Archinect - News

Managing the business direction of a design firm is an art unto itself

2022-05-16T09:27:00-04:00

Architecture isn't just a profession; it's also a business. Developing a sustainable business model is essential whether you're starting your own architecture firm or working for one. Everyone has their take on what makes a business development strategy "successful." However, since 2020, it's clear that firms need to re-evaluate their business models to survive a global pandemic, a recession, and the socio-economical impacts happening around the globe.

While this isn't the first time the industry has undergone such obstacles, it is essential to have the knowledge and business acumen to navigate them. There are plenty of components to keep your business afloat and turn a profit. Between client acquisition and retention, managing project deliveries, establishing partnerships, and effectively marketing your practice, there's a lot to consider.

At Archinect we like to provide the community with information and resources to navigate the ups and downs of running a practice. Our ongoing St...

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....

Researchers look at why some workers avoid sharing information with colleagues

2019-07-24T13:13:00-04:00

Companies want employees to share what they know. After all, research has found that this leads to greater creativity, more innovation, and better performance, for individuals, teams, and organizations. Yet despite companies’ attempts to encourage knowledge-sharing, many employees withhold what they know — a phenomenon known as knowledge hoarding or knowledge hiding.

A team of researchers have been exploring the dynamics behind knowledge sharing in work environments. While this is something many leaders encourage, their study has found that sometimes individuals within a team have certain reasons for hiding knowledge that might be able to help the rest of the group, namely, the fear of criticism. When the work environment is one where team members clearly understand the value behind sharing their knowledge, they are more likely to do so. This has been found to be a more affected approach compared to pressuring a team to collaborate. When we see the meaning behind something we desire to capitalize on it.

When Our Job Becomes Our Identity

2019-07-22T21:09:00-04:00

It is critical that we learn to distinguish and differentiate our roles from our self. We get into trouble when we lose ourselves in our role instead of thinking in a detached way about how the role is viewed by others...we forget that others in our organizations are reacting to the role we represent in their work lives, not necessarily the interesting and thoughtful people we think we are.

When we identify who we are with what we do professionally, set backs at work can often prompt us to spiral down emotionally. When something is merely an organizational issue we take it as a personal issue. Harvard University Lecturer, Timothy O’Brien, talks about the importance of distinguishing who we are as individuals from what we do at work. People tend to relate to us based off of the role we play in their lives. So for example, if we are in a leadership role, those working under us may not invite us to social gatherings, not because of who we are as people, but because of our relationship to them at work. O’Brien says that many leaders struggle to “be a boss and a friend at the same time.” But, when we embrace our role and the inevitable repercussions that come along with it we are better equipped to draw the line between ourselves and our role.