Shop Talk: Home Work Vol. 3 - Kristin Peck

The global health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic has overturned every moment and corner of our day-to-day lives. In this new micro-series, Shop Talk: Home Work, we turn to our network of friends, colleagues and collaborators for comfort and community, and discuss how they’re adapting to work and life in this unprecedented era of uncertainty.

As a co-founder and principal of the San Francisco–based lighting firm PritchardPeck, Kristin Peck was suddenly tasked with not only readjusting her own workday, but those of her team and staff, as well, as the city’s shelter-in-place order quickly took effect last month. Here, she shares how she’s managing the responsibilities and pressures of running a business—all the while strategically balancing it with motherhood and finding time to squeeze in a self-care ritual each morning.

We’re lighting designers and specifiers. I co-own our company with my partner, Jody Pritchard, and we have a total of 13 people on staff. We started our firm nine years ago, and being immersed in San Francisco, we built our company on tech and this idea of flexibility. Everyone on the team works on laptops, we do everything in the cloud, and use programs like Slack. Those aspects of workflow and structure for the operations side of our company made it really seamless for us to just take our laptops home and keep things running.

Logistically, we are all set up; emotionally, it’s been a much different scenario. Our team works very collaboratively, everyone gets along and hangs out together for fun, and we really enjoy each other’s company—so despite having all the technology, it’s not exactly as it was before, and we’ve had to change the way we work a bit. Each morning at 8:45, we all get on a Zoom together, to just kickstart and bring a little structure to the workday. You can be in your pajamas or we have some show up in costume—it doesn’t matter—but to come together and get focused for the day has been great.

Essentially, we’ve all been stripped of our resources by the pandemic: No one has access to nannies, childcare, school, or grandparents. On our part, we’ve just been doing our best to be very empathetic and flexible to everyone’s needs because we’re all in the same boat. Both Jody and I have kids—I have a five-year-old and a nine-year-old. We are home-schooling and running a business all at once. We’re a very, very family-friendly firm. We know it’s a pretty rare thing for design firms to promote, and we embrace that.

People can work at the times of day that best suit their schedule, and that’s fine with us, as long as the time is accounted for. Everyone’s still targeting their hours, and we check in every day just to make sure that the company is healthy, and that our employees are healthy, and able to get the work done. But everyone has a bad day, whether you have or not have kids, everyone’s normal has been disrupted. It’s important to be careful and not feel like your situation is harder than anyone else’s. People are away from parents or family, some may have parents overseas— everyone has it hard in their own way, and I just have to keep reminding myself of that.