Project Pods and Returning to Office

At StarFish, we design medical devices and embrace the energy and shared passion that comes when our team members get to work together in person as part of our medical device innovation initiatives. Technology and Covid brought about a large shift in the workplace, with many companies embracing remote work. A number of companies sold their buildings or ended their leases and made work from home a permanent thing.

Over the past year, we’ve been encouraging people to think about working in the office first, and working from home second. We remain flexible in recognizing there are times when working from home makes sense – most of us have times where we need to be heads-down and focused on a project and work best with minimal interruptions. However we’re looking at ways to help make the office a more attractive place to work for a full return to working in our Toronto and Victoria offices later this month.

Company founder and CEO, Scott Phillips, shared his vision at a recent company wide All Hands meeting. “The thing that really drives our company is community. We’re trying to curate a community of people who are passionate about building things, about building successful client relationships, building successful products that are going to have an impact. And we’re very interested collectively in having an impact.”

Employee feedback echoes his point. “The threshold for reaching out to someone and asking two second questions is very low. When you’re at home, you wonder, should I just go call teams? They’re probably busy now.  That threshold doesn’t exist, which helps collaboration. This inspired some of of medical device innovation initiatives.

We’ve been playing around with our seating configuration and testing out the idea of project pods. Our traditional seating arrangement has people sitting with others in their discipline. The project pods pull together the multidisciplinary team that is working on a project. This is being tested over the summer and has already had a number of positive outcomes.

In surveys with the project pod team members, they’ve shared that it has “made us feel more of a team” and that “it has facilitated numerous close proximity impromptu conversations about device function, project and scope.” As an organization that is very aware of the downfall of having too many meetings, it’s also rewarding to hear that the project pod seating has enabled team members to “keep an eye on the project progress without frequent designated meetings.”

An employee that is not participating in the pod project, observed “the barriers are quite low when you’re in office. To be able to go up to someone, tap them on the shoulder, see that they’re not actually in a meeting, and have a quick conversation, that’s actually more meaningful than scheduling half an hour, which blocks out their time. Or try to tap them when they’re in flow and on their computer for Teams.

Face to face, there’s less of an onus to being disrupted because, hey, this person’s here. It softens things and you can get more than just the tactical thing done. You actually build a relationship where you’re seeing that person and understanding where they’re coming from. And I think that helps a lot.’

Tying back to the importance of community, the project pod seating has amplified team members’ sense of purpose and feeling that they are apart of something. We will continue to try initiatives like the project seating to help continue to build the sense of community in our organization. In Scott’s words, “what the whole company is really about. It’s not about profitability, it’s not about [financial] value. It’s really about curat[ing] this magical community that works together, inspires each other and rises to a level that allows us to compete with the best companies in the world in our space and have the biggest impacts that we can have.” That in a nutshell is why we embarked on our latest medical device innovation initiative