And what I’m missing is this list of things… So if I find a situation when ‘we return to work’ I have a better grasp of what I’m capable of at home, I know what I’m missing in the work place.
‘Okay, I can work quite successfully at home with these kinds of drivers in place. But I think people right now are starting to find their equilibrium. Early on it was ‘oh this is okay, we can do this it isn’t so bad’ and then it was ‘I’m going to lose my mind, I’ve not gotten up from the same place, I’ve not really seen people except through the flattening of interaction of a virtual window. The first piece of learning is to really survey staff and understand that they’re in tune with what the drivers are for success now more than ever. We’ve been working with a lot of clients on their return to work policy. WHAT ARE THE CONVERSATIONS YOU’RE HAVING WITH CLIENTS? Also, we operate our studios in such a way that each one works with each other rather than as isolated units, so we’re constantly in connection with our remote teams anyway.
We work all over the globe and because we’re so used to collaborating with local consultants we’ve been working remotely for a long time and have built our infrastructure to support that.
HAS THE STUDIO ADAPTED WELL TO WORKING REMOTELY? We have about 45 people in San Francisco, 20 in our Los Angeles studio and 15 in New York. The stay at home order was introduced a few weeks later. We started allowing our team to work from home in early March if they felt at all uncomfortable. I’ve been in Sonoma, 45 minutes north of San Francisco and I must say it’s not a bad place to be sequestered. “On the flip side… people miss being with others.” The key, as he says, is balance. “People are finding incredible freedom just removing their commute time,” he says. Along with his international clients, which include Google and Twitter, he’s identified a collective feeling of positivity for the future. Without further ado, here now is a portrait of the startup as a young 'stache.Rapt Studio’s CEO and Chief Creative Officer David Galullo has been investigating the effects that working from home has had on creative businesses. It's something of a shrine to perennial Movember contestant Tom Selleck, Lyft's anointed mustachioed hero-though Will Ferrell does make a cameo, via a printer named Ron Burgundy. On the third floor, behind a portrait of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, a hidden door opens into a secret library-a dim, quiet room scattered with seating (plus a little couch-side stash of booze on the floor). There's a band room, too, for employees who dabble as musicians to play together. The company's approach to the rest of the space-previously occupied by UCSF administration offices-is a more typical office-as-living-room M.O., with mismatched vintage chairs and couches clustered in intimate groups, an open kitchen and dining area on the ground floor, and the requisite bleacher seating for company-wide meetings. "It's supposed to feel like you're walking inside the pink mustache," says communications manager Paige Thelen. Rapt worked with fabricators from the design house ANTLRE to construct all 8,000 whiskers by covering pool noodles in fuchsia fabric. The lobby ceiling is essentially a giant push-broom mustache, and the reception desk is skirted in what we can only describe as a large inhabitable goatee. The three-story HQ on Harrison Street, designed by Rapt Studio, is home to 375 employees, a dozen or so dogs, and 8,000 enormous pink whiskers. When your mascot is a giant fluffy pink mustache, a pared-down backdrop is the sensible choice. And really, there's no reason for ridesharing company Lyft's Mission District headquarters to break from tradition. Cavernous industrial spaces have become so synonymous with tech offices that one would hardly think of pitching investors without first securing at least a nominal amount of bare concrete and reclaimed wood.