The office has never been just a place to work, it both reflects and shapes an organization’s culture. The furniture, the light, the layout, the ratio of private to shared space—all of it sends signals, whether leaders intend them to or not.

Paul Cooper and Christopher Good have spent their careers translating between what organizations say they value and what their spaces actually communicate. Paul is a principal at the architecture firm, TEF Design, and has spent 30 years designing places where people come together. Christopher is Chief Creative Officer at One Workplace, a workplace design and furnishings company, with the philosophy that no one should have to come into an office by default anymore, the office needs to earn it.

On this episode, Paul and Christopher join organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss what offices should look like now in the age of remote and hybrid models, why rents in one AI-centric San Francisco neighborhood have doubled why downtown office space sits empty, and the unknowns of designing for the future as AI takes off.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. One solution does not fit all spaces. Come up with some guiding principles, as a team, that align with the overall mission and vision for that space’s design.
2. Ask why your workplace exists. If it’s about people, own that, invest in it, and design for what their needs are.
3. Design for the in-between experiences. When workers aren’t at their desks or in a conference room, how does the design of the space create moments for connection?

• Paul Cooper, TEF Design
• Christopher Good | LinkedIn
• Finding shared meaning through propinquity | Christopher Good | TEDxPleasanton
• Embracing the Hybrid Future: Innovative Strategies for Cultivating Workplace Culture (One Workplace)
• How to bridge the gap between workplace design and culture (Culture Amp)

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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Culture doesn’t just shape behavior; it shapes the emotional states people value. Those values operate largely below the surface and can drive some of the most consequential decisions organizations make—who gets hired, who gets promoted, who looks like a leader, and increasingly, how we design AI.

For 30 years, psychologist Jeanne Tsai, the Dunlevie Family Professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab, has been building the science of how culture shapes emotion and its implications for decision-making, health, and how people are perceived. She joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss why it’s important for leaders to understand and examine this unwritten standard for how employees feel at work.

1. Name and examine your organization’s emotional ideal—and as a leader, think about how that might be at odds with your employee’s own personal emotional ideal.
2. Consider the possibility that your evaluation of a job candidate or employee might be a reflection of your emotional ideal rather than just a reflection of their merit or performance.
3. Understand that emotional misreads are often cultural misreads, and leaders should not view those differences as character judgments.

• Jeanne Tsai | Stanford University
• Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab
• Americans are obsessed with Alyssa Liu. Here’s a big reason why. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Leader choices reflect cultural differences in ideal affect more during organizational growth than decline (Emotion)
• Should job applicants be excited or calm? The role of culture and ideal affect in employment settings (Emotion)
• Cultural variation in the smiles we trust: The effects of reputation and ideal affect on resource sharing (Emotion)
• How culture shapes what people want from AI (Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

Read the full transcript on The Culture Kit website.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We tend to treat organizational structures—such as job titles, departments, and reporting lines—like furniture: always there, moved around a bit, but rarely questioned. But what if AI is about to redesign the whole office? And in a world where you have humans and agents working alongside each other, how can leaders build a cohesive culture?

Stanford professor Melissa Valentine anticipated some of these changes in her book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. In this episode of The Culture Kit, Melissa joined organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss how AI and online labor markets are enabling leaders to assemble teams, solve problems, and then disband at superhero speeds. They also explore tensions between algorithmic decision-making and human structures, the challenges of deploying AI agents alongside humans, and how to recognize the “invisible labor” that keeps everything running smoothly.

Melissa is an associate professor of management science & engineering at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Hierarchy isn’t going anywhere, but departments might. While hierarchy will remain essential for accountability and coordination, departments as we know them are likely to blur and collapse as AI puts design, engineering, and product capabilities in everyone’s hands.
2. Adopt a mindset of “experts everywhere all the time.” Instead of thinking in terms of “expert scarcity,” leaders should recognize how easy it’s becoming to assemble the right talent—human or AI—for any given challenge.
3. Management is now org design. The core management loop of scoping a problem, assembling resources, and evaluating the outcome is accelerating and becoming more like a design practice. Leaders aren’t just managing people anymore; they’re architecting the structures of work teams.

• Melissa Valentine's Website
• Faculty Profile | Stanford University
• Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work
• When an AI ‘Agentforce’ Enters the Workforce: Generative AI, Employment Relations, and the Changing Social Contract (Journal of Organization Design)
• Who Pays the Cancer Tax? Patients’ Narratives in a Movement to Reduce Their Invisible Work (Organization Science)
• The Algorithm and the Org Chart: How Algorithms Can Conflict with Organizational Structures — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW)

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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