This transcript segment records a conversation in which Ellen (a CEO) and a host discuss burnout and change fatigue in the AEC industry. Key points: many people are burnt out from continual change; a central cause is lack of leadership buy-in and unclear priorities; employees may "quietly stay" without being engaged; Ellen aims to create a "safe" studio to slow pace and reduce anxiety; resource focus at her firm is on workflow-efficiency tools (developers building fee-calculation and project-planning apps) because manual approaches (Excel) were strained.
Chapters
You mentioned a second ago about like the pace of change and Chris was asking you about that and I, and I'm curious just from a leadership perspective in the AEC field, if you could give me like what, what is kind of the appetite of the current pace and overwhelm potential that there is. Right. Like everybody's, like I said earlier, bombarded with apps and tools and social media and media in general and all of these things. And I'm curious just from like, are people burnt out on it? Are they, are they seeing the benefits of the investment into this, that's giving them more time. And I guess if I were to step back and frame this all from a perspective of like, architecture is a creative field and creativity takes deep thinking. And so how do you get to the point of deep thinking when there's all this noise? And so then, then it starts to burn out on the noise more, I think. Right. So I'm curious from your, from your perspective as CEO of this company, but also maybe at the industry in large, like, what do you think, what do you think the sentiment is right now? Or how are you feeling?
I think what I'm hearing in the industry, people are burnt out from change. There's no question. And I think that when you have. Our industry is, is not known to be the quickest, not. We don't have the quickest pace of change, like in good time. Like, we're like pace and appetite mindset. There's a huge disconnect in this industry. I always try and explain that to, you know, new ops people that come in and project coordinators that come in because it's, it is different. Not not making an excuse for it, but it's different. So you have to work harder. And I'm going to, I'm going to go back to the same thought. When I see companies that I talk to that are having a real disconnect, it's because leadership isn't bought in and it's not trickling down. And that's where there becomes a huge disconnect between pace of change. What are we doing? What's going on? I want to understand. People now want to understand. If they can't get that understanding, they're checking out, they're checking out and you know, everybody's having higher turnover rates. And then now the talk is, you know, the quiet stay.
Right.
Right. So it's too much. I can't stand it. But I'm not really going to quit my job because I don't want to be out there in the market so.
I'm just uncertain time out.
And I'm just going to quietly stay. But I'm not bought in to what you're doing. And it's not just this industry. I think it's a general sentiment that, you know, that aligns with a lot of uncertainty in the world at large. And so my philosophy for my studio is we all live, you know, in the world. We don't live at Turner Fleischer at 67 Les Mills. We live in the world. And the world is crazy. And when you come into our studio every day, we have to be a safe space. So we have to do whatever we can do within our world to slow the pace, to minimize the anxiety, to get people the support and the knowledge that they need.
We've danced around a word, but we haven't said it really. We haven't said prioritization. And I feel like one thing I say all the time is you can't manage all the knowledge in your firm. Like there's too much. It's not going to happen. And so you have to prioritize. And I think, Ellen, you kind of got at that. It's like we need to figure out what the most you have to ignore. Ignore a bunch of stuff. Like that's kind of what leading with a good pace looks like is just being really clear about what's important, what's not, and really being able to tune out the stuff that's not important. And I wonder how related that might be to when people are feeling overwhelmed. It's partly the volume of things, but it's also the kind of lack of clarity on the strategy and how this leads to that leads to that, and that things are prioritized in a way that makes sense. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah. Yeah. But that gets back to the why, correct?
Yes.
Why are we focusing on this and not doing that? Why are we not focusing on that? Right. Why are my software developers spending more time creating a fee calculation app now? They're. They're moving on to creating a project planning app. We do have people that are working on innovation in architecture and in our projects, but I've got the focus of my developers right now in these big ticket workflow efficiency projects.
Yeah.
Because the stress of the way that we were doing it with too much and we were, you know, Excel. You can only push Excel so far. Yeah, right.
You kind of focus on things that are organizational health related. It kind of sounds like.
Yeah.
What? What?
Yeah.
You mean you can't have 38 priorities, Chris. Oh, my God. You know what's so funny about priorities is actually, it's grammatically incorrect to have more than one priority plural. Yeah, it's actually supposed to be we. We, like. We, like, broke the language rules and we just. We've all accepted priorities.
