In the A/E/C community, we talk a lot about "giving back"--particularly about "giving back" to the communities in which we work or have projects. Most of the time, this "giving back" takes the form of donations of money, goods and/or volunteer hours to local charities. Some firms' programs are formalized, specifying the types of recipients or the types of efforts allowable under the program. Others leave much up to the employee's discretion.
In an article in the September 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review written by Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), he observes that:
"Businesspeople going into philanthropy... typically have the idea that they need to "give back." This implies, of course, that when they worked in the business world, they were "taking away."
I think the idea of "giving back" to the communities where we live, work and do projects is admirable. But if we believe Omidyar's thought about "taking away," are we contributing because we really care or because of a vague sense of guilt for taking a community's money to do the project. Consider this:
- An architectural, engineering, planning, environmental or other firm must set hourly rates to pay staff, which rates will then be used with various multipliers to establish billing rates for invoicing clients;
- The rates don't reflect all the factors that contribute to a professional or technical person's true value--his or her education and the school where it was obtained, their project experience, their ability to communicate with a client, their ability to listen to a client and understand both spoken and unspoken goals, their ability to stand up and present the client's project in a public forum, and many other qualifications.
- The rates reflect some of these criteria, differently combined for each employee, informed by a knowledge of market forces and what the client would consider a rate that is too high.
Given these factors, when an A/E or related firm performs a project, it is already "giving back" simply by doing its best work, without adjusting the amount or quality of that work according to the rate the client is willing to pay. Design of a water system that more efficiently delivers this often scarce resource, a facility that more effectively uses building orientation to provide better natural lighting, electrical and mechanical systems that use energy more efficiently and cut operating costs, are all ways of "giving back" by doing creative, high-quality work on a client's behalf.
When an environmental consultant determins minimum streamflow requirements in order to protect the species living within and along a stream while still providing hydroelectric generation for downstream cities, that is also "giving back" by doing creative, high-quality work on a client's behalf.
These are the same as making an "in-kind" contribution to a worthy charitable cause, like spending the day working the Habitat for Humanity to build a home, or providing sound equipment rent-free for a fundraising concert.
So even if your architectural, engineering, planning, surveying, landscape architectural, construction management or environmental firm doesn't have a codified structure for making donations to the local United Way campaign, and even if you don't believe you ever "took away" anything in the first place, you are still "giving back" to the community.
Perhaps the gap between a professional team's true value and the portion of that value billed to the client should also be considered "giving back."