Home Page

One Year Later, What Have We Learned About Working From Home?

March 24, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Vox Recode provided some interesting insights into factors which will exist as people increasingly work from home. Some of the issues I had already anticipated like a move to a less permanent, more freelance/contract worker environment, and difficulties that may crop up if your supervisor and you live in different time zones but they expect responses aligned to their 9-5 schedule.

There were some surprises for me like the finding that older workers were more open to telecommuting than younger workers whom I assumed would be more comfortable with a digital existence. But apparently it isn’t degree of comfort with technology that was the defining factor:

Employees over the age of 40 were more likely to say they would prefer to continue working remotely, while employees younger than 40 were more likely to want to return to the office, according to one study of teleworkers done by Bucknell University. Young people felt they were missing out on the mentorship and soft skills they would have received working alongside older colleagues in the office, who can help them advance their careers.

“They are impatient to be successful,” Eddy Ng, a professor at Bucknell University and one of the report’s authors, told Recode. “They now know the value of social capital and the need to interact with others.”

The fact that older workers are likely to have living spaces large enough to accommodate office spaces and that are not intruded upon by roommates and younger children were also mentioned as possibly contributing to this finding.

There was also a racial divide and the theories supporting it bear considering if you are planning to do better on diversity and/or letting people work from home:

Nearly all Black knowledge workers currently working from home, some 97 percent, want a hybrid or fully remote work model, compared with 79 percent of their white counterparts, according to data from Slack’s Future Forum survey. The report posited a number of reasons, including remote work reducing the need for “code switching,” or making oneself and one’s speech fit the norms of a majority white office. Being outside the office also reduced instances of microaggressions and discrimination and improved Black employees’ ability to recover from those incidents. With remote work, Black knowledge workers reported a greater sense of belonging, a greater ability to manage work stress, and greater work-life balance than their white colleagues.

The Vox article suggests that productivity will gradually become less focused on the quantitative measures that have persisted since factory assembly lines and more aligned toward quality of work and interactions. However, they caution that using productivity as a measure of an employees worth, regardless of whether it is based on quantity or quality should not be the bottom line.

One of the things they caution against is a situation arts organizations have been urged to move away from –siloing. If you aren’t going into a shared workspace every day you aren’t interacting with everyone that works for your company, only a core group with whom you need to perform your tasks. As a result, there isn’t the sharing of ideas that lead to innovation; creating of empathy for needs of others, (you’re more likely to make things easier for Carol in accounting if you see how hard she works); or the creation of a general organizational culture.

At the same time, the article says that seeing people in their home environments rather than their office cubicle has helped to humanize them.

You don’t come out of seeing your coworkers — and their living rooms and their babies and their pets — in the middle of a global pandemic without getting a little closer to them. And such closeness makes people happier and better at work.

The pandemic did a good job of humanizing people, not only because we saw more of their interior lives but because we worked with them while going through something immense.

[…]

Indeed, one in six people reported crying with a coworker this year, according to Microsoft’s study, and nearly one in three say they are more likely to be their authentic selves at work than last year. About 40 percent said they were less embarrassed when their home life showed up at work compared to how things used to be. All of these interactions correlate with a better sense of well-being, higher productivity, and more positive perceptions of work, according to the study.

Hopefully that isn’t all just the stress of the pandemic and people will continue to feel a closer connection with each other.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

1 Comment

Where Are All The Cool Masks?

March 23, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

You know, we talk about the ability the arts have to bring solutions to societal problems. There is one area in which I thought I would see a bigger contribution in the past year but didn’t and that is facemasks.

There is so much obvious potential there, but I haven’t really seen a lot of interesting or clever use of the space. Even if an artist’s purpose isn’t to solve a reluctance to wear masks, there is a motivation to sell masks by designing something people want to show off.

Now granted, the whole point of the last year has been not to come in contact with other people so not only might my experience be limited by the size of the population in my geographic location, but by the need to avoid other people.

However, I am also the person who has been doing temperature checks at the front door of a performing arts venue since July so it has been my business to pay attention to what people are or are not wearing.

I have seen some cool designs that let people show off their personality, but for the most part people show up wearing a monochromatic mask. Sometimes there is a corporate or university logo.

I have seen artistic masks for sale, but haven’t really seen many being worn.

On Hyperalleric, Francesca Magnani, showed off some of the 600 images of New Yorkers wearing masks she has taken and there is some interesting variety among those depicted. I guess I assumed it would become more of a fashion statement than it has.

In my own experience, for Christmas my nephews gave me a mask with a cat face and one with a dog face (though co-workers say it is a bear). What’s fun is that my mouth aligns with the mouth on the mask so it looks like I am speaking with a cat or dog mouth.

Somehow in the last few months I have become identified with those masks. I get more people on the street and in restaurants where I pick-up lunch asking me where the masks are when I am not wearing them than I get compliments on the masks when I am wearing them. People ask my co-workers about the dang masks.

I mean, as you can see, they are kinda fun and the dog one works with my beard even better than the cat one shown below. (I am not a cat, by the way.) But if this is the pinnacle of interesting masks out there, there is a lot more work that can be done.

General Musings

No Comments

Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program Opens April 8

March 22, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

If you have been looking at the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program information page as I have suggested, you may have seen it says the applications will open in early April,

However, there is a new button on that page that takes you to the application portal which informs you things are scheduled to kick off on April 8. You can sign up there to get additional notifications.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to register for a DUNS number (or research what your number is), register for SAM.GOV, and check out any webinars your state arts council, state small business administration resource or trade/discipline service organization may be offering.

There are FAQs and Checklists on the Small Business Administration webpage, but you are gonna have questions.

Finance, Government Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Valuing What Can Be Counted Can Count Against You

March 17, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Artsjournal.com linked to an article on Australia’s Arts Hub which looks at how the philosophy of “arts as a business” has undermined the arts in that country. The overall theme seemed to be that so much which was perceived as a blessing ended up narrowing the ability to broadly pursue independent creative expression.

Katharine Brisbane writes:

The introduction of the Australian Business Number (ABN) turned artists into ‘small business owners’. No longer objects of patronage, they were free to trade in their own name, and their daily practices became the business activities of budding entrepreneurs.

In the years that followed, artists developed inter-disciplinary practices that merged the interpretive and authorial roles of actors, directors and writers in collaboration. However, as time went on, the adoption of corporate measures such as the key performance indicator (KPI) made funding agencies increasingly more of a hindrance than a help.

Brisbane’s piece summarizes the contents of papers which have come out since 2000. The comments on one of those papers, Art in a Cold Climate: Rethinking the Australia Council by Keith Gallasch contained some interesting insights.

In particular, Sue Beal who was part of Actors’ Equity union and a member of the Australian Council for the Arts’ (OzCo in her letter) Theatre Board back in 1984 expresses regret for some of the decisions she supported having seen the results. Essentially she says that the push to recognize the arts as an industry and OzCo’s desire to consolidate political and economic power under its umbrella placed the major arts organizations in the country in a position to align standards and funding to their benefit.

As an Actors Equity official with the best of intentions, I argued strongly for the recognition of the arts as an industry, believing that this would result in an improvement to artists’ conditions. Well, it did improve the conditions of some, but it also provided the arguments used by the majors in their never-ending demands for increased support from the Theatre Board. It also paved the way for the economic rationalists who soon moved in with their mantra, ‘If it can’t be counted, it has no value’.

Cash flows, attendance projections, sponsorship deals, business plans, burgeoning ‘infrastructure’, marketing consultants, accountants negotiating with accountants-all in the name of ‘best practice’, and often producing bigger deficits-this became the milieu of the majors. Vision, imagination, artistic risk, innovation, experiment, obsession became peripheral. The bottom line was deified. The worst possible skewing one could imagine.

What I found interesting was her belief that there was once an opportunity to shift this power dynamic which Beal had lobbied against and now regrets.

…Pat Galvin, the Secretary of the Department responsible for the arts, suggested to the OzCo that he could take over the funding of the majors and cocoon them in a corner of the department,…. Thus leaving the Council to pursue its real agenda. I shamefacedly confess that I was one of those who argued against this, in hindsight, visionary proposal. The OzCo came up with a thousand reasons why they shouldn’t be handed over. Of these the most honourable-and silly-was the belief that these companies would benefit from a critique of their work from an artistic perspective.

…If the OzCo lost the majors’ huge funding allocation, it would also lose the statutory administrative proportion that came with their funding. Council couldn’t countenance a reduction in staff and believed that it could control the majors. That’s always been nonsense. The Boards of the majors have consistently demonstrated that their political astuteness is infinitely superior to that of the OzCo. They have succeeded where the OzCo has consistently failed: while most of the majors have built direct, confidential and beneficial relations with Canberra, the OzCo has never been able to achieve what should have been its primary goal-decent money for the arts-but instead spent most of its energies trying to survive threats to its own existence.

There is obviously nothing to say that the Arts Council wouldn’t have ended up just as pressed to fend off threats to its own existence had this scheme come to fruition. Government often views arts funding as a zero sum situation so if the major organizations were receiving funding already, it is just as likely the existence of the council would be seen as unnecessary. Beal might instead be arguing that it was a mistake to place the majors within the direct purview of the department secretary because it allowed them to amass so much political influence.

While the arts in the US have fared no better in relation to the NEA, it is always interesting to see how government funding of arts and culture has fared in other countries.

Government Relations

No Comments