COVID 19 has been and continues to be the seminal event of our lives. In addition to the obvious threat to our health and safety, it has affected the way we work and perform as humans in very profound ways. In this special two-part edition of MINDWORKS, host Daniel Serfaty talks with workspace designer Karin Sharav-Zalkind, human language scientist Mary Freiman, and industrial organizational psychologist Dr. Kara Orvis on what we have learned from working through the COVID pandemic that we can take forward and help us reimagine work in the 21st century.
COVID 19 has been and continues to be the seminal event of our lives. In addition to the obvious threat to our health and safety, it has affected the way we work and perform as humans in very profound ways. In this special two-part edition of MINDWORKS, host Daniel Serfaty talks with workspace designer Karin Sharav-Zalkind, human language scientist Mary Freiman, and industrial organizational psychologist Dr. Kara Orvis on what we have learned from working through the COVID pandemic that we can take forward and help us reimagine work in the 21st century.
Daniel Serfaty: Welcome to Mindworks. This is your host, Daniel Serfaty. COVID-19. This has been, and continues to be, the seminal event of our lives. In addition to the obvious threat to our health and safety, it has affected the way we work and the way we perform as humans in very profound ways. In this special two-part edition of Mindworks, we take a deep dive into this topic and share with you insights from experts on the ever-changing nature of work and the workplace.
What is it that we have learned from working through the COVID pandemic that we can take forward and help us reimagine work in the 21st century? My three guests are imminently qualified to discuss and enlighten us on this matter from their very different perspectives.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind is an Israeli bond designer and founding principal and creative director of NoBox Studio. Her true passion lies in creating meaningful spaces that promote creative company cultures. She does it by integration of all design forms, with which she creates spaces people love to work and live in. Karin uses her deep expertise in creating experiential interiors to help companies manifest their identities in the workplace. In 2017 Boston Magazine held her talk, called The No Name Office, during Design Week Boston as one of the can't miss events. Currently Karin is actually documenting the current state of the workplace around the Boston area, observing the effects of the pandemic on these spaces.
Mary Freiman graduated with a Master's Degree in Human Language Technologies from the Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona, where she also studied linguistics and philosophy. Her career has centered around research on how humans communicate with each other, as well as with technology, and how communication in both directions between humans and technology can support understanding on how to make humans and computer work effectively together. Mary is currently leading the Cognitive Augmentation Technology Capability at Aptima, where she continues to care about humans working well, but also how technology can support their work and make it good.
My third guest is a returning guest to the Mindworks podcast. She appeared the first time earlier this year, when we talked about teams and distributed teams. Dr. Kara Orvis is a principal scientist and the Vice President of Research and Development at Aptima. As VP, she manages four divisions with more than 100 interdisciplinary personnel across 20 states. Kara herself has worked remotely for more than 10 years. She received her PhD in Industrial Organizational Psychology from George Mason University, and her dissertation was focused on distributed leadership and teamwork. She has published several articles on topics related to the nature of distributed work.
Here we are with very different perspective, the language and cognitive one, the industrial organizational one, the design and spatial one, to help us understand a little bit about what COVID-19 has done to our work, but also how it has affected the way we think about the future of work and the future of the workspace.
First, I would like my guests to introduce themselves. And I want to ask you, specifically what made you choose human work in all its aspect as a domain of interest? Mary, you're a cognitive scientist. You could have worked with language and babies. Kara, you would have worked about giving very expensive advice as a management consultant somewhere in the corporate America. And Karin, you could have also thought about designing high rises and things like that. But you all focus actually on the human dimension of work in different aspects. So let's start with you, Karin. Why did you choose this domain? What is particularly interesting there?
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: Well, my parents really wanted me to work in communications because I had really good human skills and I felt that after working in a newspaper for many years in Israel, this was not something that would interest me in the long run, and I wanted something deeper with more impact. And as I started design school, I was dabbling between architecture and design, and then I realized that architecture does not really interest me in the sense that it's a lot about the space and not enough about the human.
What really drew me in, especially to interior design, was the idea that we're from the inside looking out and how we feel as human in these spaces, and I think that's very important to remember because a lot of spaces are very foreboding when you walk in. Even walking into big office atriums and everything, and you're feeling very small and insignificant, and I think the human experience is what makes us difference in this world between animals and that's what sparks our creativity, our connection, our passion. So I think that's what led me to that world.
Daniel Serfaty: Well, I'm certainly happy you're with us today.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: Thank you.
Daniel Serfaty: Mary, what about you?
Mary Freiman: I was initially drawn to linguistics in particular because I thought that I wanted to be an English major when I went to college, but then I took a few literature courses and found that they sucked the fun out of literature for me. And I read a book at my sister's house that she just had laying around called Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and it was just such a cool way of looking at English in particular, but language, as having really specific patterns across time and across people, and I was completely fascinated by that.
I went back to school and changed my major to linguistics. It was probably my eighth major, so I'm not sure why that one stuck. But I've since college always been fascinated with how people use language as a tool in itself and what it reflects in how minds work, how when we are speaking and we are communicating with each other, that is a reflection of what we understand about the world and what we understand about our relationships with each other.
When we then insert technology into that ecosystem, it's an odd fit because technology doesn't have that same context and understanding about what language is to technology, it's just not the same thing. And so I've always been really fascinated with that and trying to figure out how better to describe how language is used by humans and computers when communicating with each other, but also how to make that better, so that humans are getting what they want from technology, which is actually harder than you would think. It seems like we're frequently disappointed in the skills of computers, especially when you think about talking to Siri or any other device that seems to be talking to you and you quickly realize that you're on a totally different page from what Siri has to offer you.
Daniel Serfaty: Kara. [crosstalk].
Kara Orvis: Yes, hi. Good afternoon.
Daniel Serfaty: You're both a student and the practitioner of distributed work and complex work arrangements. So tell us a little bit how you got to that particular focus. What attracted you to this part of it?
Kara Orvis: I was a psychology major in undergrad at Ohio Wesleyan University, and I thought all psychologists had to be clinical psychologists, and I thought I wanted to work with kids. And I started to learn a little bit about the success rates and some of the difficulty of folks who were working with children, and I'm a pretty positive person, and I really wanted to make an impact and work in an environment that I found I could make an impact. So I thought maybe psychology is not for me. But then somebody had recommended I take this organizational behavior course that was offered in, I think, the economics department or something like that, and it was all about humans in the workplace.
I learned about these people called organizational psychologists and they studied motivation and engagement and things that I was really excited about. So I decided to go to grad school, and then when I was in grad school at [inaudible] University, this was the late nineties, so the internet was just starting, I was beginning to use it, and I was working on this really big virtual team across multiple academic institutions, and it was really, really hard to work with people over the internet and through some of these new collaborative technologies that were coming up and people were starting to use. So I got really interested in how it's different working through technology than when you're in a face-to-face team environment.
I also want to mention that I am a dual-career family. So my husband and I both work full time. I have been working home, like you mentioned, Daniel, for over 10 years. I worked from a home office. And I have two kids, a six and eighth grader. And one thing that I found really interesting about the other folks on line here, Mary and Karin, is you guys are mothers too, and you are dual career families as well. So I think all of us can offer a personal perspective on what it's been like working in the era of COVID as well as our interests in our careers as well.
Daniel Serfaty: That's a nice segue into my next question. To what extent, your personal individual professional work, what extent did it change during COVID? Can you provide some examples? I mean, as you said, the three of you are, indeed, parents, mothers, with kids at home, with husbands at home sometimes. How did that work, especially for a person like you, Kara, who's been working already in a distributed home office while your staff is actually all over the country. How did COVID specifically change that?
Kara Orvis: I can tell you the most startling difference, and it was hard. I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. So as a woman who has a career and children, I've tried really hard and put a lot of time and effort into setting up my kids' experiences so that they're taken care of and they're engaged in the right activities when they're not with us. So I'll stand in line at 3:00 in the morning to get them into the right summer camps. I'll go to great lengths to make sure they're taken care of, and that's so when I'm at home, I have the environment in which I can focus and have my full attention on what I'm doing at my job.
Because of COVID, kids were taken out of the classroom and then put into the home environment 24/7, I no longer had that carefully curated environment in which I could do my work during those 10 hours that I had to do my work. And now I was fixing lunches or I was helping with homework or helping with Zoom calls that were falling, and I had a husband who was also working from home as well. And so an environment that was super peaceful, everyone would leave and I could go sit down in my office and do my work, that all changed completely, and it was constant interruptions all the time.
Daniel Serfaty: Karin, how did it affect yours?
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: It was devastating, I think, for an office designer. And I was in this moment in time where my kids were old enough, I had taken back from a "sabbatical" that I had for myself because we were building our own home, and I was like, of course I'm going to be the designer of my house, and I'm this great offers designer, and two three companies that I design for have really succeeded and exploded, and it was a really badge of honor because I have been piecemealing work ever since I started on my own and I've always worked from home.
There were many, many reasons for that. Because when I started off, there was the big 2008 crash and nobody was building homes, so I pivoted to office design and I loved it. And then as I was re-emerging back on the market and starting again, COVID hit. And the way that you were describing it Kara, It was just I never got that moment, my headspace, which is so critical.
At some point, I remember talking to one of the principals in the school and saying, "Look, I'm suffering from ADHD just from managing their Zooms. Either put someone there for 30 minutes or just get them off. I don't care what it is, but I can't manage 15 minute increments of Zooms, especially with a first grader that can't read." So that was very difficult.
Then nurturing a high schooler who was in public school and the public school completely dropped the ball all last year, and there was no program for them, and a middle schooler who was just really he'd get the Zoom rebound, if you've ever experienced that feeling of you're all Zoomed out, but you're 11 and you can't see anybody. And it was really hard.
But I think for me personally, it was very, very devastating. It was actually heartbreaking. Because it was like, I'm fed up. I'm an immigrant, I'm a mother of three kids, I've just done this thing and I can't do this anymore. But I think from those moments, you dig deeper and you redefine for yourself, what does it actually mean to be a designer today? Does it mean that I have to be in an actual physical space? I mean, we were talking about the virtual space versus this, and I'd write about design, I'd think about design. I think there's deeper meaning to what we do as humans and it's not just me going in a space and figuring it out and solving that problem. It's deeper than that. That's how the project of just documenting the office spaces during COVID arrived and I'm excited about that.
Daniel Serfaty: Mary, how did it affect you?
Mary Freiman: Oh, my goodness. Just as badly as the others. I thought that I would be prepared, because I have also been working from home since 2010, and my husband, since he got a job as a professor, he's home three days a week normally. And so I thought that we could work in the same office. We've been doing that for a long time. But then when you add in a five and a seven year old, or now they're six and eight, and we're managing them as well, and now my husband is, yes, working from home as usual, but also teaching from home very loudly, suddenly the space for all of us, going back to the theme of space, has completely changed, and the ability for me to focus and have a quiet moment to actually get work done, it just completely changed.
I rearranged our house. We rearranged our lives to coordinate with another family to have our kids there a couple of days and their kids here a couple of days and then have somebody to help them. A lot of the work that my husband and I did in the past year to make it work was figuring out that suddenly our jobs became a zero sum game where the more that I was working meant he had to work less because we couldn't do all of the things we normally could do in the same amount of time, and so that was difficult for us to negotiate and to make sure that our kids were doing what they needed to do.
We were figuring out how to coordinate with another family and have somebody watching them and teaching them and all the other things. Meanwhile still having the same job I've had, and I would say even busier in the past year than ever before, just as a coincidence at that time in my career.
We were very fortunate in that I do have a partner. We are very fortunate in that we were able to coordinate with another family and that we were able to hire somebody to help, and I know that that made us very lucky, but it was still extremely difficult, especially as time went on and things change. It seemed like things changed every couple of months.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: I think for me, one of the words that struck me at the beginning, and I think that was really hard for me is the word of the essential. Am I essential? What is my job here in the world? I think for many women it shrunk me down to that very immediate, I'm the mom, I need to do ABC, and then you're like, but I'm at this intelligent woman, is this it? Kind of thing. And it's a very existential moment within this world of, who's essential, who's not essential, so forth. So it's tough.
Kara Orvis: I was going to say, Mary, just to pick up on something you said, because we're all women that are talking today.
Mary Freiman: Sorry, Daniel.
Kara Orvis: My husband has a career and he is awesome, wonderful, and we really try to approach our family through a team perspective. But he struggled too. He would tell you the same story that I told you. And like you, Mary, I'm so grateful that I did have a partner to go through that were able to figure it out. I think about single parent families, and I don't even know how they could do that. Or families that can't afford to hire help in, I don't know how they survived this. So there's definitely folks that are worse off than we were.
Daniel Serfaty: Listening to those confession, almost, I would say, [inaudible] I really appreciate that, and I think our audience appreciates it because they lived some pieces of that. They totally recognize themselves in your stories. And not just women, you're right, Kara. Men also underwent some a transformation during COVID. But what strikes me, it's not just the work that has been redesigned, it's not even the workspace that has been redesigned, it's other structure, like family. The concept of family has been reviewed, as all your examples [inaudible] or even multifamily units, as Mary shared with us the pod idea. That suddenly families have to collaborate in way that they were perhaps not prepared, not designed, to do. It's a big redesign. It's not just the work. And I think that is something we're just starting to appreciate, the degree to which that thing has been truly traumatizing the very structures that we use to live with.
Then go even deeper at the individual level, at the intimate level, as Karin was sharing with us about, who am I? Am I essential? Am I a mother? Am I a worker? Am I both? What is it? So I think that not understanding those deep human implications is doing a disservice to all of us who. during our professional lives, are thinking about designing work. That's what we do for our customers at the end of the day, whether they are soldiers or corporate clients or surgeons, that's what we do for them.
Before we take a deeper dive into work into the 21st century, how important it is to reflect, to do what you just did for yourself, but also in general, as professional, to reflect really of the past 16 or 18 months, to really understand the shifting nature of work. For example, had work shifted already and that was just the catalyst that exacerbated a trend, for example? How important it is for us in order to think about the designers of the future, to look back in the rear view mirror and understand what happened.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: It's vital. I have to confess, when I started school way back in the 1990s, the first studio that we had at the time was to build a space for a person who works from home. So we're talking way back. So as designers, it's been a question that we've been pondering for a long, long time. It's not something new.
I think what happened here was we got the ultimate lab [inaudible] innovation in terms of work from home. It's interesting how it's unraveling. It's really, really fascinating for me, because at the beginning it was very cyber, futuristic, we're all on Zoom, we can do this and do that, and as we're getting more and more closer to a point where we can reacquaint ourselves to spaces again, what does that mean? And how do we reacquaint ourselves? And the way that we can reacquaint ourself is through reflection and through seeing what worked, what didn't work, what is something that we can make better for the future? It's not a gimmick anymore. It's not something that we just ponder as designers and we make these cool spaces.
I was thinking about it today that more and more in the past 10 years, we tried to make the office feel more like home. We designed all these communal spaces that look like a library or our living room, and now we're officizing our home spaces to create more thinking pods. And I found this funny image of this guy from the ninth century sitting at a desk and doing clerical work. So we're basically going back in time. So I don't know. It's like we're in this entrapment moment. So reflection is important.
Daniel Serfaty: Kara, Mary, both in terms of your own personal life, but also the people you work with, your colleagues, the people you supervise, how important it is really to take the time to think about all that, reflect on that?
Mary Freiman: I can say from a personal professional perspective what I saw, but I can also mention that we did a study at Aptima seeing what we saw and how that changed over the course of the year. Or in fact, really the first few months. So personally, as I said, I've been working remotely for a long time and I had all of that disruption around me in my home office that made working very different and more difficult. But actually when it came to working with people at work, having people at home was nice because the conversations that they would have normally in the hallway, or in passing, or in each other's offices, that I was never really party too, started to happen online in Zoom chats, or in conference calls, or things like that, or emails. And so I definitely felt that I was more included in some of the conversations that I may have missed out on previously.
That, I think, has really held over since then. Maybe because I'm bossier or more intrusive about getting into conversations, but it's nice to at least feel like I'm in the loop more on some things like that. And then speaking of loop, we did an internal research study for Aptima looking at how patterns of work changed and how people felt about their effectiveness and their workload and how they were interacting with each other, right in the first couple of months after the pandemic really hit. So everybody was working from home and we could very clearly track the increase in emails and chats and meeting frequencies, and when we asked employees at Aptima, how much more frequent are these sorts of emails, how much more frequent are meetings, and things like that, it was something that everybody felt that they were now in more communication by these other channels than they had been before.
But I think part of what was interesting is that most people felt like their effectiveness was actually about the same. So they didn't feel that their work was overwhelming them with this new way of doing things and they felt largely just as effective.
Similarly, we had mostly positive responses about whether or not they felt their work was flexible, and if their workload had increased. There was an increase in workload noticed at that time, and again, that's partly just because of some coincidental things happening at the company. So that was really interesting to track, and we were able to track it both through surveys and by looking at our communications and seeing how often meetings were set in calendars, and what was the change in the number of emails sent and the number of messages sent in Zoom chat.
That was really nice to see and to have confirmation that we weren't crazy, but really in fact communications and how things were happening had changed significantly.
Daniel Serfaty: Thanks for sharing that, Mary. Certainly it will be very interesting to repeat the same research over time periodically, because of the initial effect is, isn't that cool to be on the virtual water cooler and talk to friends kind of thing, eventually subside over time and to see whether or not actually it still takes basically more time to achieve the same level of productivity.
That's really one of the insights perhaps here, is that this notion of people optimizing their outcome or their productivity or their accomplishments, but in order to do that, they have to work harder. And the nature of the work harder has to do with more communication and coordination [inaudible]. We'll be back in just a moment, stick around.
Hello, Mindworks listeners. This is Daniel Serfaty. Do you love Mindworks, but don't have time to listen to an entire episode? Then we have a solution for you, Mindworks Minis, curated segments from the Mindworks podcast condensed to under 15 minutes each and designed to work with your busy schedule. You'll find the Minis, along with full length episodes, under Mindworks on Apple, Spotify, [inaudible], or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kara, I just want to wrap up that question, but suddenly you were not the one who was working at home, everybody was like you, everybody you supervised actually worked from home, I think, without exception, at least the first month. What insight you learn from that?
Kara Orvis: I won't hide the fact that I'm very much pro distributed work. I think it can be done well, just as well as face-to-face work. I think that our organization was largely distributed anyway. I know people who work in an office who mostly work with people who are in another office or another state, working from a home office. So my perspective has always been that our company is largely distributed.
The one thing that I found challenging, I have this mental model with everyone, all 120, 130 people in my mind, and I know who's looking after who, and I used to utilize folks who were on site to check in on people. Walk by a office, see if somebody's there, are they withdrawing from the organization? Can they stop by and have a chat rather than send an email, because it might be something sensitive, or I need to gauge how somebody is doing.
I lost that because people weren't seeing each other. It was much more difficult, it was more time consuming, to help take care of anyone. We had to reconfigure that virtual space to make sure that there were enough touchpoints to make sure that everybody was doing okay, especially under the circumstances where there was a lot of ambiguity and stress outside of work, but related to work. So I lost that.
What I was so excited about, like Mary, was that I belong to this virtual crew at the company and no one really understood our experience. I remember somebody saying, "You have to be on camera all the time." She did not know what it was like to be on camera eight hours a day, and how you needed to use the restroom once in a while, or you needed to stand up and stretch. And it was like all of a sudden everyone got the same perspective of what that kind of work was like.
I also appreciated the stigma that sometime was associated with remote work, but there was no clear research or data to support some of the negative things about remote work. I love seeing how easy it was really for people in our company to go to a fully remote situation and keep doing the work that we needed to do. So that was really nice.
Daniel Serfaty: Yes. No, I think they are two words that I like very much personally, and I hope we can dig a little deeper in them, this notion of empathy, as you say, because right now we're equalized and we all work from the same situation, or similar situation, so naturally it's easier for you to take the perspective of the other. Something that perhaps when we have a hybrid workforce, you cannot really identify with the person who's been working from home for the past 10 years. It's difficult. We can make the intellectual exercise perhaps, but it's not the emotional one.
The other word that I think is important here is this notion of intimacy. Many people worry that because we're not going to be together we're going to lose that human contact. And it's absolutely true in many circumstances. I think the fact that we're invited into people's homes, that we had more opportunities to share, made us more intimate with each other at some level. And I wonder which we will be able to replicate that in the future.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: Yes and no. I wanted to share, we had a conversation about this with a group of people, and there was a woman of color in that group and she said some profound things that I think none of us could understand, but she said, "Look, when I was working at home and my boy would run behind me, I would get different reactions, and I could tell from the faces of people on Zoom, that I had a different reaction to my wild child running behind me than a white woman that had the same child running behind her." And it came to a point that it was so difficult for her, that intimacy was very, very difficult. And she said, "Look, when I go to work, I can bring my whole self physically to the space and leave behind those things of bias that people may read into."
I think that's something very important to understand that not all remote work is created equal for everybody. If it's the infrastructure, if it's the gender bias, so we're three women here, but a lot of spaces where there were a lot of male dominant virtual meetings, sometimes women get swallowed up as they would in just corporate meetings, but at least there's a physical presence where they can stand up and show themselves versus in Zoom where it's supposedly the great equalizer or the pigeonhole, as I like to call it.
I think it's a very important question of equity and not to overlook that question of what happens with gender bias, color bias, race bias, all of these things in these kinds of spaces, and they probably have the same problems as you would have in a physical space, but maybe more so because suddenly people are in your home, or in your closet, depending on where you are. So I just wanted to point that out.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you, Karin. I think it's a very important point that I wanted to also explore with you. I have so many things I need to explore with you, we're going to need 10 hours. But that particular one had to do with the differential effects that this whole COVID had on different sub population, whether they are women, or minorities, or maybe people with limitations, old people or young people. I think that didn't treat everybody exactly equally, and I think it's important we explore that if we need to design the work of the future.
I'm going to work back a little bit here and ask you to describe, irrespective of COVID for a second, for our audience, maybe with examples if you can, to describe situations in which things such as the work structure, the work condition, the organizational arrangements, have been conducive to success in your own professional life. And also examples of the opposite, when sometime you find yourself in a project, in a company, in a situation, in which those context variables, the work structure, the work environments, the organizational arrangements, have been actually conducive to failure, or friction, or difficulties.
It's important because we're going to talk about designing work and we need to understand that these external design variables affect basically our productivity or also our failures, our frictions, our workload, our stress. So could you pick a couple of examples to share with our audience like that from your professional environment?
Mary Freiman: Well, one thing that was noticeable to me, especially as somebody who has worked remotely for a long time, is a few months ago, I went on a trip for work where we were going to be having a presentation, and I met several coworkers at the location, and over the course of a day or two ahead of the presentation, we worked together in a conference room that we commandeered at the hotel. And working together and preparing for this presentation in the same space at the same time, really proved valuable, and I thought made it possible for us to have a more natural interaction and a more natural revision process for our presentation over that day or two, so that we could be quiet in each other's presence and think, and be working on things, and then come back to something that came to mind and come back to having a normal interaction that you can't do in the same way over Zoom.
In that case, I definitely saw the value in being with people and working toward the same thing at the same time, so that you could have a normal conversation that wasn't so pressurized like it is on Zoom, where you feel like if you're quiet for too long, you might as well hang up. That was really good. I'm not saying I want to be in an office, but I do see the value for some occasions.
Daniel Serfaty: No, but that's very interesting Mary, because if you project that, if you have a blank sheet, which you need to design, basically, the work organization post COVID, beyond COVID, the injection of those moments into professional life are important, but they will need to be orchestrated. And that's really the lesson here, that it's not all the time, but from time to time, you need almost to push the reset button on that and enjoy, as you say, the silences and all the team dynamics that you experienced there. Thank you for sharing that.
Karin, Kara, any experiences one way or another, again, in which those external variables affected actually, positively or negatively, the experience?
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: I think because I don't work with big corporations all the time, I work with smaller companies, so that's not something that I missed being in or not, but I was part of the conference and it was the first time in many years as a designer, especially working in the US, that we were able to have speakers from around the world. And that was mind blowing that you got speakers from the far east and from Europe, and it was very, very exciting to be in a space where you don't have to fly in or pay a lot of money to go to it, it's just an afternoon you spend at home and your mind is blown just from meeting different people from different disciplines and different places. So I think that was huge.
Daniel Serfaty: That happened in the past few months?
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: I think it was in November, even. It was before the big wave of January. And I think it was in November and it was super inspiring. It was like November is the darkest month, and it was just a moment that you were kind of, this is not so bad. People are thinking about it and there's something to look forward to. For me, spiritually, that there's humans that are still thinking around here, you're not alone in this, we're all in this together, in this shared experience of being a part and making an effort to be part of these "smaller" conferences and so forth. So I think that was a huge moment.
Daniel Serfaty: Absolutely.
Kara Orvis: I find this question a little hard to answer, and I think what's rattling around in my head is the space and the work activity need to match. So there's probably some activities, like what Mary described, where getting together, working collaboratively in a synchronous physical space, is going to be good for some activities. But there's other activities where I know in our organization folks who work in an office have their own office with a door that they can close when they're working for six hours by themselves writing a book chapter. So I think it's about the match of the space to the work activity and what you're trying to achieve that's more important, and when those two don't work together, I think that's where you find challenges.
Daniel Serfaty: We talk about this notion of congruence in our human engineering, human performance engineering, balance. This notion of matching the work structure to the organizational structure or to the informational structure or some other dimension of human structure. And that congruence, I think while it was an elegant, theoretical concept for a while, I think we realized this year, how important that harmony is matching.
How many of us have been in Zoom meeting where the purpose was to do something like working on a document together, and it was a disaster because that was exactly the wrong work environment for that task. And vice versa, when sometime we all go into a physical meeting, and these are not just the two dimensions by the way, physical versus virtual, in which it becoming very unproductive because one person grabbed the microphone and everybody else just check their email. So it's understanding better that harmony, or that matching, between what people do and the environment that facilitate that doing is important.
I want maybe to dig a little deeper. Karin, you spent the last few months doing something really interesting, which is going around the greater Boston area and visiting deserted offices, or offices that were very partially populated. Tell us a little bit about that project. What did you see? What did you learn? What did you expect from that study?
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: I came in with zero expectations. As I said, the whole beginning of the pandemic was very devastating for me, especially as an office designer, when everybody's leaving the office and everybody's talking about, well, you can design Zoom spaces. I'm like, no, I will die before I do that.
Daniel Serfaty: It's almost becoming a cook when everybody's going on a diet.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: Exactly. It was bizarre. It was a bizarre sensation. I was like, okay, this is ground zero, and I was miserable and morbid, and it was dark, and it was just sad. And I just sat there and I was like, well, you have to do something with yourself. And one of the things that I said is, I'm going back to basics, the DNA of design. And the first thing that you do as a design thinker, which is really big now in all the business schools, all these design thinking projects.
Basically it's an exercise of observation, note-taking, making serendipitous connections between different cultures, ideas, poems, history, newspaper articles, podcasts, whatever it is. And it's like a melange of things, and then you come out with this beautiful space. And it hit me one day as I was looking at a Facebook memory, which were awful, by the way, to look at during the pandemic, it was like the life before or the before life. There's all these phrases that I can't even say them because they're intense.
There was this photo of this window of an office space in Boston, and it was my aha moment of how to solve the space. That window was the key to solving that space. And I was like... And it was a beautiful space, and it was just occupied barely a few months before the pandemic broke. And I was like, I wonder how it looks like now. And that's what started it.
There was a slew of emails that I sent right and left, and everybody was connecting me to people. And I started just by getting a good camera, my first love is photography, and just going there and just documenting. And first of all, I got a sketchbook. That's what we do. We got a sketchbook, we put a photo, and we start writing and we start documenting.
I interviewed a lot of people and my friends that came to like dealing with death, when a person dies some closets are emptied out immediately, but some, all the clothes are left there for years or the room is untouched, and it was like that. Some offices were, it's all neat and tidy, the caution tape over all the kitchen [inaudible], all the stickers of the six feet and going open in the elevator for the first time, and the seats were there, but there was a box with all of the people's stuff and their personal belongings from their knickknacks on their desks.
Then some offices, it was just like Pompeii. There were Halloween candy from the year before and a newspaper from March 9th, 2020, and a calendar on March 2020, and it's written dad's birthday, and things like that. And that was even harder. That was very eerie for me, because it was just... There's something about the neat and tidy that it's like, okay, it feels like an office in movement versus the left behind.
It was a lot of reactions. Some people were, we started this and we did this and we did cocktail night. And I don't know exactly what the end result will be of it, but what I have learned, and this is my hope, is there were some low tech companies versus high tech companies versus urban spaces and suburban spaces, and I wish we could create more synergy in the workflows of places, of low tech manufacturing, essential, what we call, and so forth, versus the high tech sitting at home coding. We all need a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
For me, I think that's the key for moving forward, is understanding what worked in those environment versus those environment, and each approach brings something else to the table and I think it's fascinating. There's also other considerations of the environmental impact of driving into work every day or in urban settings, what happens to all of the small businesses around it when office people don't arrive. So I don't know that there's a straight up answer. It was definitely a fascinating process and I'm just now starting to sift through the photos and figure out what to do with this project next.
Daniel Serfaty: No, it must have been beyond the emotion that you must have felt getting into places, it's almost after a nuclear explosion or something. The deserted places. And then Hollywood is making a lot of hay out of these looks, post-apocalyptic almost looks. But the question that interests me is the degree to which you will be able to derive some design principle, as you said, that was part of a design thinking impetus, way to which you will derive new way of thinking about office design for the future. How those static pictures were there, and how do they drive the design. And I'm really curious about how you're taking all that in the next steps. Maybe you'll come back to the podcast [crosstalk] and let us know.
Karin Sharav-Zalkind: I think there's two steps that we need, there's two keywords that I continuously have in my head, is one is flow and the other is flexibility. And I think the other pieces that I find really fascinating is, initially when people go back in the spaces, we have to be very, very careful of not changing too much. We're all in some post-trauma and there's something very gut-wrenching coming to a space that's completely been redesigned without you there. I think that can really scare people away. And I think rather than focusing on redesigning the space, is adding more places of respite, of reflection, of pause, and to acknowledge that there have been some personalized work rhythms that we need to acknowledge and take note of it and not be too quick to return to that same pace. So a lot of flow, flexibility. We don't have to do this so fast all the time. We can redesign as we go too, and that's okay. Completely okay.
Daniel Serfaty: That's really an interesting project. I'm really eager to see some of those pictures at the next expo, I guess. I'm going to show interest.
Thank you for listening to part one of the special two-part series on the future of work and the workplace. You can tweet us @mindworkspodcast or email us at mindworkspodcast@gmail.com.
Mindworks is a production of Aptima Incorporated. My executive producer is Ms. Debra McNeely and my audio editor is Mr. Carlos Simmons. To learn more and to find links mentioned in this episode, please visit aptima.com/Mindworks. Thank you.