Pujita was there in the early days at Grant Street. She and co-founders Erik and Fay shared the inner office that now houses the five navigators plus the flex desk. “It was great because it was just the three of us in the office, so it seemed very spacious at the time,” she says. “We were one big happy family. We saw each other all the time and we heard each other's conversations on the telephone, so we would know what the other person had already said, and it was so much easier to make decisions with the three of us there in one place.”
But as the organization grew, she became something of an organizational vagabond. She was supposed to move to the Eugene Business Exchange with Erik and Heather, but the air fresheners and carpet smells collided with her sensitivity to scents, so she moved to 1845 W. 11th. Then COVID hit, and she worked from home. Then the service team moved to 1845, and the development team was allotted a shared desk back at Grant Street. Then the navigators moved in and that desk was reassigned, and the team started doing a lot of work from home.
Since then, when she needs to be in the office, she tries “to find a spot where you could maybe put papers down. I’ll go to the kitchen table, but sometimes that’s busy, or I might go to the yurt, but that can be busy with meetings, too. It’s really frustrating.” Finding places for team meetings has also been difficult, and they often end up in coffee shops and have been provided flexibility to work from home.
Pujita is thrilled that the development team has a dedicated office in the new building. Team members Amanda, Jennifer, and Camille have never had CSS offices or desks. They will be among the first to move to the new building because the office space is already there and can be accessed by an outside door.
The new building also brings a new opportunity to become “one big happy family again,” Pujita says. “I'm so exicited that we will all be together .”
“We're so big now! We have 38 employees and we see each other twice a month at all-staff meetings,” she says. “I think it’ll be great for the organization as a whole to be all working together in the same building.” This move will allow the development team to be more included in daily operations.
Just the prospect of having space for everyone to do their job comfortably has already boosted staff morale. Mellinda says in her monthly one-on-one meetings with her team members, she asks about what’s working and what’s not working for them, and “the space” is “the only ‘not-working’ feedback I’ll get—the noise and all the things that we can’t fix,” she says. “Having everybody know that we’ve found a path forward so we don’t have to keep working under these conditions definitely improves morale.”
Facilities Manager Dustin has had to deal with the "nonconforming" physical aspects of the Grant Street building. “It feels a lot like having your hands tied behind your back. At times, there's been a feeling of exasperation and desperation about the situation. One of the main sentiments of the organization is that everyone is working hard to maintain the positive culture and to make the organization better, and make their little corner of the organization work in connection with everyone else, despite how hard it is with the existing space. And this is really going to be kind of a return from that energy output that's going to be really re-energizing for the organization.”
