Indulge, if you will, a drawn-out analogy: Hiring as dating.
Putting up a job listing and sifting through typo-ridden résumés? That’s the grind of apps like Tinder and Hinge. Setting up interviews and asking a parade of candidates what their strengths are? That’s the coffee meetup. Once you finally make the hire, start training and then see what they can do on a real project? That’s the jittery first year of a relationship, where a stray misplaced word can tank the whole thing.
But once you make it past that hurdle, time to relax, turn on autopilot and settle in, right? Nope. As anyone who has navigated having a long-term relationship—or a long-term employee—can attest: It’s not that simple.
Employees don’t stop growing and changing just because they make it past a certain milestone at your firm. And as a principal, the duty to help nudge them in the right direction and monitor their progress never really goes away. “I have people who have been with me for almost 25 years,” says Linda Banks of Maine-based firm Banks Design Associates. “And a lot of my core group—these are people who rarely make mistakes in all the millions of dollars of orders they oversee. But new things will always come up. Right now, I’m traveling a lot for the business, so a lot of what I’m talking about these days is getting my team to lead more. It’s a constant.”
Keeping tabs on employees’ progress is particularly difficult in design, because the skills are so varied. In what other industry can an employee be judged on their mastery of architectural software and their ability to resolve a marital dispute between clients in the same breath?
On July 9, strategist Ericka Saurit, in part two of her Social Storytelling series, dives deeper into the visual side of self-promotion, dissecting how your Instagram feed, stories and content work together to deliver a cohesive, scroll-stopping message about your unique design brand. Click h to learn more and remember, workshops are free for ereBOH Insiders
We want to hear your thoughts! Take BOH’s annual reader survey, an 8-minute questionnaire that helps us get to know you better and will allow us to tailor our storytelling to your business needs.
A common theme among designers is the difficulty gap between measuring “hard” skills (proficiency in SketchUp, or specifying a custom sofa, for example) and “soft” skills (like managing client and vendor relationships). It’s easy enough to help someone learn a new program and observe that they know how to use it. It’s far harder—and riskier—to let them loose with a difficult client and measure how well they did.
Some might be tempted to give up and say that qualities like finesse and temperament are innate and simply can’t be measured, taught or improved. Susana Simonpietri of Brooklyn-based firm Chango begs to differ. “It’s easy to think that way, but I’m going to challenge that. Everybody wants to be happy and have a job where they’re succeeding and excelling. So it’s up to us as a manager to really try to bring out the best in everybody,” she says. “And rarely can we not turn people around. It should be about trying to understand why a soft skill needs improving. It may not be their personality to lead, for example—or is there something in the environment that’s preventing them from improving? I find that you can often navigate those [issues] if you’re really honest and tactful.”
Simonpietri says that even the aesthetic side of the business can be developed in a methodical fashion, and that it’s fair to track that progress, as long as you give your employees a chance to get their reps in. “Yes, there’s a part of this that’s about taste. But honestly, design is just like playing an instrument. You just have to put in the time and eventually you’re going to be good at it,” she says. “Before we hire [designers], we sometimes have them pull Pinterest boards, prepare a project and present for us, just so that we know we’re not going to be trying to train someone from scratch. But for the designers who come in as juniors, most of them don’t really know where to go for anything, so they get most of their finesse from working in the office and looking at how things are getting pulled—they train their eye that way.”
Whether you’re looking to keep track of an employee’s people skills or their confidence with a floor plan, the next step is to develop a system to keep track of it. Some designers adopt a formal, data-driven approach, and use general-purpose HR software like Lattice to track growth over time. Others simply keep a notebook or a periodically updated Microsoft Word document. The best system—as is often the case—is the one you’ll actually use.

For those in search of hardcore objectivity, there’s Jeff Dungan. The Birmingham, Alabama–based architect has developed a system for monitoring the efficiency of his employees that feels of a piece with a Silicon Valley startup.
“It’s very difficult in our industry to measure performance, to try and understand not just speed but efficiency,” he says. “I’m not really wanting people to do their job faster. That can lead to mistakes.”
One recent summer, Dungan sat down with seven years of data from his projects (“I love math—math tells the truth”) to try to crack the code on a metric for employee efficiency. After a lot of brainstorming, he landed on a relatively straightforward system: Take the square footage of a project and divide it by the amount of time it took an employee to draw it to code and up to the firm’s standards. The end result is “square footage per hour,” an approximation of how efficiently any member of his staff works—he now uses it to chart progress and determine employees’ year-end bonuses.
Though Dungan devised the system for architects, he uses a version of the metric for his on-staff designers too. “It’s math, it’s provable, and it takes a lot of my subjectivity out of the equation,” he says. “Things like how I might be feeling that day, or my impressions of this [employee]. Let’s be honest, we’re all manipulable.”
If that sounds like way too much math, that’s fine. (Dungan himself has a sense of humor about the idiosyncratic nature of his project: “When I first started telling people about this, they looked at me like my head was on backwards.”) Design is an extremely human business, and for most principals, equations won’t be the answer. If you’re dedicating time to thinking about how your employees are advancing and giving them opportunities to grow, you’re on the right track.
Banks, who takes a far more organic, informal approach to keeping tabs on her staff, says that embracing a people-first approach and taking each employee as they come has been her secret. “Not everyone is going to be perfect at everything. That’s just not realistic,” she explains. “The thing is to lean into people’s best skills and help them shine at those.”