Work for What's Next: ThinkLab's Amanda Schneider on the 10 Shifts Reshaping Practice

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast exploring how architects can build better businesses, embrace emerging technology, and create more sustainable, fulfilling practices. I'm your host Evelyn Lee, architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or reimagining what's possible, this podcast challenges you to think differently about the future of architecture. This episode is brought to you by Gilt Firm Owners. Are you overpaying on taxes? I use gilt for my business and saved over 10,000 in year one. Visit joing.com and mention practice of architecture for 10% off your first year. Hello Disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of practice disrupted.

A Season 12 has spent a lot of time asking whether the architecture profession is actually changing or just getting more fluent at describing why it can't. The tension shows up everywhere in how firms build culture and how mentorship travels across generations, and whether the people coming into the profession are problems to manage or or signals worth paying attention to. Today's guest has been studying that question from the outside, and the answers she's found are uncomfortable in the best way possible. Amanda Schneider is the founder and president of ThinkLab, the only market research company wholly focused on the built environment. She describes herself as a designer by degree, a journalist by accident, and a researcher by choice. That path took her from product design to the Huffington Post to building a company that she eventually sold to Sandow, the parent company of Interior Design magazine and Metropolis thinklabs. Gen Z Research went viral in Forbes, landed as the number one article in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2024, and became the foundation for a TEDx talk that now has crossed half a million views on Ted.com and then she wrote a book. Work for Web Snacks comes out in May, and its argument is simple and hard to argue with.

A Workplace culture is failing. Gen Z can see why, and if we're willing to use them as a prototype rather than a problem, there's a better version of practice available to all of us. Let's dive into it.

B Thank you, Amanda for joining us this week on Practice Disruptive. I'm so grateful to have you here on your vacation. No us.

C I'm super excited to be here and calling in today from Duke University, where I'm college hunting with my oldest son.

B For people that may not know you on the podcast, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you're doing right now for sure.

C So a really fun way to summarize my path. I like to say I'm a designer by degree, a journalist by accident, and a researcher by choice. So fun, memorable little line for cocktail parties. But the short story is I started in product design and it was fascinating to me to really kind of explore the semantics of how people interact with product even when the designer is not there to tell them how to use it, kind of how do they naturally perceive and work with that product. As I progressed in my career, which is a long and funny story, I stumbled into journalism. So I would say I was a journalist by accident. I stumbled into becoming a blogger for the Huffington Post Post, where I really found my passion around the future of work. That's where I started writing a lot about that.

C It's the largest sector of the design industry, according to our research on the interior design giants of design. So I, you know, spent a lot of time blogging about that to the general public, not just our industry, which gave me an interesting perspective to see what people reacted to. And then I like to say I'm a researcher by choice as I look back at my path as it's kind of developed. Hindsight's always 20 20. My true passion around design is really in the research behind the design, understanding the why, seeing the things you can't unsee, and really learning from those semantics, how people react with space, how people interact with product, and how those things come together. So designer by degree, journalist by accident, researcher by choice. And I'll say this is my first fun tip I'll leave your listeners with. I know you love to leave them with.

C Practical advice is think about your own little tagline like this, because it's a great way to be a bit more memorable at cocktail parties and help people kind of understand the context of where your passions come from.

B So you kind of alluded to the work that you're doing. And before we get to the book that is releasing in May, why don't you tell us a little bit about ThinkLab and where it's at right now.

C Sure. So ThinkLab is the only research, market research company that is wholly focused on the built environment. So interesting little niche. I actually started the company in 2011. I sold it to Sandow in 2018. Sandow is the parent company to interior design magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Design Milk. There's just more that we're adding to the Sandow family of brands every day. Material bank is also from the same founder.

C And so my job as the research division is really to leverage their reach to the world of architecture and design to kind of study what's changing and help product brands stay ahead so we've been part of the Sandow family of brands for the past seven years and our goal in those seven years has really been to scale. And I think the interesting thing about not only being the founder, but now having lived through seven years of scaling it as part of a larger entity is really looking at how the messages and the work that we're doing in this industry are resonating not only with our industry, but really beyond our industry. And I think potentially giving our industry a bigger voice in a lot of the really important things happening in the world right now.

B I think there's so many different directions I could just take that in Beyond Work for what's Next. But thank you for that little overview. I was like, I think I need to bring Amanda on for four more episodes at least. But I want to focus on a book that you have coming out called Work for what's Next. Do you want to do a quick cap of that before we dive into it?

C Yeah, let's definitely dive into that because I think it really builds on what I just said about building and scaling this business. We had an incredible consultant that was with ThinkLab for just over a year, but she was just a ball of energy. And we were doing some work for the industry, specifically on architecture and design firms around building culture in this post pandemic era. And that research ended up really diving into Gen Z. Gen Z is the first digital first generation. They have been raised, you know, entirely in a world where we have to work digital first. The earliest of Gen Z kind of graduated just right before the pandemic hit. So they would have graduated maybe six months to a year before assuming traditional college path.

C Right. And so we did a year long research study really looking at how Gen Z was affecting specifically the interiors industry. Well, that consultant really said, Amanda, I think that there's more to this than just talking to our industry. And so we submitted an article to Forbes. It went viral. We followed that with a article to MIT Sloan Management Review, which was the number one article in July of 2024 in the MIT Sloan Management Review. So then I was like, okay, well this is gaining traction. Let me see what we could do.

C So I've always wanted to do it. TedX talk. So I did a TedX talk and it was part of the less than 1% pulled to the Ted stage. So it's now on Ted.com has a little over 500,000 views, a little over half a million views, which is really incredible on ted. And so as each of these things happened, I thought okay. This has a much, much broader audience. So we have been building on that original Gen Z research the whole time through all of these kind of steps into the broader world beyond design. And I've also always wanted to write a book.

C So I thought, okay, let's put this into a book and really reframe it. And it's been a fast and furious process. The book will be out in May of 2026. But super excited to kind of share with the world, you know, some really foundational research that was built around Gen Z, around this industry, but also really applies to a lot of our clients and the main things that they're struggling through right now. So the title of the book is Work for what's Next why Workplace Culture Is Failing and How the Next Generation Can Fix It. So important context for the book is the book is really around why workplace culture is so hard to build right now. But it's built around the business challenges of building that culture and maintaining businesses that are profitable and sustainable for their people and keeping your best talent. And it's not really about Gen Z yet.

C It's all about Gen Z, because Gen Z becomes the lens by which we look at what's changing and clues for what's happening next. We like to say prototypes, not stereotypes. We're looking at Gen Z to help us really prototype work for what's next. Right. When you prototype something in the design world, you keep what works and you iterate on the aspects that don't. And so the book is really an invitation both for our industry and anyone else in any other industry to start to prototype this digital first working world that we're in. It is not an argument against physical space. Quite the contrary.

C I think as we're freed up from physical space space, it makes more pressure on that physical space to perform. But we can't fix a how problem with a wear solution. And I think that, you know, as we look at what's happening in the world of work today, that's a lot

B of what's happening, right? And coming from Slack and being working so closely with the Future of Work crew, this obviously resonates with me a lot. It's interesting that you say it's not about necessarily about Gen Z, but it is looking at this lens through Gen Z. And I think there's like kind of an important distinction there because I think our initial reaction when we're looking at how do we work across generations is in a way, you know, the counter statement to that is we are in a workplace now that has More generations than ever. So why focus on Gen Z so deeply?

C So the interesting thing about our research may be different than most generational research is we look across all generations in the workforce, we really focus on four, although there are more at either that we could kind of talk about. So we look at boomers, we look at Gen X, my generation, we look at millennials, and we look at Gen Z. So all of our data really spans across generations. And we know from other research that we're doing in other studies, other areas that we've been doing as we've kind of built what became Think Lab, that we do see differences across generations and we believe that it would kind of give us what we called arrows to our future as a researcher. We love that picture bar charts that are short on one end and gradually stack up and get taller on the other end that give. You could put an arrow across the top of them and say this is probably where we're headed. And we did find a lot of those in the data. We share a lot of that data in the book.

C We also found that the pendulum is swinging in many cases. Millennials are actually the most extreme, especially when it comes to being very digital forward and wanting less face to face connection and things like that. So I think that in a weird way, although we're really pushing towards Gen Z as these prototypes and this fresh viewpoint, it's also interesting to see there's something we talk about in the book called the Boomer ification of Gen Z. Because Gen Z actually in some of their preferences in survey data, which is really, really important, in some of their preferences, they actually align more closely with boomers or Gen X than even their predecessors, the millennials. So I think a lot of people look at this data and they're like, yes, like we finally got a good one. We got a good generation that's going to think like us. But when you dig behind that survey data, you know, we, we have statistics, you may have heard this one from the TED Talk, that Gen Z is actually least likely to want to be in the office five days a week. They're also least likely to want to be five days fully remote.

C Right. They're somewhere in between. However, they still do not want to be told to show up, just to be there, just to be on zoom in another place. And that is a lot of the frustration that we're kind of seeing and that we're having. So I think first of all, just to kind of COVID that generational pattern that we're looking across all generations. But you asked, why should we care about this? Why should we be concerned? Well, again, the foundations of this research was in our industry, in architecture and interior design practices. And what was happening at the time that we were responding to in our research is a lot of these firm leaders were saying, it is really hard to build culture today. It's really hard to keep everyone cohesive, coming out of the pandemic and figure out in this maybe increasingly hybrid world, even if you're back in the office five days a week, you're still collaborating with other regions, other offices, clients that aren't always going to fly in the way that they used to.

C Maybe 10 years ago, they were saying, it's really hard. This hybrid world is hard. So we asked all four generations in our research, what's the hardest part of working in a hybrid world? And the most interesting aha from that is that twice as many Gen Z said trust is the biggest issue. So it was about a quarter of Gen Z said trust is the biggest challenge, where only about 12% of baby boomers say that. And it was a really clear pattern in the data across four generations. You can see that growing. So what that tells me is there is this growing trust gap, and that is going to be a big business impact. Again, we talk about business challenges.

C You want loyalty, you want culture, to create culture, you need time together, you want them to show up, to get them to want to show up, they have to like working there. All of these things are kind of linked. And so I see a growing trust gap. And if we don't address this growing trust gap, businesses in our industry and beyond are going to have talent pipeline crises. And I think that that's getting more extreme, not less.

B I think it's also important to frame how much of the workforce is currently Gen Z too, when we're talking about using them as a prototype. Because you mentioned in the TED Talk, which was that from last year, the

C TED Talk was originally done in 2024 and it went to Ted in 2025.

B Yeah, okay. But then they made up 25% of the workforce. So there are already a quarter of the workforce, which to me, I don't. I was like, it made me feel really old simultaneously. But I was like, oh, I didn't even realize that so much of them were in the workforce. But I do also feel that as even a Gen Xer, this desire for trust in the companies that I even purchased from, like, you know, and making more conscious, socially conscious decisions continues to be on, on my radar, even as somebody from a Different generation. So when you talk about, like, trust, just wanting to dig a little bit more into, like, what is it the trust that they're trying to identify or what is the trust that they need from a company?

C Yeah, I think that it's really a different perception in how trust is built today. And this is something that in every chapter of the book. So the book walks through 10 major shifts that are happening that we see in these clear patterns across generations. Again, it's not what Gen Z wants. It's exactly what you're talking about. Even as a Gen Xer, you're feeling this shift in yourself towards how you think about trust and how you purchase from a brand. Right. So I think that we really have to think about trust and how that's changing, how it's changing, how you build trust in a digital first era.

C So one of the big shifts, one of the first shifts we talk about in the book is really this shift to digital.

B Did you guys trademark that love?

C And I hate. I hate the word gross word. Gross word. But the concept I love. So full credit. I always give her credit because she's the one that sparked this for me. There's an author called Hannah Grady Williams who wrote a book called Unlocking Gen Z. She was a guest on my podcast, Design Nerds Anonymous, and it's still one of our top performing episodes because it's so profound.

C And what she talks about is people over 30 are naturally analog first, digital second. People under 30 are naturally digital first, analog second in patterns and how they think. If you think about it, I don't know about you, Evelyn, but, like, when I got out of school, I would go to the park and see who was there. That's how I found my friends. I have three boys now, ranging in age from 12 to 17. I can tell you when they find their friends after school, it starts digitally. They're like, where is everybody? They're texting. You know, my youngest doesn't have a phone yet, but he will go on his iPad, you know, he'll ask me to text the moms, like, something, right? They connect digitally first, you know, kickball, still a big poll.

C Like, they're going to show up in person. They want to be together. It's different when they're together. Even they recognize that. But they're going to start digitally and then connect physically. And I think as we look at the shift happening, you know, in our midst right now, most of us naturally still think analog first. We've seen this in the Pandemic. I always use the Example of, you know, a junior high orientation for me, that happened during the pandemic where they took everything that they would have done in a two hour session in a high school or junior high cafeteria and they just put it on zoom, which culminated with a kid drawing a very phallic symbol.

C Somebody, one of the kids took over and was drawing on the screen. And then the administrators could figure out how to stop it. Right. Like we're taking exactly what we do in the physical world and putting it online, which it's not optimized for. It's not a great experience. Right. We see this in our industry, even with things like Pricers, you can see them in the magazine app, right? Where you flip the page and it even makes the annoying sound. It's not how we would design it if we were designing digital first, but what we're often doing is we're designing for analog natives to get to the digital realm.

C So it's kind of these baby steps to be like familiar like this, but different and putting it into that digital realm. And I think we get to take the same concepts and apply them to work. We're often trying to do the same things that we would have done face to face. And then we put them like that junior high orientation directly online, digitally. And we're like, it's not good enough. It's not the same. We have to go back. I think if we were to actually redesign these practices for a digital first world, it would look quite different.

C And Evelyn, I'm going to tell your listeners a little bit about our prep for this. Like we even prepping for this podcast, like this was a very last minute thing. So Evelyn had a gap in her thing. I have my laptop on vacation. So she said, could we make this work asynchronously? She sent me a Google Doc that said, here's some questions I might ask you. Feel free to add to it. This is my main goal for my podcast. I am a super early riser.

C I get Evelyn from the time you were commenting in there that you're probably more of a late night person.

B I'm on the late end. Yes.

C Yeah, yeah, I got that. And I was up at 4 in the morning working in that doc, if you didn't see. So I got in early, early and I highlighted the questions I thought would be interesting and where I thought we should go. I put some comments and some little visuals in there for her. Asynchronously, we were able to have a whole conversation that we didn't have to pause. My vacation when it wasn't convenient. We didn't have to interrupt Evelyn's workday. She woke up whenever she chose to wake up as she's having her coffee.

C Looked at all my comments and she comes into this meeting fully prepped. But we didn't have to synchronously connect. So I love that as an example of a way to balance synchronous and asynchronous work that is design from this era that we're in. Evelyn, for you and I, I built a digital first company. You worked at Slack like, it's like the air that we breathe for us. But I can tell you because we do similar things with our podcasts, we do similar things in the research we present with clients. It is not natural. Yet for most of the world that has grown up in this analog native era, we've got a lot of work to do.

C And I think what this book is going to do is give you so many just little examples try this that you can, you know, maybe encourage the world to wade into this Digital first era in a way that doesn't say digital is better than human. I don't think that in a way that says digital means we don't need physical space. I don't believe that. But I do believe if we can lead with Digital first and then let that physical space, let that, that synchronous connection do its job, we're all going to be in a better place.

B And you actually have a few business cases of where leading, not necessarily with digital first, but with the next generation in mind, informing the decisions of the current leadership and how that's changed. You mentioned at least in your TED Talk and on kind of the three minute video lead up for the book work for what's Next, the Gucci Shadow Board.

C Gucci Shadow Board, yeah, yeah.

B Can you share a little bit about. They essentially make a great business case for why you want to be listening to this next generation and how that can inform how you work and even how you sell.

C I love the example of the Gucci Shadow Board and I share others besides this in the book if this one doesn't do it for you. But what I love about the Gucci Shadow board is it is not saying Gen Z has all the answers. It's saying Gen Z has fresh insight that needs to be filtered through a lens that only experience can bring. You mentioned earlier, Evelyn, kind of this generational gap and how you were surprised how big Gen Z is already. But another really important thing is baby boomers are the largest generation. They are retiring at an unprecedented rate. Our generation, Gen X is not big enough to fill their shoes. This means that millennials and Gen Z have to step up sooner.

C But I think the risk is that that generational wealth, that, and when I say wealth, not in terms of money, in terms of knowledge, is leaving not only our industry but our working world faster than we're refilling it. So one of the biggest things we need is this cross pollination between that wisdom and learned and lived experience of these older generations and the fresh spark of the younger generations. But today they're not speaking the same language in that digital first, analog, first world. We're really missing a lot there. So the Gucci shadowboard is a really great example of how to bridge that gap. And we have a whole chapter in the book that covers in more detail how you can apply this to your business in countless different ways. But the Gucci example is that Gucci recognized that its sales were declining as its core demographic was aging. And so they put in place a next gen shadow board, they called it, that was really kind of the youngest generation advising senior leadership on how to connect with that next generation of consumers.

C And this is where I love to tie it to business results, right? Because even the architecture firms that are listening, they want business results. It's nice that everyone loves where they work. It's nice that you have a good culture, but you want business results, right? Well, here's a business result. Gucci grew its sales 136% during the same time period, a two year period where their closest competitor declined 11 and a half percent. Which they credit mostly to this next gen shadow board that was advising sales, marketing and product development on how to connect with that next generation of consumer. They didn't put Gen Z in the C suite, they didn't let them run unfiltered. They use their C suite's knowledge to filter these fresh ideas coming from Gen Z. And I think this is a lot of you know what the book pushes, not let's get Gen Z what they want.

C And all you boomers and Gen Xers, you got to give up what's dear to you so that they can get what they want. Because we got to recruit the next generation. No, no, no. This is about getting all of these generations to collaborate with one another and getting them to really prototype what this next era of work could and should look like.

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B So I want to dig a little bit deeper on collaborating across generations because I feel, and this is going to be related, we like to think it's related specifically for us. But a lot of the pushback I receive from architecture and firm owners and of course you work in the built environment space too. Is this history and this culture, this ingrained culture of gatekeeping and kind of working your way up there. So how, how has this been received from the leaders in the built environment that you've been talking to? And, and I like, I'm notorious for asking multiple part questions. So my follow up to that would be, you know, and if you need to help them shift their mindset, like how do you begin to have that conversation?

C I will say it's hard. And some generations, some genders, some people are more open than others. So I will say most architecture firms, most leaders that I talk to are still really struggling with getting people back into the office. They say we need to get people back in the office because we're losing studio culture. Or maybe they're complaining that Gen Z is difficult, they don't want to work hard, Gen Z isn't loyal. And, and I want to start by saying they're not wrong. We're in a really frustrating moment in time and that should be acknowledged. And to say that none of us have ever led through the other side of a pandemic and the onset of AI and all of these things that are real business challenges that these people are right and valid to be struggling with.

C However, I want to look at maybe the flip side of this that but we can't fix a how problem with a where solution. Right? That's kind of where I started and I want to kind of continue to come back to that. And I think that this is the moment that we're in that is very different than past generational challenges. Right? It's not new for older generations to be like, meh, these kids, kids these days, blah blah, blah, you know, like that challenge is not new. What is new right now is that we have never really been through this big of transition in how we work, where literally the old playbook no longer works, yet we don't have an agreed upon new one of how it should look in the future. We can work anytime, anywhere, but we can also work all the time and everywhere. And there's some really interesting data that we talk about in the book about burnout and how that is showing up in our culture. Across all ages.

C And I guess the third thing I'll say there is also really around kind of technology enabling collaboration across geographies like never before. Right. As this technology gets better, and in fact, especially in our industry, I think you can agree with this. We're seeing more architect in San Diego and a designer in Chicago and a project manager in New York. Right. Like it helps manage the lumpiness of our business. So even if you're back in the office five days a week, you're likely collaborating across these geographies like never before. So all of this, if we don't get it right, is going to result in lost productivity, it's going to result in talent churn, and it's going to result in slower decisions.

C Often we're seeing this in many practices, right? More oversight, more people involved. Right. And that results in burnout. So if those things are things you don't want in your business, Lost productivity, talent churn, slower decisions, burnout. We can't deny that the world has changed. We have to figure out what to do now. So I would say, you know, for your listeners, probably there's four chapters. I wanted to pick some that were like, hey, these are the places that I would focus for architecture firms specifically, I think Shift one talks about phygital.

C That's a place I would focus. This is actually chapter seven in the book. So Shift one, how to think digitally in this digital world. Blending the physical and digital. Again, not saying one's more important or less important. Let's let each of them do their jobs. Shift 7, which is around communication. I think we need our clients to actually hear us in a way that they haven't before.

C We do all of the interior design giants of design research. So that is like the Fortune 500 but for interior design firms. ThinkLab, my company, does that on behalf of Interior Design magazine. We have access to 40 years of data about what their biggest business challenges are for these large interior design firms. Guess what? They haven't changed in 40 years. They're the same every year. We've been doing it for seven years. Right.

C So this tells us, as an industry, we haven't quite figured this out. And I think there's a huge opportunity to take some of the ideas in the communication chapter, Chapter seven, to really help your clients actually hear you. And it's going to require us to think differently. The third one would be Shift eight around collaboration. The number one challenge today, too many meetings. Our meetings have actually three xed since the pandemic. This means you're in Meetings all day and you got to do your real work on the couch at night after the kids go to bed or whatever else. It's rampant in our industry.

C You talk to these young gen zers and we have an ongoing Gen Z cohort which is like that Gucci shadow board, but specific to our industry, asking, you know, what are you challenged with as you're getting up and moving in this industry? What are these old mindsets we need to help this world rethink? And one of the biggest ones is like all these pointless meetings, you know, just like we talked about, you and I working asynchronously. I don't think our industry has figured that out. So I think there's a lot around shift 8, which is around collaboration. And then the final one, I should have picked three, but I couldn't, I had to pick four. Is around mentorship. We are an industry built around mentorship in an analog era. And there's nothing wrong with that. It is great.

C This does not mean mentorship should not be in an apprenticeship model. It is a yes, and we need to keep what worked from that. But. But also build on more ways that we can incorporate across industries, across generations, across geographies, ways for these folks to connect. And I will say that mentorship may be one of the most challenging chapters for your audience to read because it's really challenging the way things have been done in this industry.

B When I'm thinking about these. Well, you said 10 shifts before that specifically architecture should focus on. And I always come back to the fact that we are designers by trait. Right. We love to design physical buildings, but I have the hardest time getting people to think about design or redesign of the business. How do you begin to have those conversations with architects? For me, it always comes back. It'd be interesting to hear your perspective, but for me, it always comes back to the nuance or the fact that also the business models we've created allows us so little time to think about these things outside of our products.

C Yeah. And I think I want to start with, like, again acknowledging those feelings. Like it's valid and it's really, really hard. Listen, I'm a business. I've been a business owner. I guess technically I don't own the business anymore because I sold it, but I still run it as if it was my own. And it's really hard to find this balance of working on the business and working in the business. It's the vital versus urgent.

C This will always be a challenge for every business owner in every industry. But I will Say, as we look at disruption, right, your whole podcast practice disrupted. It's really about disruption and what's happening. Look outside this industry, the biggest disruptions have come not from somebody inventing a better product in recent history. It's been from people really reinventing the process. So I say that in our industry, the biggest disruptions will come from process innovation, not product innovation. Now this is really hard for our industry to hear because we love product. Whether your product is a chair, a table, a wall covering, or your product is a corporate space, a hospital or whatever, we are an industry as a whole that celebrates product, that we celebrate the end result.

C Regardless of what it took you to get there, how much you burnt yourself out, how many all nighters you pulled, how many product award shows do we have? You know, you go to one trade show, how many awards can you win for product? We are not rewarding that process innovation. But look at some of the biggest disruptors like Airbnb, right? They didn't build a better hotel, they built a better way, a better process to stay when you're away from home. Uber didn't build a better taxi cab. They built a better way to get from point A to point B. And we could go on with a hundred other different examples. And you know, just from those two, like, we still have hotels, Airbnb is there, we still have hotels, Taxi cabs are still around. In New York City, you can still hail a taxi cab, but Uber is generally a more attractive way to travel and easier to do business. Expense reports and all of these things.

C You know, Revpar has gone down for hotels, but you can still stay at a hotel. So I think to your listeners, like practice as we know it will always be there. But if you want to be a disruptor, the biggest opportunity for you is not in building a better end result that gets you noticed. That's harder and harder and harder in this era of access. I think the biggest future disruptors are going to be the ones that really focus on the process of working with them and telling those stories. And that's where the disruption in our industry is going to come from.

B So let's talk about process and really dig in on that. A process that I often like to refer to is how I was onboarded at Slack as a technology company who at the time was onboarding 40 to 50 new employees every single week versus all of the those moments showing up at an architecture firm and at one point they're like, oh, we actually need to get you a computer, we need to go find one so when you talk about just changing simple processes like that, walk us through what like a digital remake of even an onboarding process would look like.

C That's a great question. And I think it's one of the biggest opportunities for business of all sizes and stages. And this is. So here's a stat that shocks most people. The average tenure for Gen Z is projected to be two years and three months.

B Yeah, all the architecture, firm leaders are gonna like, fall out of their seats right now. Yeah.

C I mean, and it's, it's scary. It's not necessarily a good thing. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, especially since, you know, think about some of our hospital projects that take three, five years, whatever, you know, like, like there's some really alarming things about that. But the average tenure, even for a baby boomer today, eight years, three months, that also shocks a lot of people, especially in our industry, because I do think we see maybe a little longer 10 years and more loyalty than that. So I think one of the most important things is really looking at that loyalty and that tenure. Like, what if this is true? What if this is a trend? Because the biggest shift for all of us, not just Gen Z, is access to these job opportunities. So what that means is we're going to have to think about onboarding, offboarding, and I would even suggest boomerang employees in the future a little bit more differently than we have in the past. You watch my TED Talk, I open with the question, would you rather change jobs every year from now until you retire or stay in the same job that you're in right now until you retire? And when I do that with mixed audiences, it's usually around 60, 40.

C About 60% say, you know, I want to stay in the same job, sometimes higher, depending on how seasoned the audience is. But when I ask that to gen Z, it's 60, 40, the opposite way. About 60% of them would rather change jobs every year from now until they retire. And if you really push them to think about their future, they would even rather hire people that bring experience from 17 different companies over someone that's been at one company for 17 years because that's all they've ever known. They want the innovation and the ideas from all 17 companies. So I know this is uncomfortable. We don't necessarily love it, but I think, you know, we're in the future going to have to think about onboarding a little more like college campuses. Like I'm here on the Duke campus touring with my son this week.

C You know, like Hearing how they do this freshman orientation, how they connect them before they even arrive. And then when they're on, you know, they have a whole week on campus just for those freshmen to bond. They give them projects that's just about having fun and learning together. They actually put them. There's a freshman campus and they all only live on this freshman campus to bond them. And then they bring them over into the rest of Duke and they kind of encourage them. What could we learn from the university onboarding process? Because they're used to bringing people on board for four years, maybe five, depending if you take that victory lap, right, and then offboarding, how could we really think about this onboarding experience in a different way way? And I want to add one more thing to that, which is really going back to this digital idea, because in the world of these Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who is to come after them? They don't know a world where they couldn't google something, find something out before they walked in the door. Yet in our professional world, that's the way we treat people, right? If you look at the way that they meet people, they can check them out on LinkedIn, they're going to chat with them, maybe in a dating app before they ever meet up in real life.

C I think one of the keys to onboarding is really how do you get digital first? Another line from the book that I use a lot is digital human sticks. So how do we light those digital sparks first before they even walk in the door? It could be something as simple as in the book. I share an example of onboarding. It's a PDF document, easy to send no matter where you are, that says, here's all the people on the team and their core function. It's not a word document with 100 words. It's a picture of my face. And then it says, Amanda graduated from this. She studies this.

C Her main role at ThinkLab is this. And you're more likely to get her at 4am than you are at 8pm so you know this is kind of how she works, right? And we have a little one page, very visual document like that for everyone on our team. So when someone comes on board, they get that as kind of a visual orientation before they ever even walk in the door. It's got links to all of our LinkedIn profiles if they want to, like, find out a little bit more information about us. But that's just one example of a way that you can kind of give them this digital context before they ever walk in the door. Because in every other area of their lives, especially these digital natives, they're used to having that searchable digital context before they walk in. Yet at work they're supposed to walk in. It's literally like walking into a black box for them.

C And I think if we can do what Duke is doing here for their freshmen, right, and bond them a little bit before they walk in the door, give them a safe place, give them a connection, it's going to really affect your culture and it's going to make them want to stay for longer. Even if the average tenure is that two years, three years, months.

B Yeah, there's so many follow ups I can say to that. As a for instance, I've told somebody that and they're like, well then they can just google me and I'll just like send them, you know, the five people that are joining their team. And I was like, but, but you want them to feel like they're a part of what you're bringing them on too. And it is harder for me to convince the five or seven people on my team to update our LinkedIn profiles in a similar fashion than it is to take five, five pictures of us. The bios that we send out in business development docs anyways, maybe make them a little bit more fun to be insider and say, and by the way, here's our LinkedIn. It makes that person on the receiving end feel so much more welcome than go Google your team members.

C And like they want to find the behind the scenes stuff, not just the marketing, polish stuff, you know, like post a day in the life up. Like what it's like to work at XYZ firm, you know, that is not a polished marketing document. That's just people at their desks. They can kind of see inside. You know, this is the level of kind of unfiltered access they're used to having in other areas of their lives that makes them develop that affinity for those brands. Why not start that before they ever walk in the door?

B I want to dig a little bit more into something that you said at the time. Top of the hour. Regarding culture and the fact that culture is going away when people aren't showing up at the office. Which is really something that I've always struggled with because culture is the feeling that I get when I wake up and I'm like, am I going to do like, am I going to be happy to go to work today or am I not going to be happy to go to work today? So help us draw like for those people that like have culture committees and Say like we have culture are taken care of, help us understand kind of the bigger thing that drives culture and its ties to business, like true business.

C I think people are struggling with culture in this digital era, but it may not be for the reasons that you think. What I mean by that is, well, let me tell a quick story. So I was presenting at a conference a few weeks ago and a gentleman raised his hand at the end of my presentation and said, you know, this sounds like it's trying to make us the room with largely full of boomers and Gen Xers. It feels like you're trying to make us think differently about them, but who's training them? Who's teaching them the way things are done here? And so I asked him very simply, I said, well, are you, do you feel like you're short of ideas to give them? He said no. I said, well, do you feel like they're hearing you? And he said no. And my comment to him was, do you want to be right or do you want to make change? Because the biggest problem that I see right now is not lack of ideas, it's lack of conversation and lack of one side of this debate being able to hear the other. So when we talk about a culture committee that often feels like kind of a one way thing where we're trying to dictate what we want, what we desire this culture to be. But one of the things that I challenge in the book is that we are no longer building culture from the top down.

C If you look at a lot of articles about how trust is built today, you know, these younger generations especially trust more about a five star review than they do from, you know, our president, which that could go a lot of ways. So let's not go there. But they don't necessarily trust authority just because that person is an authority. They trust their peers and more. So instead of building culture top down or having a culture committee that says this is what we want it to be, now go act. I want to challenge that we're going to be building cultures from the bottom up. That it's going to be the building of these little micro cultures that together make even, you know, like strands of a rope get stronger as you weave them together. So what that looks like is really encouraging, you know, maybe your different regional practices, let's say you have a practice in Austin, Texas and Chicago, Illinois and New York State.

C What do those cultures look like? How do you name it? How do you document it? So it's not these unwritten norms that people are supposed to learn as they walk in the door. But it's really stated. We know Austin tends to be more digital first. We know New York City likes to be in the office because culturally they don't work out of their tiny apartments. Right. Like whatever it is, like how do you document those things to name the differences so as you're working together you can really, really, you know, figure out those differences. We do that at Sandow. I will say our interior design team tends to be very late night.

C They, they will start their day sometimes at 9 or 10 in the morning. I'm practically to lunch by then. I love to start my day at 4am and, and it is not uncommon for ThinkLab to call one another at 6am it's very strange, very strange. Not a culture for everybody. But everyone knows this. So most people aren't gonna book ThinkLab for a 5pm meeting and most people aren't going to book interior design for an 8am meeting. Right. Like we kind of understand these cultural nuances of one another and by naming them, by weaving them together, we can show each other more respect for the norms that exist in those eras, in those different microcultures, even if they don't match.

C And I think that this is one of the most challenging things about thinking about culture and how it's going to be built in the future because it feels very out of control for some people that are used to more that culture committee, that top down approach, approach to think about culture communities and really building it from the bottom up. But I think this could be one of the most powerful arrows in your quiver.

B So you've constantly referred and said through this whole conversation, it's not just physical, it's not just digital. But as you know, as you look at the advice you're giving to those in the built environment. If you look, as you look at interiors, how, how does our space and the workplace really change in 2050? And I'm just thinking back to my days as Salesforce 2, three years ago where they're like, we still need to assign desks, some bosses. Everyone needs an assigned desk in the office. How does the physical office shift around all of this?

C Yeah. And I really wish I could give you a checklist. Like if you do these 10 things, you'll be skinny. Right? Like, we all want this. Nobody wants the diet and exercise plan. We all want the Ozempic. Like just give me the shot. I want to be skinny.

C Like let's just do this already. So while I wish I had, like do X, Y and Z and your office culture will be successful. What I will say is one of the biggest challenges is that it kind of the technology side, hr, the people side and workplace design, the physical space side are blending like never before. But I don't think that we have aligned goals, incentives, motivations for all of those functions to truly align to design something better. We had an episode of Design Nerds Anonymous that was called the Future of the Physical Environment is all about the entanglement of it, HR and workplace design. And I think that the true checklist is going to come when those incentives all get aligned. I will say Another great person for your listeners to follow if you're not familiar, is Rob Seydow. He runs something called the Flex Index that is really looking at what all these digital first companies are measuring as their measures of success.

C Unfortunately, a lot of workplace folks are still in the world of people per square foot and some of these metrics that probably aren't going to land and I don't think it's how we're going to measure success in the future. But we're struggling to let go of them because we aren't aligned around a new metric that is going to be the Ozempic and the magical thing to look at. Rob and his team are really looking at that. Another individual is Brett Hotop, who fascinates me because he's really trying to bring a lot of these workplace folks together to say if we keep marching towards the goals that are given to us and those are the wrong goals, we're going to be extinct as a species. So let's make sure that we are aligning on what the new goals should be. And I think that as we think about this digital world and getting digital first again, we keep arguing about the wrong things, which is better. Guess what? They're both good in their own right. There are times when we should use digital.

C There's times when we should meet face to face. I don't think that this digital world is ever going to be the same thing as meeting face to face. Yet there are things that this digital world offers that I actually miss when I'm face to face. A good example of that is like the chat on a zoom. When I'm presenting right in real life, you get nods that kind of tells you your audience is with you. But when I'm presenting digitally, I get all of the people that wouldn't speak up in a large room of people typing in the chat. So I not only get a nod that says they're with me, I know exactly what I'm Saying that actually is resonating with them in real time. I actually miss that when I'm in person.

C So I think instead of debating the value of physical space, instead of debating if we should be in person, hell yes, we should be in person. Hell yes, we should have office offices. It should be really about realigning these goals and make sure that we're measuring to the right things that drive business results and using each of these so that we don't lose efficiency for effectiveness or effectiveness for efficiency.

B My last question here is if I'm an architecture firm principal listening to this episode and I know something is off in my culture, but I have no idea where to start. And all of this seems overwhelming. Like where do I even start to align HR with it and physical what's the first shift that you recommend them making?

C I love this question. It's a great way to end. And I want to make sure I give your listeners something different to do on Monday. My biggest piece of advice is I wouldn't start with culture. I think that that's where people usually go. But culture is really going to be the output and not the starting point. So I think we have to start with how work actually gets done. Chapter three of the book actually gives you some a way to go through that for yourself as an individual.

C Because we can't design better if we don't know what better looks like. If I told you you had to meet me for a meeting at 6am it probably wouldn't go over well, right? If you tried to have me join and be mentally available for a meeting at 8pm it probably wouldn't go well. But one thing that I discovered in doing the TED Talk is most people haven't even thought about when, where and how they work best. And I was actually practicing the TED Talk to my best friend who at the time was not in this industry, and she said, amanda, you've been thinking about this whole your whole career because of your writing with the Huffington Post, because of the work that you do in this industry. Most of us have never thought about that because work is just a place that we went. It was a noun, not a verb. It wasn't something you do. It was a place that you went.

C And so I never thought about these things, but before. So I wrote Chapter three with that comment in mind. That's really encouraging individuals to think about when, where and how you work best. And I think that most of the time, when something feels off in culture, it's probably not a values issue. It's really a Coordination issue. So I think it's starting by get your individuals really clear on when, how, and where they work best, and then start writing that down and documenting it as a team. How you work best, you can ask simple questions like how do we best communicate and where what needs a meeting versus what doesn't? When do we need to be in the same room and why and when do we not need to be? I think right now, most teams are still operating on assumptions or outdated norms on those fronts. And what's happening today that's leading to this miscoordination and this culture mismatch is those assumptions are not the same for everyone.

C So that's where the friction starts. And over time, that friction turns into frustration, and that frustration starts to feel like culture breaking down. But it's not culture, it's misalignment. So before you redesign your office, rewrite your values, or like, just try to force everyone back in, I think it's as simple as getting aligned on how work should work for your teams. There's another great book not to recommend to read someone else's book, but Brian Elliott, Sheila Subramanian, and Helen Krupp, some folks that you probably know quite well, wrote how the Future Works. And there's some great tools in there called, like the team level, agree that are, you know, I refer to them in my book because I don't think there's anything better out there that really helps your team start to kind of align on some of these and find those commonalities that helps everyone, you know, go by. Not the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated, but more by the platinum rule, treat others the way they want to be treated, but in a way you can systemize and scale because we can't have 400 employees and 400 ways of working that don't align.

B This book came out of a lot of research. It didn't just show up out of nowhere. I imagine that that momentum is going to continue well beyond publishing. What is next for ThinkLab and the team going forward?

C Yeah, I think it's actually a really exciting time for us and a really exciting time for our industry. This book was born out of a lot of concepts that this world our industry has thought about for a long time that have really taken off in the broader world world. And what I want to do is build on that momentum and really keep that conversation going and elevate a lot of the really thoughtful voices in this industry. So this book really speaks to analog natives about how to think digital first we are launching a new study that is really focused on closing this trust gap and the role of physical space in that how we think about physical space differently today. So it's almost going the reverse is really thinking about how we get our two digital worlds to think about the role of physical space differently. So there's actually a new survey that just launched. It's open now that we are hoping that architects and designers of all shapes, sizes, functions and focuses actually take. So hopefully we can put a link to that in the show Notes that is really kicking off what will probably be a multi year research study about the role of physical space in really closing this trust gap and how we need to help those investors think about ROI maybe a little bit differently than we have in the past.

C So I hope that your audience joins us, maybe takes that survey and certainly follow us at ThinkLab for more information as we start to shape that. And we'd love to have their voice

B join that conversation this summer.

A Join me for Innovation in the Built Environment, a professional intensive from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, built for practitioners who are ready to move from thinking about transformation to actually leading it. Learn more@beradicallybetter.com that's B E R A D I C A L L Y B E t e r.com. 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 Path past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of arch. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello to.

A Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.