employee retreats can serve all kinds of purposes, but when a firm’s guiding lights get together each year, their tasks are fairly clear-cut. For Cunningham + Quill Architects, Washington, D.C., that annual scrutiny takes place over the course of three days at a hotel in nearby Baltimore. Armed with a self-published book made up of financial, personnel, and marketing reports, plus reading materials culled from design intelligence agencies, magazines, and architectural consultants, the firm’s four principals and one associate spend the first day reviewing the past year’s successes and failures. The second day ends with an action plan for things that need work in the following year, and on day three they’re joined by their lawyer and accountant to review business strategies.
Founder Ralph Cunningham, AIA, says the firm has grown a lot in the last couple of years to its current size of 26 staff members, making personnel issues a primary area of concern. “Last year during the retreat we realized we simply didn’t have enough interns and weren’t having much luck hiring out of school,” Cunningham explains. “So this year we participated in a lot of college employment fairs and have had much better success.”
When firms reach a turning point, they often look to outside experts for advice. Several times during the past eight years, Lake/Flato Architects has consulted with Hugh Hochberg, a partner with The Coxe Group, Seattle, to sort out ownership transition and marketing issues. The most recent meeting occurred two years ago, after the firm won AIA’s prestigious National Firm Award. “For us it was a moment of introspection,” says partner Greg Papay, AIA. “We said, ‘This will do different things for us in the next decade if we pursue it right. How should our office be structured to do that?’”
The participants got creative, sketching an architectural diagram of beams and columns that represented people and projects, respectively. “As the office has gotten larger and more experienced, people have spread out in different directions, and we realized the office needed a few beams—people who would touch every project,” Papay explains. They came up with eight or nine beams, including a design beam, which consists of a person or group tagged for tasks such as organizing monthly design reviews and tours of the office’s built projects. “We grew up as a little firm,” Papay says. “We were trying to find a way to not become corporate-driven but rather, to let some of the younger people take on a leadership role in things other than whole projects.”
