“Why I throw my staff out at 6pm”

I met Marcus Beale, Director of Wimbledon based Marcus Beale Architects, the other week through a mutual friend. My experience of London’s professional service firms is that they foster 24/7 work cultures. So it was refreshing to meet a business leader whose people management philosophy actively supported his staff’s worklife balance. He volunteered to share some of his enlightened thinking with us here.

Architects are highly motivated, vocational professionals. Since it’s time and attention to detail that make buildings a success, there’s a strong tendency in our sector to work late and for this to become the norm.

There are problems with this. First, the classic problem of presenteeism, that those who stay late every evening form a little clique and others who may have family or other commitments feel, consciously or not, that they are letting the side down.  Another is that those who operate a stretched day often work in a more elastic manner.  Things can be left till later so they usually are. The third is more long-term.

Do I want, as an employer of architects, to have a team of monomaniacs who can talk and think nothing but architecture?

For all these reasons we have operated a policy of encouraging people to leave at 6 pm.  If there’s a deadline to be met, fine, stay late if necessary, but it should never be the norm.

Does this affect productivity? Upwards.

Does it affect employee health and well-being? A conversation heard this morning in the office: “What did you do last night?” “Nothing.” ” I started kick boxing lessons…”

It’s a privilege to be able to ‘design’ one’s working practices to suit you – but I firmly believe if you can design other people’s buildings you should be able to design your own life.  Over the years I have watched my own and others’ behaviour. I’ve kept an eye out for some more fundamental questions about work, for example the Ten Criteria for Good Work, published a few years ago by the Lutheran Church in Finland. (I’m not a Lutheran, but have copied the principles onto our website – changing one word ‘God’ to ‘universe’, to make them more inclusive – to try to enshrine them in our institutional culture).

Stress and panic are the root causes of most mistakes. They slow you down, make you less effective, less likely to listen and assess a situation properly.

So how to avoid this?

A technique that works for me is to write the script and then perform it. I say to myself and others, regularly, “we don’t do stress, we do serenity”. Eventually you believe your own propaganda, and it works. People pick up on each others’ moods, an attitude of calm focus is infectious.  Another way of removing stress is to work only with people you like.  It sounds snooty but it’s quite an effective business principle. The feelings are nearly always mutual and over the years you build up much better teams and relationships.

What do you make of Marcus’s leadership approach? Can you see ways his thinking could extend to you personally, or to your firm?

Marcus Beale is an architect working in conservation doing new things to old buildings. His firm, founded in the recession of 1991, now employs ten architects and works on projects in the residential, educational and commercial sectors. Look him up at www.marcus-beale.com and at www.stowandbeale.com.

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