To Office Hours or Not to Office Hours
Two people working on laptops and talking.
It’s weird to think about how opinions form.
At first you have no opinion. Then one day, your co-worker emails the entire company to tell them to type 2 spaces after a period. Suddenly, you realize that you have a strong opinion.
Not that I know this from experience.
20 minutes of content design
Another weird thing I’ve formed an oddly strong opinion about is office hours.
In product companies, a lot of content designers hold office hours to give their design teams a chance to ask for help with content, in short chunks of time.
Nothing wrong with that. Right?
I was never a big proponent of office hours. But since I’ve started valuing deep collaboration in the design process, I’ve begun to take a more dim view of them.
Here’s how I’ve started thinking about collaboration on design teams:
A continuum with “Content as design service” at the left, and “Content as design collaborator” at the right. On the left, under “working broadly” are “Office hours,” writing training,” and “tickets” On the right, under “Working deeply,” are “Design critiques,” “ideation sessions,” and “jam (working) sessions.” In the middle are “style guides” and “voice and tone standards.”
In my quest to move to the right side of the above continuum, I’ve taken such a dislike to office hours that I’ve convinced my team at work to discontinue them. (They weren’t working for us anyway.)
Other perspectives
But I’ve noticed that others have different experiences. They find value in office hours because:
They get an opportunity to know what all the teams are doing.
They can apply their knowledge from one project to another.
They get visibility and a chance to show design teams how important (and difficult) content work is.
This all helps them to grow content design in their organizations.
So having office hours and doing content as a service aren’t wrong, per se. It’s just a question of whether a team is ready to move past them. And no organization’s content practice is born on the right side of the continuum. We’re all working our way there.