What is the internal communication structure like in your offices? How big is your office, and do you have staff meetings with different levels or with the entire office? How do PMs and principals communicate with designers and/or interns about current projects, upcoming work, marketing, etc.? How are office-wide problems addressed, important good news shared, etc.? How is new work dispersed to teams, if there is no specific "studio" setup based on project typology?
I am currently in an office that has grown quickly (from 10 -15 to 25+) over a couple years and I feel like we are struggling to communicate effectively because of this change. Curious how others do it.
monday morning staff meeting,
once a week there is a PM meeting.
we go over what everyone is working on in the staff meetings, talk about what is going on in the upoming week, what jobs we got, what jobs we didnt, what jobs we are going after. any sort of current event pertaining to the firm...
i assume that in the PM meetings they talk about hours, and stuff like that, but i really don't know, since i am an intern.
we also have charettes, where everyone can be involved/have input on the design process for our larger projects.
THANK you stephanie. that was exactly the kind of information I'm looking for. and exactly the kind of logical communication that I think should go on in an office, that doesn't in mine. of course, part of that may be the type of projects we work on - many are small interiors projects, and also prototype retail projects, which are not usually team projects. But still, I hope things will change as we move toward larger ground-up projects.
10 person design-oriented botique firm, principal is a psudo-starchitect.
Projects are large houses and museums.
No staff meetings. Ever.
Informal PM meetings are held every month or so.
The principal tries to remain friendly w/ everyone so he has his PM lieutenants do all the dirty work (i.e. "this weekend you WILL be working, won't you?" or "you're fired!") while he gets to brag about his kids.
The way we find out good or bad news--the principal tells his favourites, rumours fly around for a few weeks, then one of 'em lets the info leak out, and it gets dutifully distributed to all other employees.
The boss has three favourites that he shares everything with, jokes around with, goes drinking with, lets design. The rest of us may get a nod once a week.
For such a small place, I'd expect information to flow more freely. Instead it's all whispers and rumours. It's rather infuriating.
When I was an intern I was working for a firm that had about 3 all-staff meetings a year and I had that feeling of being left out of the loop. I mentioned this during my annual review with the principal and the next thing you know we had all-firm meetings every second Tuesday morning.
This was a big mistake. Meetings are no fun. If your firm has no staff meetings be happy.
The active project list was several pages long and the meetings mostly consisted of project managers droning on about what little progress had been made and the principal talking about what projects he was going after and which ones from the last meeting we had failed to get. Occasionally the CAD manager would cook up some kind of remedial lesson in layer organization, complete with handouts and a projector.
If your firm has few or no meetings be thankful. They suck up time and amount to firm-wide non-biialbe hours. Think about the impact of even an hour meeting twice per month in a firm of 10 people. Let's say the average hourly billing rate per person is $90, x 10 people x 24 meetings per year = $21,000 of billable time lost. That's probably all the interns' potential bonuses right there...
I currently work in a small firm with a totally open office plan - so all information flows freely to everyone within earshot and non project-specific meeints are pretty much never necesssary. In the event that decisions regarding staffing or other sensitive issues need to be discussed between managers/principals we usually have these discussions off-site.
20 people. Use phone, e-mail for short questions or when I don't want to waste time.
walk to another person's desk and talk or leave a note if they aren't there.
meeting them in the conference room by calling an appointment by phone.
things are on a need to know basis that i find frustrating.
design teams rarely meet, like everyone all at once. they really like to keep the billable hours down - billable hours, we are all too expensive and have too much going. pm's meet monday mornings for 30-40 minutes to drink coffee and eat donuts and discuss progress and scheduling.
then someone comes and tell me, the non-registered youthful architect, what was said at the meeting. and so the gossip begins.
Are you new to the job Museschild? Or have you been through the firm change?
i think we need more meetings. they don't have to be that long, 15 minutes once a week for each project, would do me good. and when they are interoffice you don't have to prepare for them.
everybody can get on the same page at the meetings, define goals and deadlines and get new insight towards their work.
if your firm can't run meetings successfully they are cheating the emloyees out of a cohesive, communication friendly work place and management is looking soley at the bottom line.
Strawbeary and others: I'm interested in what specifically you'd want to get out of these meetings - or maybe what you feel you're missing information-wise in the firms. What kind of information would give you this "new insight" into your work?
We try to avoid meetings as much as possible. We don't think meetings are really fun for anyone, nor usually all that useful. When you've got multiple projects and not all staff is working on every project then discussing each project one by one would just seem to be wasting the time of people not involved in whichever is being discussed. This is a small firm so information doesn't really need to go through too many layers of management and people are usually pretty well informed about whatever it is they're working on. If they're interested in what others are working on it also isn't usually too hard to observe and converse within the office, so a meeting would only seem to be redundant.
Naturally there are things that need to be discussed from time to time among those managing projects and staff. Some of this is of a sensitive/private nature - firm finances, decisions regarding staff hiring (and firing. and how to avoid firing), decisions relating to direction and growth of firm, certain issues regarding client relations, some marketing info/strategy, etc. So, there will always be a few meetings to which more junior staff are not privy.
Meetings about how to aportion staff to various projects can also be touchy. We try to have people work on things that they've indicated interest in - but there will always be less popular projects that need staff. There are also issues with staff skill levels, interpersonal dynamics, even preferences expressed by clients for particular staff. Discussing all of these issues with the entire office would be inappropriate.
There is probably less information witheld from you deliberately than you think. But: if info is in fact being kept private it may occasionally be to avoid hurt feelings or uneccesary conflict.
What is it that you feel would be better handled in a meeting format? And why would you prefer this instead of direct information from principal or manager on a project by project basis?
Aluminate - a little wordy there aren't you? I bet your meetings take long. I think I answered a lot of your questions in my first post.
My own question: Why do professionals succumb to gossip and unorganized information distribution?
They aren't supposed to be long enough to be fun or boring.
Every project I have worked that has had good communication has been successful and I have felt great about working on the job. When the principal architect or interior designer comes by every afternoon for 25 minutes at 4 with their work we discuss the project because we have both been working on it. He shows me the estimate he's been working on and I show him the entry and parking I've been working on. We talk about design. Project. People. Working on it. Path. Goal. Next morning, first thing for 15 minutes you can meet for another project. This time principal has talked to the owner and all is good, they want something to look at by Tuesday and priorities have switched. I work with one principal this way and it works for us very well. Are you saying it's more efficient to get 25 interoffice e-mails and 14 phone calls a day? Amonst 7 different projects in 3 totally different stages of design? Not to mention the outside calls. So you're asking me what are the side benefits of having a clue?
I do not want to participate in every meeting for every project nor management things of which I have no busness.
As for having the direct information from the principal or manager question - yes this sounds very helpful. It is piecemeal.
My office expects me to operate very efficiently and I strive to do so. But misdelegation and misdirectives from management makes my job harder and theirs easier. My tough luck.
As far as the inefficiency of meetings, you can run them short and sweet and they are cool and that's the rule. Or you can relish in human nature and enjoy the interaction and chat amongst co workers.
I heard of an interior design firm whose employees get paid lunch hour if they stay in the office. The lunch hour is a great time for discussing design and browsing magazines not to mention getting some social time and interacting with interesting co-workers. It sounds great.
how do you coordinate work without getting together and discussing it?
I am not wishing for meetings with any more than 3 people. 4 maybe.
7 projects - not all the same weight of project, not all projects are addressed everyday.
it wastes my time to get interuppted by single questions and I waste people's time by interuppting them with the same. Especially when you have to switch gears fifty times a day.
The "meetings" I desire are much like the "meetings" I explained above with the one principal architect. It makes perfect sense to me that if multiple people are working on the same job that they have a place and time to communicate other than the documents on the server and these interruptions. I can think of plenty of things that waste more time than meetings.
i do not work in a big corporate firm where there are 5 drafters and 3 architects and 3 engineers or whatever. it is usually me and one or a few others. Our consultants are all hired, none in-house so I am not including them. I do not get directives and get told what do thank god. I work on what I think I should, and how I think it should it be done considering the parameters given. Then the team members review this in the time right before the deadline and the proj. arch realizes he forgot to tell me something and now what do we do. I appreciate that my firm gives me lots of autonomy and design decisions. But usually they don't give me all the criteria in an organized fashion. As an intern, I am indeed working on their project for their client and I must get info and input from them periodically to stay on mission. This is a torturous annoying process as we have it set up now. Often I don't see the site or meet the client or know the subtle things that might drive a design. Often I am not informed of things that I have no way of asking. I have been given as little directives as "Work on this, do what you want and yada yada" and didn't I see the proj. mgr for days. I worked my little ass off and produced something great. time to meet with the client the next day and the pm checks to see what I have. Well, he likes what I did, a lot in fact, but wait, somethings wrong here. the client had insisted that the library stacks be turned one way and and I changed all of them in the new plan. A little guideline previously not given to me. He aggrees my plan is great, good job, in fact better for many reasons. But it doesn't address the client's needs so of course it won't do. Now I have to skip lunch and panic to get a new plan drawn and that previous plan was just "practice". The new plan is not near as thought out and resulting in a lesser quality design and yet it is the one we show to the client and are "stuck" with.
There is probably no blanket solution to # and type of meetings and who is involved and what is accomplished. But in my case I think some more communication is warranted.
staff meetings shouldn't be all too time consuming, ours rarely last over a half hour. since we meet weekly things go pretty fast, and nobody drones on about details. our bosses move the meeting along so we aren't all crunching time.
then again, my office isnt very large.
at my old job, our meetings were conference calls between 3 offices (allsmall), and those sucked, because they were not very organized. and there would be like 6 people talking at once
Well I work in a ridicously small office. Only two architects but many other design professionals.
We have walk in - the office set up encourages discussions only closed offices for the administrative staff.
But importantly we keep a mail file. Roughly holds the equivalent of 2 weeks worth of information. From project info, to prospective projects. After two weeks its filed. Everyone is expected to read it and often.
We don't have enough architects to offer a meaningful charette but we do have drags (drag your drawing over), and informal conferences with our QS, Engineers et al. Information flows that way and is usually recorded as tab notes.
I believe ultimately, because our system is not perfect - but works! that it is the responsibility of the individual to get the information they require - whatever it is. You have to desire it...and seek it out, esp its accuracy.
we have staff meetings every two weeks (sometimes three). the meetings are usually less than an hour, but that includes lunch, which the firm buys for everyone.
i still feel that even with the semi-regular meetings, we need to work on improving office communication.
I had a staff meeting - kind of a review of projects. The staff liked it and I scheduled one for the next two weeks. They like being in the loop - even though they are required to read the mail file as often as is necessary
It's horrible where I am. Rampant backstabbing, and project theivery are at the top of the list. Then there's the issue of spousal cheating that seems to become known through one rumor or another at least five times a month.
They also just did away with our purified water filter, saying "It was costing too much and we don't think it was working anyways," - yet they couldn't understand that it doesn't cost that much to change a filter.
Let's see, what else?
Oh, yah - the two restrooms we have are consistently disaster zones, nearly requiring Haz-Mat gear on several occasions to be cleaned thanks to generations-old plumbing and a high water table. Seriously, one minute you're in there and it's fine, and you go back in two hours later and it looks like a swamp.
There are also people here whose oral hygiene (or lack-thereof) rivals that of Cajuns or the Inuit. We have a pretty loose dress code, too, and many women are addicted to open toe sandals. Let me share a suggestion with any women here on Archinect: If your feet look like like some kind of mutated morphing of a corn cob and Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, do people a favor and wear socks and shoes all the time, okay?
But I make a good wage, enough so that I can handle these problems on a daily basis. But I've heard friends and colleagues talk of their great work environments and of course I have nothing positive to say about mine except that it's great we always have a huge budget for computer upgrades and always have top equipment.
Other than that it's so bad here.
RA rudolph...i think i know of the firm you are talking about
trader joes, (now a gelson's too), wok ave chinese place, mexican food etc nearby, no - i know someone who used to work there and used to bitch a looooot
Office communication informal poll
What is the internal communication structure like in your offices? How big is your office, and do you have staff meetings with different levels or with the entire office? How do PMs and principals communicate with designers and/or interns about current projects, upcoming work, marketing, etc.? How are office-wide problems addressed, important good news shared, etc.? How is new work dispersed to teams, if there is no specific "studio" setup based on project typology?
I am currently in an office that has grown quickly (from 10 -15 to 25+) over a couple years and I feel like we are struggling to communicate effectively because of this change. Curious how others do it.
shout-outs, email, phone. ~10 person office.
big brother calls if all else fails - 70 person office over three floors
that's not me!
130+ employees across all A&E diciplines.
Most intra-dicipline communication is made phone or email but I like to walk downstairs and talk in person.
Most communication within dicipline is just talking w/each other - sometimes phone call.
<10 oids.
radio or cell if out of office.
atmospherically transmitted sound waves when in office.
e909
radio????
1 person talking to himself.
radio
yeah, if someone wnats to contact the boss quick, we place an ad on a 10 watt station. :)
http://www.privateline.com/landmobile/
i use nethail
we have about 18 people in my office.
monday morning staff meeting,
once a week there is a PM meeting.
we go over what everyone is working on in the staff meetings, talk about what is going on in the upoming week, what jobs we got, what jobs we didnt, what jobs we are going after. any sort of current event pertaining to the firm...
i assume that in the PM meetings they talk about hours, and stuff like that, but i really don't know, since i am an intern.
we also have charettes, where everyone can be involved/have input on the design process for our larger projects.
THANK you stephanie. that was exactly the kind of information I'm looking for. and exactly the kind of logical communication that I think should go on in an office, that doesn't in mine. of course, part of that may be the type of projects we work on - many are small interiors projects, and also prototype retail projects, which are not usually team projects. But still, I hope things will change as we move toward larger ground-up projects.
any other feedback? thanks.
10 person design-oriented botique firm, principal is a psudo-starchitect.
Projects are large houses and museums.
No staff meetings. Ever.
Informal PM meetings are held every month or so.
The principal tries to remain friendly w/ everyone so he has his PM lieutenants do all the dirty work (i.e. "this weekend you WILL be working, won't you?" or "you're fired!") while he gets to brag about his kids.
The way we find out good or bad news--the principal tells his favourites, rumours fly around for a few weeks, then one of 'em lets the info leak out, and it gets dutifully distributed to all other employees.
The boss has three favourites that he shares everything with, jokes around with, goes drinking with, lets design. The rest of us may get a nod once a week.
For such a small place, I'd expect information to flow more freely. Instead it's all whispers and rumours. It's rather infuriating.
When I was an intern I was working for a firm that had about 3 all-staff meetings a year and I had that feeling of being left out of the loop. I mentioned this during my annual review with the principal and the next thing you know we had all-firm meetings every second Tuesday morning.
This was a big mistake. Meetings are no fun. If your firm has no staff meetings be happy.
The active project list was several pages long and the meetings mostly consisted of project managers droning on about what little progress had been made and the principal talking about what projects he was going after and which ones from the last meeting we had failed to get. Occasionally the CAD manager would cook up some kind of remedial lesson in layer organization, complete with handouts and a projector.
If your firm has few or no meetings be thankful. They suck up time and amount to firm-wide non-biialbe hours. Think about the impact of even an hour meeting twice per month in a firm of 10 people. Let's say the average hourly billing rate per person is $90, x 10 people x 24 meetings per year = $21,000 of billable time lost. That's probably all the interns' potential bonuses right there...
I currently work in a small firm with a totally open office plan - so all information flows freely to everyone within earshot and non project-specific meeints are pretty much never necesssary. In the event that decisions regarding staffing or other sensitive issues need to be discussed between managers/principals we usually have these discussions off-site.
fletch - you don't happen to work near a Trader Joe's by any chance ?
RA- nope, I'm in england.
20 people. Use phone, e-mail for short questions or when I don't want to waste time.
walk to another person's desk and talk or leave a note if they aren't there.
meeting them in the conference room by calling an appointment by phone.
things are on a need to know basis that i find frustrating.
design teams rarely meet, like everyone all at once. they really like to keep the billable hours down - billable hours, we are all too expensive and have too much going. pm's meet monday mornings for 30-40 minutes to drink coffee and eat donuts and discuss progress and scheduling.
then someone comes and tell me, the non-registered youthful architect, what was said at the meeting. and so the gossip begins.
Are you new to the job Museschild? Or have you been through the firm change?
i think we need more meetings. they don't have to be that long, 15 minutes once a week for each project, would do me good. and when they are interoffice you don't have to prepare for them.
everybody can get on the same page at the meetings, define goals and deadlines and get new insight towards their work.
if your firm can't run meetings successfully they are cheating the emloyees out of a cohesive, communication friendly work place and management is looking soley at the bottom line.
Strawbeary and others: I'm interested in what specifically you'd want to get out of these meetings - or maybe what you feel you're missing information-wise in the firms. What kind of information would give you this "new insight" into your work?
We try to avoid meetings as much as possible. We don't think meetings are really fun for anyone, nor usually all that useful. When you've got multiple projects and not all staff is working on every project then discussing each project one by one would just seem to be wasting the time of people not involved in whichever is being discussed. This is a small firm so information doesn't really need to go through too many layers of management and people are usually pretty well informed about whatever it is they're working on. If they're interested in what others are working on it also isn't usually too hard to observe and converse within the office, so a meeting would only seem to be redundant.
Naturally there are things that need to be discussed from time to time among those managing projects and staff. Some of this is of a sensitive/private nature - firm finances, decisions regarding staff hiring (and firing. and how to avoid firing), decisions relating to direction and growth of firm, certain issues regarding client relations, some marketing info/strategy, etc. So, there will always be a few meetings to which more junior staff are not privy.
Meetings about how to aportion staff to various projects can also be touchy. We try to have people work on things that they've indicated interest in - but there will always be less popular projects that need staff. There are also issues with staff skill levels, interpersonal dynamics, even preferences expressed by clients for particular staff. Discussing all of these issues with the entire office would be inappropriate.
There is probably less information witheld from you deliberately than you think. But: if info is in fact being kept private it may occasionally be to avoid hurt feelings or uneccesary conflict.
What is it that you feel would be better handled in a meeting format? And why would you prefer this instead of direct information from principal or manager on a project by project basis?
Aluminate - a little wordy there aren't you? I bet your meetings take long. I think I answered a lot of your questions in my first post.
My own question: Why do professionals succumb to gossip and unorganized information distribution?
They aren't supposed to be long enough to be fun or boring.
Every project I have worked that has had good communication has been successful and I have felt great about working on the job. When the principal architect or interior designer comes by every afternoon for 25 minutes at 4 with their work we discuss the project because we have both been working on it. He shows me the estimate he's been working on and I show him the entry and parking I've been working on. We talk about design. Project. People. Working on it. Path. Goal. Next morning, first thing for 15 minutes you can meet for another project. This time principal has talked to the owner and all is good, they want something to look at by Tuesday and priorities have switched. I work with one principal this way and it works for us very well. Are you saying it's more efficient to get 25 interoffice e-mails and 14 phone calls a day? Amonst 7 different projects in 3 totally different stages of design? Not to mention the outside calls. So you're asking me what are the side benefits of having a clue?
I do not want to participate in every meeting for every project nor management things of which I have no busness.
As for having the direct information from the principal or manager question - yes this sounds very helpful. It is piecemeal.
My office expects me to operate very efficiently and I strive to do so. But misdelegation and misdirectives from management makes my job harder and theirs easier. My tough luck.
As far as the inefficiency of meetings, you can run them short and sweet and they are cool and that's the rule. Or you can relish in human nature and enjoy the interaction and chat amongst co workers.
I heard of an interior design firm whose employees get paid lunch hour if they stay in the office. The lunch hour is a great time for discussing design and browsing magazines not to mention getting some social time and interacting with interesting co-workers. It sounds great.
fletch - that's funny because it EXACTLY describes a firm I used to work for... guess there's a limited number of office variations out there
Strawbeary that's kind of the pot calling the kettle wordy there, eh?
I'd go with the 25 emails and 14 phone calls as being more efficient than most of the meetings in firms I've worked in.
I still say be careful what you're wishing for. If you end up in a firm with regular meetings you'll be wishin for your current system back.
Though if you're only working on 7 projects and you're getting 25 emails a day then something seems wrong with the communication in your office.
when i used to work at this large corp firm, we had meeting to schedule our meetings. that was the ultimate low point of my career.
bloopox, yes I was wordy in my second post.
how do you coordinate work without getting together and discussing it?
I am not wishing for meetings with any more than 3 people. 4 maybe.
7 projects - not all the same weight of project, not all projects are addressed everyday.
it wastes my time to get interuppted by single questions and I waste people's time by interuppting them with the same. Especially when you have to switch gears fifty times a day.
The "meetings" I desire are much like the "meetings" I explained above with the one principal architect. It makes perfect sense to me that if multiple people are working on the same job that they have a place and time to communicate other than the documents on the server and these interruptions. I can think of plenty of things that waste more time than meetings.
i do not work in a big corporate firm where there are 5 drafters and 3 architects and 3 engineers or whatever. it is usually me and one or a few others. Our consultants are all hired, none in-house so I am not including them. I do not get directives and get told what do thank god. I work on what I think I should, and how I think it should it be done considering the parameters given. Then the team members review this in the time right before the deadline and the proj. arch realizes he forgot to tell me something and now what do we do. I appreciate that my firm gives me lots of autonomy and design decisions. But usually they don't give me all the criteria in an organized fashion. As an intern, I am indeed working on their project for their client and I must get info and input from them periodically to stay on mission. This is a torturous annoying process as we have it set up now. Often I don't see the site or meet the client or know the subtle things that might drive a design. Often I am not informed of things that I have no way of asking. I have been given as little directives as "Work on this, do what you want and yada yada" and didn't I see the proj. mgr for days. I worked my little ass off and produced something great. time to meet with the client the next day and the pm checks to see what I have. Well, he likes what I did, a lot in fact, but wait, somethings wrong here. the client had insisted that the library stacks be turned one way and and I changed all of them in the new plan. A little guideline previously not given to me. He aggrees my plan is great, good job, in fact better for many reasons. But it doesn't address the client's needs so of course it won't do. Now I have to skip lunch and panic to get a new plan drawn and that previous plan was just "practice". The new plan is not near as thought out and resulting in a lesser quality design and yet it is the one we show to the client and are "stuck" with.
There is probably no blanket solution to # and type of meetings and who is involved and what is accomplished. But in my case I think some more communication is warranted.
Wordy again.
And I apolgize for inadvertantly turning this post into a post about me. Didn't intend it. Sorry to the original poster.
what we have here luke, is a failure to communicate...
staff meetings shouldn't be all too time consuming, ours rarely last over a half hour. since we meet weekly things go pretty fast, and nobody drones on about details. our bosses move the meeting along so we aren't all crunching time.
then again, my office isnt very large.
at my old job, our meetings were conference calls between 3 offices (allsmall), and those sucked, because they were not very organized. and there would be like 6 people talking at once
that's faster :)
after reading this thread, i think: good meetings are best, but uncommon, and bad meetings are worst. so no meetings are just OK.
i've worked in small places, where meetings shouldn't have been necessary or should have been very rare.
and someone mentioned paper notes. those are good too.
--. -. .. -- .- ..- ---. -. -- . --- . ...- .. -. --- .--- .- . -..- .. ...- . - .. - . -.. - . -.. - . - .--- .- . - . -- . -.. - - .- - . - .... - . - . - .- -. -- . --- . - . -.. - .-. -.-. -. - .- . -- . - .-- . - .
we use morse code at my office. but my previous post doesn't say shit.
and i thought you were just a little nervous
meetings over 15 minutes suck.
15 minutes, once a week.
Only the busiest or those with ADD run the meeting.
Whats up/ down/ hot/ cold, etc.
You! whats going on?
'Well, the project is on hold because....'
Great! Who needs help?
"I do, on the Yadayada project."
Ok, you talk to her.
Next, you!....etc. etc. Very quick.
We all leave confused, but informed.
Email mostly for important (carbon copy everyone) stuff, or phone.
Well I work in a ridicously small office. Only two architects but many other design professionals.
We have walk in - the office set up encourages discussions only closed offices for the administrative staff.
But importantly we keep a mail file. Roughly holds the equivalent of 2 weeks worth of information. From project info, to prospective projects. After two weeks its filed. Everyone is expected to read it and often.
We don't have enough architects to offer a meaningful charette but we do have drags (drag your drawing over), and informal conferences with our QS, Engineers et al. Information flows that way and is usually recorded as tab notes.
I believe ultimately, because our system is not perfect - but works! that it is the responsibility of the individual to get the information they require - whatever it is. You have to desire it...and seek it out, esp its accuracy.
i work in an office of 10.
we have staff meetings every two weeks (sometimes three). the meetings are usually less than an hour, but that includes lunch, which the firm buys for everyone.
i still feel that even with the semi-regular meetings, we need to work on improving office communication.
I decided to test this
I had a staff meeting - kind of a review of projects. The staff liked it and I scheduled one for the next two weeks. They like being in the loop - even though they are required to read the mail file as often as is necessary
go
It's horrible where I am. Rampant backstabbing, and project theivery are at the top of the list. Then there's the issue of spousal cheating that seems to become known through one rumor or another at least five times a month.
They also just did away with our purified water filter, saying "It was costing too much and we don't think it was working anyways," - yet they couldn't understand that it doesn't cost that much to change a filter.
Let's see, what else?
Oh, yah - the two restrooms we have are consistently disaster zones, nearly requiring Haz-Mat gear on several occasions to be cleaned thanks to generations-old plumbing and a high water table. Seriously, one minute you're in there and it's fine, and you go back in two hours later and it looks like a swamp.
There are also people here whose oral hygiene (or lack-thereof) rivals that of Cajuns or the Inuit. We have a pretty loose dress code, too, and many women are addicted to open toe sandals. Let me share a suggestion with any women here on Archinect: If your feet look like like some kind of mutated morphing of a corn cob and Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, do people a favor and wear socks and shoes all the time, okay?
But I make a good wage, enough so that I can handle these problems on a daily basis. But I've heard friends and colleagues talk of their great work environments and of course I have nothing positive to say about mine except that it's great we always have a huge budget for computer upgrades and always have top equipment.
Other than that it's so bad here.
RA rudolph...i think i know of the firm you are talking about
trader joes, (now a gelson's too), wok ave chinese place, mexican food etc nearby, no - i know someone who used to work there and used to bitch a looooot
we use charades
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.