Assignment: corporate headshots
Location: The Kiln, Portland
Highlights: This month, downtown Portland’s empty office index hit the highest point since the dark days of the 2020 pandemic… almost 15%. The downward occupancy trend is a stark reminder of the dramatic changes that have unfolded in the way we live and work. In the emotional vacuum of COVID, employees embraced their homes as offices (with strong approval from family pets) while employers were left scrambling for new approaches to making traditional office space attractive again. The changes (and the tensions they produced) are still reverberating. Five years later, it isn’t uncommon for Zoom-based work teams never to have met face-to-face.
In between the home and the traditional office, new kinds of work spaces have started to fill in the gap. Sometimes called modular space, community space or bespoke coworking space, these urban hybrids offer scalable, pre-furnished work environments that can be rented by the year or by the hour. Or both. The Kiln, in Portland, is an example. The Kiln hosts small groups (like one) or larger groups (like fifty) in work spaces customized to their businesses. The emphasis is on flexibility. Meeting rooms can be re-assigned in real time as The Kiln’s occupants require extra meeting space. Digital occupancy screens outside each room display changing tenants on a thirty minute basis.
For PagerDuty, my client for headshots this past month, The Kiln’s novel space was perfect for a one day team building workshop. PagerDuty is world-wide. Its Portland staff normally works remotely, with occassional in-person gatherings for synching up, and catching up, planned throughout the year. The Kiln was uniquely suited to PagerDuty’s flexible, action-packed mission: automated incident management. That mission is best described as software-driven triage for heavily automated businesses experiencing interruptions, like hardware failure or cyberattacks. PagerDuty equips companies to handle them.
The analogy to a medical triage is apt. PagerDuty’s role is a lot like managing the chaos of a hospital emergency room. PagerDuty offers a rational process to deal with organizational trauma. But there are also emotional elements to factor in, like confusion and stress, which the process has to address as well.
To design and market such a process is to think both systematically, and instinctively. Not surprisingly, in the camera, PagerDuty’s staff came across as high energy, bright, and cool under fire. Meet Dionte, Stacey, Jim, Mark and Rebecca, taking a break from video conference screens.
At The Kiln that day, several were meeting their teammates in person for the first time.
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