Description Scenario You work for Gauze and Effect, a local humanitarian organization focused on providing high-quality emergency medical care to people in crisis. Your friend, Dr. Lee, asked you to join Gauze and Effect as the organization’s first part-time employee. Nearly two years later, you quit your other job and started working full-time as a member of Gauze and Effect’s small administrative team, which coordinates relief missions, plans fundraisers, and conducts community outreach. Since then, Gauze and Effect’s small but dynamic team of doctors, nurses, and administrators has received national recognition for its responsiveness to natural disasters. Recently, the organization received a substantial influx of funds from a private donor and a government grant. These funds will allow the organization to expand its reach nationally. To position the company to respond to natural disasters throughout the country, you will need to expand the current administrative staff. To accommodate your growing staff, you are moving to a new, larger workspace. Since you and Dr. Lee, your friend and now manager, have little experience with interior design, you plan to hire someone who specializes in layout, decoration, and furnishing healthy and aesthetically pleasing spaces. Dr. Lee wants a workspace that fosters creative collaboration and encourages social connections, but you know the design team and contractor will need more specific details. Since your employees will be spending the majority of their daylight hours in the space, he wants them to be involved in the design process. Gauze and Effect’s new workspace Directions You are moving into a larger workspace to accommodate your expanding staff. You want to get a sense of what types of workspaces have worked for them in the past, and what types of things they think should be incorporated into the space. Dr. Lee has developed a brief questionnaire to encourage employee participation. He thinks it’s important that all employees participate in this activity, including you! Part 1: Workspace Questionnaire Respond to Dr. Lee’s questionnaire. Download and respond to all of the questions in the Workspace Questionnaire. Submit this as one of your deliverables for this project. Part 2: Article for The Gauzette Involving the entire administrative staff in the design process is an important part of creating the inclusive culture that Dr. Lee envisions for Gauze and Effect. You and Dr. Lee were overwhelmed by the number of responses to your request for input. The teams’ reflections have shown that workspaces come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and forms. Angie O’Gram, the editor of The Gauzette, Gauze and Effect’s monthly e-newsletter, has approached you about writing an article about the workspace design initiative for the organization’s network of volunteers. She has provided you with a list of topics and questions that she would like you to address in the article. Using the resources about workspace designs in the Deliverables section, answer the following: Compare and contrast cultural and historic definitions of work and workspace using examples. How do different cultures define work and workspaces? What are some examples? How have definitions of work and workspaces changed over time? How do different groups in a culture define work and workspace? Explain how definitions of workplaces compare to the culture of your current or former employer and the broader societal culture using examples. How does your workspace represent the culture of your current or previous employer? How does the culture of your current or former employer relate to larger societal culture? How do the values of your current or former employer compare to the values of your societal culture? Describe the relationship between your culture and your ideas about work and workers. How does your societal culture reinforce your self-concept as a worker? Explain your answer. Discuss how understanding the humanities can impact your ability to perceive artistic merit. To what extent has learning about the humanities impacted your ability to perceive the artistic merit of artifacts and your surrounding environment? You can supplement the provided resources with some of your own research. If you decide to conduct your own research, make sure that the resources are reputable and authoritative. Remember that you must cite your sources appropriately in the article.
