Archinect - News

When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent

2020-04-16T15:59:00-04:00

A colleague and I were recently talking about something we've both experienced during a project's construction administration phase. The contractor sends an RFI, expressing the urgency of the request, advocating for a speedy response from the architect. As the architect, we investigate the RFI and provide our answer in a timely manner. Everyone's happy. Then we receive two more RFIs, these are both "time sensitive" as well. We then receive 5 more, each of these also "require immediate response." You get the picture. When everything is urgent, the very meaning of the term becomes moot. Suddenly, the point of priority disappears. We tend to expect this from (some) contractors, but this hyper-prioritization also unfolds within design teams, leaving staff overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated. But what should be done instead?

Chaos creates confusion

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

I remember early in my caree...

Architects share their biggest challenges transitioning to WFH

2020-03-24T13:20:00-04:00

The recent move to Work From Home (WFH) has been a radical change for many professionals. Archinect reached out to its global community to learn how things have been going for architects and designers across the industry. We'll be providing focused insights from our findings. For this piece we're going to look at some of the core challenges many have expressed regarding this shift.

From our results, the main challenges appear to be:

Impacts on culture, collaboration, and feelings of loneliness
Guiding younger staff and mentorship opportunities in the virtual setting
Leadership stepping up and providing clear direction to staff
Technological limitations
Environmental conditions, distractions, and impact on focus/productivity.

Naturally, there are many challenges that go beyond those listed here, but these make up the core of feedback we've uncovered from practicing professional. Let's dive into each one of these and see what our colleagues have to say.

Culture, Collaboration, and Loneline...

When "Friendly" Competition Becomes Backstabbing Survival

2019-07-24T14:57:00-04:00

An organization that relies upon individual goals or performance benchmarks to evaluate employees...needs to be careful to design competitions and structure comparisons that thwart the efforts of some workers to sabotage their colleagues. Otherwise, saboteurs may bring down everyone’s numbers — including their own.

Associate professor, Szu-chi Huang at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has been studying how competitions within the workplace materialize among larger teams. She explains that competition inside companies "is something that needs to be carefully structured and managed." And that while they do increase engagement, destructive effects can be had as well.

Colleagues can grow preoccupied with proving that they are better than one another, especially, when competition is encouraged inside a professional work environment. According to Huang, this distracts from the larger goals of the group.

One proposed solution for better in-house contests is for companies to try to "restructure the comparison by matching employees who are at different phases of their careers instead of the same phase, for instance through a mentorship system...Or they could highlight the differences and uniqueness in each employee’s background, task, and project, and thus make the comparison less meaningful....