NEWS
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN, UVA MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR
By Carol Diggs
Y
Albemarle County, which had outgrown its downtown office building and was leasing additional space, is now reassessing what jobs require employees to work on-site.
to be part of a team. So they’re telling us they want a hybrid model, where they can be in the office two or three days a week.” “Sometimes the need to focus [on a project] means working from home works better,” Tessier says. “But a lot of what architects do is collaborative—showing your ideas to a colleague, noodling it through. Some of our teams have been getting together for meetings with masks.” His 14-person firm is in the process of developing a hybrid model that combines the best of both approaches. “We recently had our first face-to-face all-office meeting [since the shutdown]—which was just really nice.” But business owners also have to consider their customers’ needs and expectations. While most people seem to have adapted to Zoom meetings and digital data exchange, many still prefer in-person interaction. “We’ve given clients the option to meet anywhere they felt comfortable—in our office, at their home, outdoors at a restaurant, on Zoom,” says Heneberry. “I think that will continue.” Then there are logistical concerns. Would a hybrid model, allowing both remote and in-office work, mean supplying employees with high-tech workstations in both places? Do employees still need individual office space if they are only coming in one or two days a week? With employees working flexible hours, how does the company ensure responsive service and client coverage? Many of these decisions have an impact on the bottom line.
“Our employees have found they can get so much more done at home. But they also need contact with colleagues and clients.” DAWN HENEBERRY, OLD DOMINION CAPITAL MANAGEMENT
What about offices themselves? Prepandemic, Kilroy says, Albemarle County had almost outgrown its downtown office building and was leasing additional space. Now, with a teleworking policy in place, every manager is being asked to designate which positions can offer flexibility and which will require on-site work, so the county can reassess its space needs. ArcheMedX, which currently has core staff working out of office space at Vault Virginia, is also in the process of deciding what’s next. “We’ve proved we can do much more than we thought we could virtually, but there are times when being together with a white board is necessary,” says Selzer. “We’ll likely continue in a hybrid model, with some [physical] presence downtown— Charlottesville is still the heart and soul of ArcheMedX.” “I hope we can embrace what has worked,” says Selzer, “but there’s always a time and a need to meet face to face.”
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ou get to wear slippers all day. You don’t have to commute. You have more flexibility with childcare. After a year of remote work, is the office a thing of the past? A high local vaccination rate makes the return to in-person work feasible for many area businesses, but that doesn’t mean everyone is headed back in. Some outfits have ditched office space and others are downsizing, as hybrid work arrangements become more common. Before COVID hit, many businesses were already accommodating employees who wanted to work from home occasionally— but others had to scramble. “When the shutdown happened, Albemarle County didn’t have a teleworking policy,” says Emily Kilroy, director of communications and public engagement for the county. “Within three days, people were sent home, and we had to make sure they had the equipment and IT they needed—which sometimes meant borrowing or renting laptops.” ArcheMedX, which develops software for life sciences and health care clients, was at the other end of the spectrum. “We have always had some remote employees, but most worked in our downtown office,” says Joel Selzer, co-founder and CEO. “As soon as the pandemic hit, we moved everyone to remote. We got them whatever they needed—workstations, desks, even furniture—from the office, and everything else we gave away or put into storage.” And the firm isn’t looking back. The company used to rent offices on East Main Street, but gave up the space last summer. “Our offices never went completely remote—we had staggered schedules, so attorneys could come in to work with staff a couple days a week,” says Mike Griffin, business manager at Tucker Griffin Barnes P.C., a law firm with four offices in central Virginia. “The decision now is when to allow clients back into the office, and how do we do that safely.” After safety, the big concern for employers and their workers is child care. “Fifty percent of our employees have children under the age of 18 at home,” says Kilroy, so the reopening of schools was a critical factor in bringing employees back. Tim Tessier, one of the principals at Bushman Dreyfus Architects, agrees: “I have teenaged boys, and we had homeschooled for a while—but that’s not as challenging as for employees who have grade-school kids.” As schools and daycares re-open, why would employees want to continue working from home? “Productivity,” says Dawn Heneberry, managing director of wealth management firm Old Dominion Capital Management. “Our employees have found they can get so much more done at home. But they also need contact with colleagues and clients
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along better,” he says. Ryan’s introductory words on the institute made Vaidhyanathan worry that a safe space, rather than a space for truth, was his goal. In an op-ed posted shortly after the announcement of the gift, Ryan wrote that universities “have our own work to do in rebuilding trust and credibility with all Americans, especially the skeptics who portray us only as instruments of liberal indoctrination or protectors of ingrained systems of power.” “The most valuable work universities can undertake to support democracy is purposeful and nonpartisan,” he added. “The worst thing that can happen to the Karsh Institute is that we become merely academic and merely committed to making UVA look like a safe space for convening,” Vaidhyanathan says. “We have to tell the truth first.”
Remote or hybrid work could be here to stay
June 23 – 29, 2021 c-ville.com
“I don’t want to see the Karsh Institute end up being a mealymouthed, mediocre forum for talking about how we all need to get along better,”
Working it out
SKYCLAD AERIAL
of Arts and Sciences that she can help meld together a disparate set of academic disciplines and perspectives on democracy.” “It will be really valuable to have somebody who can look across the water and bring us together on an ongoing basis.” Certainly, now seems like the perfect time to study democracy, with an unprecedented insurrection just six months in the rearview. According to Barnes, anyone you talk to might identify a different problem with our system, whether it’s white supremacy, or attacks on the media, or the rollback of key voting rights. Barnes will be working this summer to create a programming plan for the first couple of years, with a focus on how the university can be legitimately helpful in strengthening American democracy. To Barnes, the announcement of the institute was a “significant commitment by the university to the challenges facing democracy, to leverage these really wonderful assets that we already have at the university, and to bring new and original ideas with the heft of a pan-university institute to the table.” “We really are in desperate need of a deeper understanding of what has happened to American democracy,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and director of the Deliberative Media Lab, which is a part of the Democracy Initiative. “We need historical, sociological, and economic, as well as political analysis to really understand how we might rebuild American democracy.” However, Vaidhyanathan worries about what the Karsh Institute will become. “I don’t want to see the Karsh Institute end up being a mealy-mouthed, mediocre forum for talking about how we all need to get
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