Work Changes

This morning I was suddenly struck by how busy my bike path was.  It was crowded and sometimes I was stuck behind slower people.  It's not that it's been an empty path before, it was just I didn't really take notice of the amount of people because it hadn't reached this critical mass.  At first I was a little frustrated as I was trying to get into work early.  But then I really liked that I was part of something so cool.  How awesome is it that in my daily schedule I'm part of the growing body of people who are walking and biking instead of being stuck behind the wheel of a car.  And in such a scenic setting too!

On the work front, I don't think I mentioned that this month my department tipped.  We are now majority female.  This is quite a feat in my industry that is majority male.  My first job I was the only female that wasn't support staff (admin, accounting, marketing).  Even today, there is still not a lot of females.  It was a strange congruence of events.  I had delegated some of the interviewing - the new grads and based on recommendations from my staff, put out offers to a selection of students, male and female.  In the end, we had three females, recent grads start this month.  I feel like it's a great achievement - how I can effect change in my industry.

Unfortunately in the same month, there was a step back.  With the new office furniture and the growth of the company, we have more bodies on each floor.  The result is busier bathrooms.  Since most floors are still predominately male, the decision was made to flip the bathrooms which allowed the men's bathroom to add an additional facility.  As a result, it reduces the women down to a single toilet.  It addresses the back-up for the men, but now the women will face it, especially if the firm works to be more balanced in gender.  It's an unfortunate message from management.

On the upside for work, I happened to have two professional development meetings today.  I started a new system with my annual reviews of staff.  I cover the regular stuff, but I give them an article from Harvard Business Review, called Job Sculpting and ask them to schedule a meeting for us to discuss in six months.  It's been surprisingly rewarding on multiple fronts.  My main aim was to help with staff retention.  But by opening up the dialogue and having a platform and structure for discussions I've been gaining invaluable insight about what people are interested in doing that I was not aware.  I would always ask staff in their review if there was other stuff they would like to be working on but the question was too open ended.  By having the framework it allowed me to ask more leading questions to get to the heart of the matter.  I found out today I have one staff who actually wanted to be a journalist before changing careers focus, but still loves that aspect.  And journalistic writing is something I can really leverage and utilize.  I had another staff that I found out that what really drives him is effecting change, it's not the figuring out of things just for the purpose of figuring things out, but figuring things out to then impact design to impact the earth.  It was really good for me to understand where he was coming from so I can frame our discussions in the future.

In addition to be rewarding for me to know how to better utilize my staff, it was really rewarding to see how much they both appreciated my time and input and guidance on their professional development.  One of them even spent time going through it at the end, about he had never come across any boss who would spend time on this subject, and then taking it the level we were discussing.  He even was discussing it with his brother and wanted to share the article.  As I'm writing this, I realize I will need to search out some other useful article for next years discussion.  It is really helpful to have something to discuss - it leads to deeper answers.  But what is more rewarding than appreciation for your efforts.  And it's been amazing to see them grow and develop, not only intellectually on the technical side, but on the professional side too.