody at Shepley Bulfinch has been here for the entire 150 years of our existence. And I think the leaders of the firm, at least for as long as I've been around, have been very concerned with the stewardship. And the people of our firm make up the firm. It's not a 1 or 2 people whose name is on the door makes up the firm. So I think we have a tendency to be a little bit more interested in not only listening, but actually acting on what we are hearing from our people.

C And that's one of the reasons why we decided hybrid was the way that we were gonna go. We were hearing a lot of that from a lot of our people. But we're also not homogeneous. So different people have different opinions about what they would like to see, and some people are getting an experience that they're not so happy with and other people are ecstatic. And because we're made up of people, that is always gonna be the case. For us, for the firm that we are right now, hybrid seems to be the way to go. It's doing all the things that we needed to do. Our work is great.

C Our people seem to be happy. And I don't know if it's the right move for everyone, but we're also only 3 or 4 years into the journey of figuring out how to do work this way. We had a 140 odd years of doing work in the old traditional way of leaning over desks and providing crits in person and dealing with body odor and other things that are maybe less less awesome about that particular part of the process. But we're still gonna keep experimenting, and there are still things that just have friction or aren't quite as great as we want them to be. I can tell you that I feel like my personal bugaboo for the rest of my career is gonna be how to create an equitable hybrid meeting where there's a lot of people in one space and a lot of people who are remoting into that space and how to make that not suck for anyone. Still working on it. That is something we're gonna be fussing with for a while until we get it right. But there's lots of other things that we have policies in the business that are deeply rooted in the way we used to work and haven't been reviewed about the way we are working now.

C So we're just gonna keep looking at those things as they come up and addressing them and trying to figure out how we can make them better and experiment. And the more our people get used to what has worked for them in this new way of working and share those things around with other folks so they can live vicariously through their learnings, I think the better off we're gonna be. And we're gonna get really, really good at it as time goes.

B I would just say the common theme that you already brought up was the mentorship, but I truly believe we're not alone in saying in saying that mentorship has always been challenging. And I think that we need to challenge ourselves as leaders not only to think about how are we going to train the next generations, but we have to be humble ourselves because I think there's a lot that the next generations can teach us as well. And so whether it's a discomfort with technology and and helping you feel more comfortable and thinking different ways. I just I think there's just this realization and vulnerability that we've all been kind of forced into that is showing up in different ways. So I just think staying humble and just finding ways to support each other.

D I feel good. It's also interesting. It's reminding me of another thing that was actually written into our hybrid vision, which was sort of twofold things. Number 1, share your experiences and what you've done to help combat a particular issue. And number 2, to speak up if you feel like you're having an inequitable experience. And I think both of those things, to Jen's point, leadership being humble and open to new ideas, to challenging the way the the things are working now and have been in the past, I think, is is really important.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture.com slash podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h, we'd love to hear from you. So feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.