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Actual Recognition That Return To Office Shouldn’t Be Return To Usual

October 18, 2022

by:

Joe Patti

Yesterday Daniel Pink made the following Twitter post about OKRs – Objectives & Key Results (because apparently KPIs – Key Performance Indicators, needed to be replaced with another equally meaningless acronym?) and he suggested some NO-KRs which have plagued work culture to jettison.

OKRs — Objectives & Key Results — can improve performance.

But maybe it's time for NO-KRs — a list of things organizations ask people to *stop* doing (cc-ing everyone on emails, scheduling endless meetings, presenteeism, etc.)

Link: https://t.co/iomTVyTyfJ pic.twitter.com/f97Gz599n8

— Daniel Pink (@DanielPink) October 17, 2022

Pink provided a link to a website summarizing the Charter Workplace Summit. This was the first time I have seen signs corporate employer making constructive attempts to revise the office work environment and move beyond threats or cheap perk ploys to get people to return to the office.

Some of the things that caught my attention:

Workers should be re-onboarded. “We’ve been spending all this energy on onboarding new employees in a unique and special way,” said Daisy Auger-Domínguez, chief people officer at Vice Media Group and author of Inclusion Revolution. “We need to do the same thing for our current employees.” She sees that as a way to remind colleagues why it’s important to come to the office.

Talk about what’s not working. “We owe it to our people to get really specific about where we’re growing, where we’re shrinking, where we think we have the most risk,” said Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy, and purpose officer. “In doing so, we give our people a lot more power as well.” Providing transparency about a business’s challenges is also a way to enlist colleagues in navigating an economic downturn, said Kieran Luke, chief operating officer at Lunchbox. “We want everyone to see and understand, empathize, and take a sense of ownership.”

Audit your attention. “The scarcest resource that we have is not money and it is not time. It is attention,” said Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp. Organizations need to assess what they’re asking their leaders, managers, and individual employees to focus attention on amid numerous priorities. “We can actually sit down and look at it and give ourselves almost a budget,” he advised. “How are we going to prioritize the things we need [a company’s staff] to focus on?”

I particularly liked the idea of re-onboarding, especially if people have been working from home for any length of time because the shift back to the office is pretty much going to be akin to starting a new job in a new place mentally, emotionally, physically and relationship wise. In addition, the time and attention paid to new hires makes you feel special. I am sure a lot of us have resented seeing special offers advertised for new subscribers to a service, but no benefit given for 10 years of loyalty. I have recently seen people complain online about being denied the $2/hr bump in salary being advertised for new hires when they obviously had more experience and wouldn’t require a learning curve. It makes people feel their loyalty is taken for granted.

I also liked the concept that these days attention is a scarcer resource than time and money and that there needs to be clear communication across the organization about what priorities should receive the most attention. We have all seen the posters wearily asking which of the 10 top priorities is actually the super-secret extra top priority the boss want you to focus on first.

What I was really surprised to see included in the list was the recognition that workplaces being a social environment, there is opportunity for tension. There seemed to be an acknowledgement not only that this may present a problem for people returning from a work from home setting, but that perhaps more could have been done to train people for that reality over the last few decades:

Practice real-life scenarios such as uncomfortable conversations. “We often give people an opportunity to expand their role and become managers without actually giving them the experiences that they need to practice the craft,” said Edith Cooper, co-founder of Medley. One way to do that is to create spaces, such as group coaching environments, where they can practice having difficult conversations without being judged or dismissed.

and

Physical offices are a place for conflict. “Conflict, disagreement, the brainstorm, the row, the ‘I’m sorry, we’re not on the same page here’” are important to spend time together with colleagues for, said Julia Hobsbawm, author of The Nowhere Office. In-person work—whether it’s in an office, coffee shop, or other location—is also important for training, mentoring, and social connections between people. “To hang out, to learn, or to argue,” is what in-person work time should be for, concludes Hobsbawm.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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Questioning Capacity Building

October 17, 2022

by:

Joe Patti

Over the last few months, Non-Profit Quarterly has run a series of pieces on the topic of capacity building. In particular, the authors have challenged the notion that current capacity building efforts are healthy for non-profits given that the definitions of capacity building and effectiveness are made externally by funders rather than internally by the non-profit entity.

Particularly because these definitions tend to hew closely to commercial quantitative metrics which aren’t particularly valid when it comes to organizations dealing with homelessness, drug rehabilitation, domestic violence, etc., where low numbers served can mean the organization needs more capacity or that they ARE being very effective in achieving their goal.

Additionally, as Marcus Littles points out in his piece, there are entrenched issues facing Black and Brown lead organizations which impede their growth in ways consultants can’t fix:

…A board development training plus a communications audit does not equal sustainability in seven months. A technology plan combined with an organizational culture audit does not equal organizational resilience in a year. Why? Because on their own, competency building and skill development do not enable Black and Brown leaders and organizations to overcome the structural inequities that make it difficult for them to thrive.

In surveying a group of leaders at Black-led community-based nonprofits, Littles notes a distrust of capacity building programs, not only because of a perception that they “perpetuate white-dominant norms of effectiveness,” but also that they signal a lack of commitment to the success of an organization by funders:

The first: “Capacity building is the consolation prize money that foundations offer when they are willing to pay for us to get advice, but they aren’t willing to resource us to help our people get free.” The second quote resonated with most of the folks we interviewed: “When I think of capacity building, the first thing I think is that capacity is the wrong word.”

Capacity is a tepid word. Once an organization’s capacity is built, what does it become? Capable? Sufficient? Competent? Capacity building is a process without a tangible aspiration. It is an investment with an unambitious return.

These perspectives made me stop to think a bit more about the idea of capacity building. The idea of capacity building as a consolation hasn’t necessarily been true in my experience since I generally have applied for separate monies to support a specific goal rather than having someone say, we won’t fund X, but we would like to offer you funding for capacity building. Though up until recently when funders began to allow funds to be used for operational expenses, it could be difficult to answer questions about how the increased capacity would be sustained in the future if the capacity wasn’t going to directly result in increased earned or unearned revenue or be volunteer supported.

So in that context, I can understand the feeling that capacity building programs can feel a little hollow without an interest and commitment to an organization to provide some sort of support over multiple years if required.

Advocacy, Fundraising, State of the Arts

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Great Experience Is Crucial To Achieving Perfect Acoustics

October 12, 2022

by:

Joe Patti

I haven’t really been paying close attention to all the recent stories about the re-opening of the renovated Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, but a New Yorker article about how the acoustics have been re-engineered caught my notice. Our main guides through the article are acoustical-engineers Christopher Blair and Paul Scarbrough of the firm, Akustiks, who were hired to solve the sound problems of the hall.

The fact they were advising that the adhesive coating on wood paneling be 3/16 inch thick rather than 1/8 and were concerned that the fabric samples for the seating was too thin, you get a sense of just how exacting the tolerances they work with. So you can imagine just how upsetting it was to the original acoustic engineer when 200 seats were added to the initial construction of the hall in the 1950s without consulting with him. That decision apparently has contributed to the sound problems of the hall ever since.

The new design eliminates 200 seats, increases the pitch of the seating and moves the orchestra 25 feet closer to the audience. This will mean instead of 30% of seats being 100 feet or more from the orchestra, only nine percent will.

But Blair and Scarbrough say that the audience experience of the space is of greater influence on how the room sounds than all the science based adjustments they are implementing, something known as psychoacoustics.

Scarbrough said that the Royal Festival Hall of London was one of his favorite venues: “You cross the Thames on the Hungerford Bridge, you can see Parliament, the London Eye, St. Paul’s Cathedral. The lobby is active, it’s like the living room for all of South Bank. You progress upstairs, and—”

“—and it almost makes up for the acoustics,” Blair interrupted.

“True. But you feel you’re in a special place. It’s the psychoacoustics that works so well there.”

[…]

People often have a special feeling about listening to opera outdoors, under the stars with a bottle of wine. The sound is usually weak, or amplified, or in other ways just not that good—yet, still, great.

The author of the New Yorker piece, Rivka Galchen, cites the way sound plays in Hagia Sophia, Chichén Itzá and Toshogu Shrine, in Nikko, Japan as examples of how people have been integrating psychoacoustics to create a sense of importance to a place.

For Geffen Hall, these principles aren’t just being applied inside the hall, but in terms of how audiences approach the doors and move throughout the space. We talk about how there is often a sense that you have to possess inside knowledge to attend an orchestra concert, but architect Gary McCluskie is quoted as saying that was the case if you wanted to even find the door.

“With the old hall, it was difficult to even find the entrance, unless you already knew where it was,” McCluskie said. They wanted the hall to feel welcoming to everyone, not only to those people who were—in whatever way—in the know.

Clearly, a great deal of effort and attention is being paid to getting things right and erasing past perceived flaws with the space currently known as Geffen Hall. In reading the article, I also became aware of the time and effort that went into writing the piece. This piece is set to appear in the print edition of the New Yorker on October 17, but Rivka Galchen notes that she first met with Blair and Scarbrough to discuss their work in November 2021, spoke to New York Philharmonic conductor Jaap van Zweden in June and references people she spoke with at two tuning rehearsals which started in August.

I just wanted to note that while I knock out these posts in the course of an hour or so, I need to acknowledge I am benefiting from much greater efforts made by others.

Arts Facilities, Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations

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Pittsburgh Likes Us, But Europe Loves Us

October 11, 2022

by:

Joe Patti

Jeremy Reynolds recently wrote a great piece about the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s (PSO) European tour. The article isn’t so much about what happened during the tour as it is about why orchestras tour. The insight it provides about the way orchestra operate is pretty fascinating.

People interviewed for the article admit that PSO’s touring activities don’t really benefit Pittsburgh in terms of tourism or increased business opportunities and corporations are increasingly less willing to support the orchestra’s tours.

However, European tours are apparently a great recruitment and retention tool for the orchestra. There was concern that music director and conductor Manfred Honeck might be lured away by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which has a bigger budget and salary base, but he surprised everyone by renewing his contract with Pittsburgh–with the understanding they would continue touring.

Similarly, the role of concertmaster went unfilled for years until last Spring when David McCarroll assumed the position and part of the appeal for him was the adulation PSO received while on tour.

He said the opportunity to tour in Europe — and to be welcomed with such fervor — is something that defines a top caliber orchestra.

“I know these audiences,” he said. “The reaction to the symphony is not typical. This is not usual, it’s not normal.”

Who wouldn’t want a job where they got that kind of acclaim? Even if you have to leave your hometown to actually get it.

“We’re famous everywhere else except Pittsburgh,” said Bill Caballero, the orchestra’s principal French horn player. “We go to these places and they go crazy for us.”

Though touring can sometimes be something of a double-edged sword when it comes to recruitment. Apparently, when the Oslo Philharmonic visited Pittsburgh, PSO took the opportunity to wine and dine the music director and ultimately lured him away from Oslo.

Where you tour in Europe also apparently matters:

“Tours were this big benchmark that orchestras differentiated themselves with, right along with their base and how long their season is,” said Drew McManus, a Chicago-based orchestra consultant.

“If they went on tour, did they go to Europe? And if they went to Europe, do you mean Spain or do you mean Germany? It’s all a kind of caste system.”

There is quite a bit more detail about the tour in the article, including some nice multimedia components, so take a look and learn a little bit more about the nuances involved with orchestra touring.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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