Can the Museum Workplace Be More Human?

A review of the Life@Work Conference in Brooklyn

So here are my 10 takeaways from Life@Work. You’ll have to excuse the lack of on-the-spot photos, but the conference organizers asked phones to go away while sessions were going on.

3. And speaking of, is your museum open to uncomfortable truths about colonialism, oppression, racism, and sexism inherent in so much of its practice? The session ended with a final exercise for the audience — provide wisdom from our future selves. Despite the optimism of the event, at that moment my vibe had my future self speaking from a troubled world. Yet he still said to my current self, “You didn’t change everything you wanted to — *but it was still worth it to try.”

5. Physical space matters. A trio of sessions addressed the importance of physical workspaces on organizational culture. John Reid-Dodick, Chief People Officer (museum friends, take a drink every time you laugh imagining this at your museum) at WeWork, didn’t address physical space per se but his presence made me think about how flexible workspaces at a museum could help the generally poor office infrastructure in museums, how conceptual silos are reflected in physical offices. Reid-Dodick did talk about his experience merging the legacy cultures of Thompson Financial and Reuters, and how values are a conscious decision on the part of senior management. Hear that? You can change.

6. Stop reinventing the wheel. There is a LOT of research out there about improving the interaction of people and workplaces. Steve Semelsberger, President, Individual Transformation Practice at SYPartners, gave a quick rundown of some of the best — and if you’ve read this blog it’s been a part of my bottom-of-blog reading list. (Read his full list below). What you get out of this research (besides the fact that there has been a LOT of psychology research done) is that it is possible for people and workplaces to HEAL. Well-being, Semelsberger said, can be learned. It’s a chore reading books like this now — who has time? — but important for those of us who want to improve our workplaces, especially in museums, where we have an added burden of subcultures which may appear to have opposite goals and which have learned to identify as having unique expertise.

8. Is there org culture on Mars? To start out the second day of the conference, all the attendees got on the floor and engaged in a role-playing card game developed by org culture firm The Ready and narrated by company founder Aaron Dignan (the keynote speaker at the Responsive Conference in September). This simulation of the founding of a colony on Mars was challenging and fun, and went on for over an hour, as we navigated ourselves in groups of eight (each person drew a card which gave them a particular role and a preference for one of six colony resources) through a series of crises which would impact selected parts of the colony’s physical safety and mental well-being. Rules limited communication and proscribed decision-making. What happened? Well, I was made “captain” (ha) of my group of eight, and thus I had to make arbitrary decisions about which resources we would invest in and which we would ignore. The lesson for me was that decision-makers have to be open to the expertise of others; some of my early decisions badly hampered the development of our colony and we barely survived. Another rule, which forbade communication between team members, effectively simulated silo culture (hello, museums!), while another rule forced teams to repeat their decisions — good or bad — for the next round. Fortunately, teams could, after a few turns, discard one of these rules — assuming the colony survived long enough!

The key takeaway, according to the winning teams, was for each team member to follow the role on their card, pushing for what they valued and where they had expertise. (Interesting — though as an Aquarian contrarian, no card is gonna tell me what to think!) Another comment from an attendee was that team members (often women) with good ideas were unable to make their voices heard — and that did happen in my team. Increasing equality and input is important. From a museum point of view, I wondered, can games help develop camaraderie and decision-making expertise?

9. What does a museum’s brand proposition mean to staff members? Getting back to brand, the talks by leaders from Etsy and Airbnb seemed to me to have plenty of relevance to museum workers. One thing both companies did to align internal and external values was to have staff be in touch with users — tourists and hosts for Airbnb, and makers/sellers for Etsy. Every staff member has to, to quote Carissa Menendez, VP of People and Workplace at Etsy, “Own the purpose of your company.” What does that mean to a museum? Well, one idea is that more staff would be rotated into visitor-facing areas, even for a temporary period of time. Should publications staff work in the bookstore for a week? Or label team members should stand in the galleries with the labels they worked so hard on? Etsy also faced layoffs this past year, and Menendez recalled that staff members were asking, “Is this the same place it was when I got here?” Even museums in good times will find staff asking that — have our values drifted? Does the institution still reflect *my values?* Digital departments aren’t responsible for culture change — they were hired by senior staff with the approval of boards, presumably — but their arrival often heralds questions about culture.

I’m reading a few things, but for today I’ll stick with the org culture reading list provided by Steve Semelsberger of SYPartners. This list is a who’s who of foundational psychology related to organizational culture:

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