The Cost of Loyalty

Life of an Architect

The episode explores the shifting dynamics of loyalty between architecture firms and employees in a post-pandemic landscape. Hosts Bob Borson and Andrew

Key takeaways

• COVID-1s acted as a 'black swan event' that exposed how much office culture relied on incidental, unmanaged interactions.
• The shift to remote work transitioned many employees from being goal or results-oriented to primarily task-oriented individuals.

Main topics

• Evolution of firm culture
• Impact of COVID-19 on professional relationships

Notable quotes

Firms now have to be much more deliberate about creating the conditions that make loyalty worth giving.

Conclusion

True professional commitment requires a reciprocal arrangement where f

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is Life of an Architect, a podcast dedicated to all things architecture, with a little bit of life thrown in for balance. Speaker 1 (0:09) Most firms would say they value loyalty, and most employees would probably say they do as well, which makes it interesting that both sides seem increasingly unsure what the word actually requires. Firms want people who are invested for the long term, while employees have become more careful about giving that commitment away before they understand what comes back in return. Somewhere along the way, what used to feel like a shared understanding starts to feel more like a negotiation. Welcome to episode 210, The Cost of Loyalty. Today's episode is generously brought to you with support from Construction Specialties, maker of architectural building products designed to master the movement of buildings, people, and natural elements. Speaker 1 (1:03) Welcome to the Life of an Architect podcast. I'm Bob Borson. And Speaker 3 (1:07) I'm Andrew Hawkins. Speaker 1 (1:08) And today we're going to be talking about loyalty, specifically the kind that firms tend to expect from employees and the kind employees used to assume that they would get back in return. For a long time, that relationship also formed a large part of what we thought of as firm culture because people stayed somewhere long enough to build trust and shared history. in a sense that they were part of something that extended beyond the project sitting in front of them. Very little of that had to be designed intentionally because the conditions of working together were already doing most of the work. And once those conditions changed, it became much easier to see that culture and loyalty had been reinforcing one another in ways we had mostly taken for granted. So, Andrew, right out of the gate, when you think back on your firm's history, Do you think culture was something anyone was consciously building or was it mostly something that developed because people stayed around long enough to actually know one another and figure out and see how the place worked? Speaker 3 (2:14) Well, I mean, honestly, I was definitely trying to build culture in Speaker 1 (2:19) the Speaker 3 (2:20) things that I was doing in my firm because it was small and it was a lot of young people that culture tended to ebb and flow a little bit. There were times where there was what I would call much. more culture than other times because of the employees and how they related to one another. But overall, yeah, I tried to focus on it, but I don't know how many of my employees were that focused on it, to be quite honest. Speaker 1 (2:42) Well, the part I find interesting, I don't know if now's the time to put this out there, but this is not a podcast dedicated to, hey, let's help Bob figure out what's going on in his own office. Speaker 3 (2:55) Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:55) This is something that I talk to a lot of people about, and I pay more attention to it now. In fact, actually, if you go back and look through probably like the last hundred podcasts we've done, there's a lot of it where the podcast becomes a bit of a sounding board where... I'm asking other people to listen and join in as we try to clarify what thoughts enter our head because we're trying to make something better. And that idea of public thinking shapes private thought that we've kind of been having as a recurring theme. Yeah. And so the part I find interesting about today's particular topic is that I don't really think today's story is about employees becoming less loyal. Even though that's the easiest or at least usually the easiest explanation to reach for. Yeah. I think a more useful question is whether people are simply responding to a relationship that has become more transactional and whether firms have adjusted their expectations as quickly as employees have adjusted their behavior. Which gets us into things like retention and compensation and professional growth and leadership or leadership opportunities, management opportunities. Speaker 3 (4:09) Yeah. And Speaker 1 (4:11) the larger question is really about culture and what it takes to create genuine investment when the old assumptions are no longer doing the work for us. Like loyalty is still possible, but. I think firms now have to be much more deliberate about creating the conditions that make loyalty worth giving. This is where my brain was at when I texted you that, hey, I want to get into this. Speaker 3 (4:35) Yeah, yeah. I can see that. I understand framing it that way. It's less of an expectation than it used to be. Companies used to not have to work to instill loyalty. That was more of a, maybe a workforce trade or the mentality of just people. Yeah. And then as we'll get into something, change that drastically. Yeah. Across the board. I mean, for everyone. Speaker 1 (4:56) So to that end, we've broken today's roadmap into four sections. Section one is what culture used to be. And then this black swan event that we're talking about. And then I want to segue into how that arrangement changed. How did the deal change? And then just to make sure that we're not just like talking out like, oh, this is what I think. And I'm basing everything based on just. observations and DMs and Speaker 3 (5:25) opinions. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:26) Instagram messaging is what does the research actually say? Is there data to support the position that we're trying to navigate through? And then the last one, because these things ideally are supposed to be of some value. It's the fix. So what happens now you've identified that maybe this is a two-way street discussion. How do you move forward? That's the premise on this. And so that, that first section that we have, which was what culture used to run on was for the vast majority of my career was something experienced long before anyone thought to describe it as a management responsibility, which is how I look at it now. And I thought for a long time is that the difference between big firms and small firms, like small firms, you don't talk about culture. It just is what it is. Every office clearly has its own personality. Every place I've ever worked has been different and they all have their own vibe and frequency and all that kind of good stuff. Speaker 3 (6:30) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:31) But most of that personality developed while everyone was busy doing the actual work rather than through any kind of deliberate effort to create it from my perspective. Now, what I've been spending a lot of time since I thought about this as a topic to go, and you said this at the top, when I asked you that question about your own firm cultures, you put effort into it and your employees might not have recognized that, hey, when we used to play these card games or we'd shut the office down on Friday and goof off and just kind of Speaker 3 (7:00) have Speaker 1 (7:01) fun with one another, that was a type of culture building, right? Speaker 3 (7:05) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:06) Even though you had Monday through Friday afternoon, early Friday afternoon, maybe. was this is how the job works. This is what you learn. You ask questions, you pick things up from the conversations happening around you. Like that's part of what happened. Speaker 3 (7:18) Yeah. So Speaker 1 (7:19) the younger architect can hear the senior architect working through a difficult consultant call. Maybe they learn how to handle situations or they get to see how a more experienced architect or employee handles a client meeting. And part of that knowledge just transfers because you just happen to be present and in the room and you see it and it's, you just absorb it. Speaker 3 (7:42) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:43) That same thing happened with trust as people stayed around long enough to learn who could be counted on when project got hard and who understood some obscure part of the work because someone had already dealt with it before. There was a shared history. What we're talking about is there's a shared history that was accumulated in these offices. And eventually all those relationships begin to feel like something the firm had created, even though the conditions of working together had actually been doing most of this work. This is the Monday morning through Friday lunch. Speaker 3 (8:17) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:18) Everyone just showing up and doing the job. It kind of creates the environment of how we work together, how we play together, all this kind of good stuff. When I worked in small firms, we definitely had a culture and it was personality driven was my perspective. We had fun because we generally liked each other. We went to lunch with each other. And I thought, is this a small firm thing? Because I knew everything about everybody because we're all in the same room basically. Speaker 3 (8:43) Yeah. And Speaker 1 (8:44) so if somebody was a black cloud in an office of 10 people, you really, really felt it. There was no hiding. Speaker 3 (8:50) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:52) Then I find myself in a large firm. now as a basis of comparison. And we spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort trying to figure out how can we make coming to work rewarding to people. And sometimes it lands, some people it works, some people it doesn't. Speaker 3 (9:09) And Speaker 1 (9:10) you go, okay, what can I do to make it better? Right? So I have conversations with people. I go, what do you do in your office? Are you experiencing some of these conditions? What's working? What's not working? And I think that That black swan event that we kind of brought up earlier is COVID. Speaker 3 (9:28) Yes. Speaker 1 (9:30) COVID exposed how dependent. That being in the office with each other, working, sitting next to somebody, that version of culture had been based on conditions that nobody had ever thought very hard about. Like they just manifested. Speaker 3 (9:48) It was just a consequence of normalcy in reality. Speaker 1 (9:52) Yeah. Speaker 3 (9:52) This is what we do every day. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:56) And so because of COVID, firms discovered fairly quickly that the work itself could continue from somewhere else. Although many of the interactions surrounding the work did not transfer nearly as well because they never needed to be scheduled or even acknowledged before. And this is something that I know that senior leadership and in my office, senior leadership equals ownership in this case. They're all very strong advocates for we do our best work when we're together. Speaker 3 (10:23) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:24) And I think the distillation of that comment was not received necessarily in the broader sense of how it could be taken. Them saying it was heard as we want you to come in the office because our equal sign is better when we're all here talking to each other than when we're isolated in our bedroom number two on Teams calls. working a little bit in a vacuum, even though we're talking to one another. But I think it's bigger than that. It's the you sitting by somebody. It's you having that conversation like, hey, did you see that Texas-Ohio State game? Wow, that was a bunch of bad luck for both teams. Speaker 3 (11:03) Game Speaker 1 (11:03) of two halves. Those conversations don't really happen unless they're accidental a lot of times. Speaker 3 (11:09) And Speaker 1 (11:09) so that version of culture changed. And I think what happened is that conversation that once happened at somebody's desk moved inside a private meeting, like it had to be scheduled, which meant the person who might have learned something by simply being nearby, they weren't a part of it anymore. And the answer is not as simple as putting everybody back in the office because the conditions that allowed relationships develop without anyone having to manufacture them. Speaker 1 (11:42) changed when COVID happened and when we came back because now, and this is when I think the word transactional starts to show up on everybody's radar screen. Speaker 1 (11:53) People didn't want to necessarily come back in the beginning because maybe they were scared for their health. Maybe they were like, I don't know how this is going to work. They'd gotten used to this. I work in my bedroom. I love it because I'm in my jammy pants all day. If I want to make cookies in between calls, I go down there and I turn on the oven and I come up here and I work a little bit and I go downstairs and I make a couple of cookies, whatever the case may be. Life changed. Speaker 3 (12:16) Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:17) And as a result. I got the feeling, I heard this from so many people, like so many people, that work became transactional. You pay me to work. And so that I do like what I was paid to do. No more, ideally no less. But when I have spare time, I don't want to play board games and drink beer with you on Friday afternoons. Speaker 1 (12:43) There's a little bit of that that seems to have manifested itself. Speaker 3 (12:46) Yeah. I also think there was a byproduct of the pandemic that I don't Speaker 2 (12:52) want to say, Speaker 3 (12:53) maybe Speaker 2 (12:53) it is, the adjustment to Speaker 3 (12:55) isolation. Even if you were doing all your work, you were still doing it in your own bubble. Even if you were on teams, meetings, or whatever, it wasn't an all-day-long thing. You had brief instances of interaction, and then most of the time you're just... grind it away on your own, whether that's making cookies in between or not. But there was this isolation of I can do my work and I don't really need anybody else to participate. Not meaning that I don't need help doing my work, but meaning that none of those coincidental or incidental conversations or interactions and all those things you're talking about, they got pulled out of what was considered work. Whereas before, I think before that, all those kind of things were considered work. I know you and I are the same way. Yeah, we run into somebody, we're going to have a chat and all that. That's just work. That's still part of being at work, a separate thing. Well, Speaker 1 (13:44) there's value to it. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3 (13:46) I mean, sometimes there is. You got to admit, sometimes there's not. But that was still the work thing and the idea of water cooler talk that existed before that. And that all got removed. And I just think when everybody came back, that whole idea had just vanished. Speaker 1 (13:59) Yeah. Speaker 3 (13:59) That concept of all that was not related with work anymore. It got split off into something else because during COVID, if you were going to do something like that, it had to be scheduled and scheduling those things during COVID were the worst. I don't know. I went to maybe like two scheduled happy hours where there was a zoom screen full of 15 people. You're supposed to be having this social event and they were terrible. Speaker 1 (14:24) Yeah. Speaker 3 (14:25) Because you can't really have conversations like that. because only one person at a time can talk and there's no way to have sidebar conversations. And there's all of that just disappeared, man. Speaker 1 (14:36) Well, you brought up something that during this, I've got all my notes typed up and I went, he's kind of saying something that I'm buying into, but it's making me think about it a little bit differently than what I had anticipated. Speaker 3 (14:49) The Speaker 1 (14:49) idea that when we were isolated, we. Worked in our bubble. We'd have our overlapping of meetings or whatever case. I think it changed the idea from, and I wrote a post about this and I just looked it up and I go, I think this might be part of it. It changed everybody into task oriented individuals. Speaker 3 (15:08) And Speaker 1 (15:08) what we lost was the other two buckets, which was objectives or results oriented individuals, which that might still have existed. But if you didn't have that responsibility, like if you didn't have a job title that assigned. results oriented responsibilities to you, you fall into the task oriented. Speaker 3 (15:29) And Speaker 1 (15:29) it definitely got rid of the goal oriented individual. Now, when I talk about things becoming transactional, I think what it really does, it put everybody into a task oriented frame of mind, which is. Not unnecessary, but it loses the evolution of how you advance along in your career and how you engage with others and, and how do you approach those water cooler conversations? Speaker 3 (15:54) Yeah. Speaker 1 (15:55) So I think that that's kind of, um, kind of a big deal. The whole idea of the task oriented individual, the transactional experience that people have evolved or devolved into. Yeah. Is what's happening because, and I. I'm trying not to make this a generational thing. Speaker 3 (16:15) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:16) Because I think it minimizes the conversation a lot. But the idea that work-life balance wasn't a conversation anybody my age has ever had in their life, not from a motivating behavior one way or the other. Yeah. And we've talked about how that exists and it changes throughout your life at different stages, that sort of thing. Speaker 3 (16:37) Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:40) More from Life of an Architect in just a moment. Speaker 1 (16:46) Andrew and I are joined today by Pat Baker, who brings a rare blend of hands-on experience and technical expertise to the conversation. With a background that spans skilled trades, product development, and envelope design for complex facilities, Pat has spent the last decade refining how early collaboration and clear specifications can drive better product outcomes. In Pat's current role at Construction Specialties, That focus translates into helping teams navigate envelope solutions with an eye towards innovation and long-term performance. Good morning, Pat. It's