Date

Jan 28, 2021

Participants

• @Josh Walawender

Goals

• From Randy: Post covid SA  work model in terms of working both on-site and from home. What is a good balance? What would office space at HQ would be needed and how might those offices be equipped?

Pre-meetings notes

This space is for us to prepare for discussion around the topics listed above.

Post-Covid work model notes

How would you like to change the work model?

Do you have suggestions for modifications to the offices, or to the former visitor office?

Please add your notes here in preparation for the meeting

• Josh: One of my concerns would be that the computer infrastructure at my office is inferior to what I have at home in terms of processing speed, data storage, screen size and quality, and even network speed and reliability.

• Josh: Another requirement would be that all meeting rooms would have to be really well equipped and maintained in order for remote attendees to be as well connected as those in the room. If the Zoom experience is poor that would really limit the abilities of remote workers once many people are attending meetings in person.

• Carlos: What would the impacts on visitors such as the Visiting Scholars be? Currently we share offices.

• Jim: Several thoughts

  • Keck is on a hiring spree – office space will be at a premium

  • Redesign of remote ops to add some offices?

  • If I’m at home >50% of the time, do I need an office?

  • Offices could be converted to private space for telecons, equipped w/ stand-up desk, giant monitor. Could be reserved like a conference room

  • One/two offices converted to communal storage for books/stuff

  • Improve data infrastructure (network, NAS/cloud capacity) such that we don’t need to be tied to personal disks with our data on them.

• Luca: I agree with most of what has been said before so no need to repeat; upvotes to Josh’s concern about computer infrastructure and Jim’s point on redesigning remote ops. These are just some additional notes

  • Focus on individual needs rather than company standards. This is mostly true for the IT approach. The right question to ask is what is the best way for you to do your job. This includes home vs. office, computer infrastructure, choice of furniture. Don’t take anything off the table before talking to employees. Some of us might want plants, or a couch, or a lava lamp, or music. After working from home for a year, we have a new routine that works well. If the cost is acceptable, go for it.

  • Lighting is important too, overhead neon light is not good for computer work.

  • Create shared spaces. The famous “keck juice” is not helped by the cubicle style layout that we have now. Informal, spur-of-the-moment meetings can help, but they need a space. The old visitor office was very good for that. Add a real coffee/tea station to it. (And yes, this might be at the cost of smaller remote observing rooms)

  • An office is not just a building or a layout. Enhance our ways of sharing our culture and our mission. Keep our team aligned and connected. Give chances to share success stories, keep around copies of our mission and our values, or quotes that inspire, or posters. Let’s be social! We can do it even during covid: beach time, occasional work or relax time away from the office.

A help desk to replace the emails to “instruments@keck.hawaii.edu”

Is it worth setting up a Helpdesk similar to the remote observing one for instruments? We can differentiate the emails according to instruments if we want to.

PROs: we can all keep track of who responds and past responses

CONs: it’s one additional process to manage

• Josh’s thoughts:

  • I think there’s a lot of benefits to using this for some of our observer communications.

  • … but, we’ll likely not get much traffic to it for a while as this email alias isn’t used much. We’d have to try to steer observers to using it over time,

  • We’ll have to similarly redirect internal notifications which use this email alias (I think some alarms use it).

  • Similar to how remote observing was handled, we may want to create a new email for this. Since it is for observer questions and not really for instrument questions only, something like observinghelp@keck or observingquestions@keck, etc.

• Description. We keep the internal aliases instruments@keck.hawaii.edu and the various <instrument>_info@keck.hawaii.edu but we add something like <instrument>_help@keck.hawaii.edu or something like Josh suggested. We change the web pages to point to the new emails and to a web form

Discussion topics

Action items

Decisions