How to Collaborate for a New Era of Work: Lessons from New York Build

Daniel Topping

In the early days of COVID-19, the chaos of the rapid shift to remote work inspired many organizations to develop new ways of communicating and collaborating. Now, as we transition from the “Work from Home” era to a “Return to Office” mindset, we need to embrace the best of what was developed, as well as look out for new challenges in the hybrid workplace.

I was recently invited to contribute to a panel discussion about “A New Way of Working and Collaboration” as part of New York Build, alongside other leaders from the AEC community. Here are some takeaways from that discussion:

Use the physical office to foster “soft” connections.
Remote collaboration allows strong direct bonds to develop between team members working together, but it often fails at reinforcing the “softer” bonds associated with bumping into a colleague and catching up with them. As organizations return to the workplace, they might benefit from altering their existing floor plans or furniture to help foster these connections between staff.

Schedule shorter meetings.
The utter convenience of virtual meetings means they are never going away, but project-based teams often suffer from days filled with back-to-0back-to-back meetings. Focusing team efforts into 15-minute “stand-up” meetings may be a way to gain back time without losing effective collaboration. 

Or don’t meet at all.
“Could this meeting have been an email?” is an even more important question to ask, with the ubiquity of virtual meetings clogging up calendars.

Reduce the number of apps.
The proliferation of productivity apps offers organizations too many ways to do the same thing, i.e. share, communicate and transfer data. Improving and clarifying collaboration among teams requires deliberate steps to focus collaboration into narrower channels, to ensure that no one misses out on vital information. This can be particularly challenging when collaborating between organizations which have built workflows on different, or even incompatible, platforms.

As designers, we can help our clients implement some of these organizational or cultural changes — by designing supportive floor plans or selecting the right furniture and equipment — but only to a point. Where we can really make a difference is project management: implementing the lessons we’ve learned from two years of remote work enables us to engage more quickly and effectively with teams, to make better decisions, faster. Personally, I find it an exciting time to be a designer — this “new way of working” starts with us.