CCB

Welcome to the ONEder podcast, this is your host CCB and our conversation today is going to be incredibly stimulating. There is a guest bringing a set of information and knowledge to us today, which will increase our awareness of what goes on in the people aspect of our work but also bring us some concept around tools that might be deployed to help us create more welcoming, inclusive spaces. I'm delighted to welcome Melissa Fisher PhD, but I'm not going to call her doctor, to our ONEder podcast today. Melissa, thanks so much for joining.

00:45.63

Melissa Fisher

Well, it's wonderful to be here and have an opportunity to talk with you again.

00:52.97

CCB

All right, the first question that I have for you is since you're representing cultural anthropologists, help us understand the definition of cultural anthropology. What does that entail?

01:04.80

Melissa Fisher

Sure? Well cultural anthropology started out as a discipline about a hundred years ago. And one of the key folks I have cultural anthropology is to study of culture, right? And what is culture. There are lots of definitions and debates amongst cultural anthropologists, but one useful way of understanding culture is that it's a system of values, ideas, beliefs and rituals that shape a particular given society or a given workplace, right? So, it's about sort of what are the symbols and ideas when you take it in the context of the workplace that shape for example, financial culture right? And so, anthropologists study culture on the one hand but they also have a methodology that they bring to the table. Which also began, had its inception at least a hundred years ago which is the notion of what we call ethnography or really what is fieldwork. So what is field work? Essentially field work is the idea of participant observation, right? So, you both. Participate in the given culture but simultaneously you observe it. You try in the words of Clifford Geerts, the father of cultural anthropology, to step into the shoes of the people that you study to understand their worldview. How they see things.

02:33.87

Melissa Fisher

How they understand themselves as women or as gender fluid beings. How that shapes the culture, shapes their understanding of themselves in relation to their family, to the workplace, to their ideas about the future. So. It's a very sort of holistic discipline that tries to understand. The culture of people, how culture shapes people, how people in turn shape culture. And it does so from the notion that hanging out, which is a totally other like more colloquially word of fieldwork. It's like you know, go to the coffee clutch. You know. Go to a ritual don't only just sit in the ah in the synagogue in the seats. But afterwards you know when there's like kiddush and people are like going around and with wine. I mean really try to understand the everyday life of people. What is it like to be in a given culture and space and place.

03:37.54

CCB

Perfect. Okay, so we have the study of cultural anthropology, and the kind of the drivers and the tools that professionals in the field utilize. You have a very long history of working with different groups, bringing that cultural anthropological perspective to what's going on. I'd love to have you step back maybe, oh I don't know 30 years, and help us understand some of the work that you've done that's gotten you to where you are today.

04:12.46

Melissa Fisher

Sure. When I was in graduate school back in the 90s, which is about three decades ago at Columbia University. Which, by the way, is one of the first anthropology departments in the nation created by Franz Boaz, one of the fathers of anthropology. I became really interested in studying contemporary work life. And that was pretty unusual in the context of what anthropologists were studying to some degree in the 90s. But I thought it would be really interesting to study Wall Street, you know. I was up at Columbia. Wall Street was you know a subway away. Whether it meant taking the subway all the way down to the financial district or midtown where some other firms were, and I wanted to understand sort of what is the culture of finance. What is happening? But I wanted to understand a specific group within financial culture. Which was looking at women, but not just looking only at women, but the very first generation of women who came onto Wall Street. And those women came onto Wall Street in the late sixty s very early 70s, and they really were the first women to become professionals in what was, as you probably know, a very white, a very male dominated space of work. And I wanted to trace their histories, because by the time I met them in the 90s they had been on Wall Street for some time, and in some cases had begun to break the proverbial so-called glass ceiling, right? Which meant that they were the first women to be promoted to say managing director.

So that project was really long in the making, because I wanted to figure out how can I trace a community. So, it wasn't a community that was a so-called community like a Balinese community for example, but a community or a cohort or a generation of women as they moved over time in the context of Wall Street. So the project really looks at their careers, their networks, but it also traces how they changed over time. Being pretty young people right in their 20s, coming onto Wall Street, they weren't exactly sure what they wanted. A lot of them thought that it was the height of the feminist movement. They had read Ms. Magazine and Betty Friedan's work, and they were like, they really knew that they wanted to do something that was different. They didn't want to be housewives, right? They sort of felt a stirring. But Wall Street at that moment in time was not a place where you went to make a lot of money, because it was the late sixty’s early 70s when New York City in particular was in a recession. So the project itself followed the women from the 50s, 60s and 70 s up until the financial crisis or the immediate aftermath. And I can talk more about what it was like, but I can explain maybe how it is that anthropologists really look at the workplace. It may be useful to use it as a case study.

So to understand firms like Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan, now J P Morgan Chase and the women's experiences, I didn't just look at the culture of finance in the context only of the firms. And I didn't just look at the women. I tried to understand how the culture of Wall Street shaped the women, and how women reshaped what was a white male dominated space. How did they create an opening for women. How did they begin to bring new ideas into the workplace about women? How did they bring ideas with the feminist movement about gender equality and put it into practice. And that was, for example, there was no family leave policy for professionals at the level of managing director, because of course they had all been men and men didn't take time off. And so the women really were some of the negotiators some of the change makers to really work with. In this case human resource officers to craft new policies that would enable women to take time off or not. But what's important in understanding going back, is I wasn't just looking at Wall Street culture as a black box, but understanding firms and women's experience within them in relation to various shifts that were more what we would call macro shifts or trends. So, understanding the women's experience in relation to changes in finance, which meant in the case of the 70s an onward deregulation and globalization. So that's a bigger picture, right?

08:51.41

Melissa Fisher

Second, understanding their experience in relation to the feminist movement and new ideas. And third, when we get to the cultural ideas, was to really understand how is American cultural ideas of what is success? What is moving up? What does it mean to balance work and family? How was that also impacting their experience, right? So, one of the key dimensions I think that's really important about anthropology, is we look at how the larger socio-cultural economic environment shapes the workplace. And why is this important, because, say today's workplace right, we're not just working in the workplace, right? We're moving through offices, coffee shops, at home. And the covid experience if you will, like this huge disruptor, made a lot of people who were kind of used to commuting kind of taking certain things for granted about the workplace, going in five days a week began to really open up and create a more public cultural conversation about what is work? What is the meaning of work? What is the meaning of work to me, but also what is the meaning of work more largely. And create a cultural conversation that is of course deeply impacting the workplace and creating a set of discussions and sometimes debates about who should be in the office. Who wants to be in the office, and we can talk further about that, but I used the case study of the Wall Street project to show that anthropologists can really look at the workplace but put it into context. right?

10:26.74

CCB

Right? I want to I want to stop you there for a minute because you introduced also the globalization, and the nature of the external factors that might have an impact you know on culture, and I know you've done work internationally. What were the focuses if you will of that kind of work, and what did that bring to your perspective at this moment in time.

10:55.16

Melissa Fisher

Yeah, so that's a really good question. There are two projects that I did that I can talk about. One was looking at sustainable fashion designers who were working in Berlin, and the second was in the context of looking at international women's groups. Um, and I'll talk about the latter. Um for a minute one of the things that's really interesting in the context of globalization, and you know transnational corporations is that we don't just live in for many of us who are knowledge workers. We're not just working in one city, one headquarters right? We work for these global companies and there are a lot of global or transnational institutions whether they are the central banks or Davos or any kind of entity right, or the United Nations. So that's really interesting, because the question for anthropologists will be, how do you study across cultures or across spaces right? How do you study a global corporation, even like a Wall Street firm which is not just headquartered obviously in New York but Tokyo and so forth. But I've been really interested in, as women have moved up the corporate ladder, the spaces in which women leaders come to gather, throughout Europe. So, one of the questions I have had is how do women, again this is a lot of gender work I'm talking about but that's been sort of the focus of my work up until about five years ago. How do women create alliances with each other at conferences and institutions, like meetings. So I went to one meeting for a group, and sometimes I keep them confidential, where it was really about women's leadership, how do we change the world? How do we change the workplace? And I was interested in how people came together to create a sense of themselves. Not only as you know, New Yorkers or Americans, but really as what we would call sort of transnational, or an international set of, for lack of a better word, elites, right? Sort of how do we begin to think of ourselves as a group. And that's important in the context of women. Why, because traditionally and even historically now, there have always been spaces in which powerful men meet together. For example, in the context of Davos or where have you. And so my question sort of moving off of the Wall Street work was: where are women making not just local or national connections, but international ones. To create groups and ties in which they can have sway over, for example, how we institutionalize or talk about sort of women's place in the workplace? How do they have space to have these kinds of conversations. So that's one part.

13:51.57

CCB

So, I'm teasing out some of what I'm thinking about the experiences and the knowledge that you have, and the paths that you take to help organizations or to help cultures or communities kind of define themselves. So you start to see, as I’m sitting here thinking about the international aspects of many of our workplaces today are not only shifting, and we'll talk about this the shift to the you know more hybrid but the sense of belonging that you are addressing and almost in the ethnography component. How do all these different groups, how does a culture create belonging for multiple groups?

14:45.83

Melissa Fisher

Right? And that's a big question, right? if you have two things. One is to look at where are the spaces or the moments or the opportunities that people come together to forge ties with one another. How do people create and forge a common world view. Right? What are the kinds of workplace rituals that people either bring from the past or create in the current moment right, to begin to foster community and a sense that we belong. A sense of loyalty or allegiance or belonging right and connection. I mean in some ways that's why the office or happenings within the office context, or a physical context, become really important. Maybe not all of the time, but an opportunity for people to be in one place. And it makes sense that you know people create ties with one another through engaging in common activities. Feeling that you know they're sharing stories, that they're able to communicate with one another. That there's some sense of not so much I as the individual, but a sense of we, the collective. And it's very, very difficult, because there are differences in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of culture. So, the issue is really when you get to talk about you know, maybe everybody doesn't share common corporate culture or world work culture. And so, the anthropologist really needs to tease out, to help organizations understand, if you want a given culture and you want to strengthen it, why don't you understand at the current moment, who is sharing culture under what conditions? When do they feel included and when do they feel excluded? So that's more of a starting point. You know my own work that showed that female traders for example, on the trading floor even to this day, felt somewhat isolated, right? And this sort of, and this was in the 90 s but I think to some extent continues. They felt excluded from the dominant culture. So if you start to understand the moments of inclusion and exclusion, and how people want to feel included, then you can begin to build an understanding. Okay, here's the moments of exclusion. How can we take these moments, in these people who feel excluded, and create ties and rituals that will knit them together right? And that really is important about the office. It goes into how we design the office. How we think about where we put furniture, what kind of furniture, the lighting. Do we create certain kinds of spaces along, for example, a stairway where instead of it just being a stairway. There's a place where there’s, I've seen one recent firm which I just loved which was a wooden stairway and they're comfortable. Um, you know pillows that are sort of aqua and pretty and you can almost see like well maybe I'll just sit there. So then I mean really, it's about you see so much about how the physical environment creates the possibilities where people can connect with each other. Right? And it so it doesn't seem so obvious. But you're like hey you know I'm going up the stairs and you forge these kinds of informal moments of gathering together, right? And that I think shows the kind of opportunities that the physical office needs to or the physical places in which people come together when it comes to the workplace.

18:12.11

CCB

Well, you also bring up a question in my mind as to who owns who owns the care and feeding of culture.

18:25.10

Melissa Fisher

Such a good question. right? I mean is it leadership is it employees, is it both? And I think that it should in in theory and in practice, be everyone right? Because if everyone feels that they own or are part of the culture then they feel a sense of identity as a community, a sense of we, a sense of being a collective. You know, participating in the everyday life of the community but you may be the rituals. I mean it turns out I'm doing really interesting work, and it's so subtle, with research scientists who often are in labs, right? I mean they're in their individual labs. They're doing their thing, and they're very sort of siloed from each other, even if they're in the same university or hospital setting. It turns out that they would very much like to have lunches together. Why? Because they want to find out what each other's doing, they want to have opera brown bags so that they can share their research with each other, get to know each other. They want to receive emails or some kind of message if, you know, somebody gets an award. These seem like really sort of small, trivial kind of micro things, but it's fascinating. I mean these are the spaces, the minutiae that can create a connection to ‘oh, you know we have a common research set of ideas right? We have, we are all scientists in this particular case, right? We all care about you know and it shows that it doesn't necessarily entail scientists in this case, but you could take other workers, like leaving the lab every minute but it means that they have like these rituals if you will, these meetings, these gatherings in which they forge a worldview. They exchange ideas; they exchange stories. They see people who are somewhat like each other, right, I mean they share work habits. They share professional knowledge and suddenly the world is bigger, right? And they can connect. And this is not a small thing. This is about creating a common identity, but also the possibilities of “oh you know, so and so is working on X and I'm working on X. Let me work on X, right?” So then you have collaboration that begins in those kind of informal moments hearing about something, right? Then you maybe have common conversations about, you know, a new finding and you have somebody link it to somebody, and that's where innovation and creativity happen. So it's really important to not only have a sense of connection, but a sense of these are the places where I go to be accelerated. You know, excited about work. You know like thrilled about it, like this is very cool.

21:03.21

Melissa Fisher

And then you leave it, and you have, you know you're skipping, or I mean that's like an over exaggeration. but you have excitement and energy right, and you bring it back. You know I think some of the new kind of things about work and hybrid work, it's not necessary to have, be in the office all the time or be in these things, but it's like how that sort of excitement that energy that knowledge can then be built be fostered rebuilt in the hybrid environment right? I mean it it really is a kind of snowballing effect and I think it's really, really important.

21:35.70

CCB

So, you said over the past five years your work has shifted a little bit more towards a different focus, and what...describe a little bit more of that work.

21:45.44

Melissa Fisher

I started at the University of Copenhagen as a business and organizational anthropologist, and I was part of a larger team of researchers in Stockholm in Sweden interested in how institutions and people were thinking about the future. So, I had two mandates really. As in Copenhagen, I had a mandate to see Danish business and in my larger group I had a mandate to look at how institutions were looking at the future. So, what did I do? I ended up the day that I got my job, was going into the Institute for Future Studies in Copenhagen and saying can I do fieldwork and hang out with you? What are you doing? What are you looking at in terms of the future? And they were looking at the future of work, it so happened, and they were working with ISS which is a facility management firm. So, I started to do field work, participant observation in the Institute for Future Studies and a little bit in ISS trying to understand how people in the built environment, people in charge of buildings were beginning to think about the future of work.

Go forward a couple years later we're in the pandemic right, and I got really interested in what's happening to the future work in a very different way, right? Because suddenly we were all sitting down. I'm in my apartment, I'm not in Copenhagen anymore. How am I going to get to the field? I've got to do what we call suddenly, digital field work or digital ethnography. So, I spoke to my Copenhagen folks and started to do a much broader project which was talking to people and experts in the built environment, broadly speaking, architects and others. Suddenly understand what they were experiencing, what their firms were doing when we were shut down initially. And then of course in the subsequent years afterwards, or the more current moment, how we've moved to primarily hybrid forms of work, remote work and so forth. So the project has really looked at these shifts over time. right? And different experts’ views and ideas, and largely coming back to my work while it's not gender-focused, my biggest question is is, is are these new forms of work, these new workplace cultures creating more equity, more justice, more inclusivity? Are they more sustainable in terms of the environment and so forth. Or is there a kind of reproduction, or a strengthening of different forms of inequality or forms of inequality that still existed. For example, take gender inequality, again I'm writing a report about the return to work amongst women in underrepresented populations on Wall Street so I'm thinking about this. You know, I mean with the return to work what's happening to women who have been caregivers, right? So I've talked to women most recently who are like well, I was working a gazillion hours on Wall Street, but during my commute in the car I was able to take care of stuff, you know, I could talk to people. My commute back, and simultaneously I'm taking care of my daughter who's in college who's had some problems because of covid. I've got a parent who’s just had to go into senior living. I'm really, really stretched to the limit. It's really helpful that I don't have to go into the office three days a week, right? I can somehow manage. I mean I'm stretched, I'm stressed, I'm going you know. Then the question is what's going to happen to those women those caregivers, if and when they have to go back to the offices. Some firms are mandating five days a week right, what will happen to care? Not that I think that, and of course, the issue is why are women doing the bulk of the caring. That's a whole other you know, cultural kind of question, right?

25:53.84

CCB

So, I think what we wanted to hear from you which we're hearing loud and clear is the amount of vision that you have across multiple entities within any cultural community, collecting the rituals, the beliefs, the importances, the what the critical elements of what makes them feel well, to function just in general, but to feel good in that space. So, in your work today, working with organizations who do you work? Who do you come to? Who brings in Melissa Fisher, cultural anthropologist, to work on…and I can make some obvious guesses, but I'm going to ask you to tell us.

26:45.41

Melissa Fisher

Yeah, so I've been in the consulting space working with different institutions since 2001. So, I can give some examples of former examples, but also the current ones. So perhaps a hypothetical but real, would be like an architect or a design firm, right? Trying to really understand you know, the needs of employees, right? Sort of how will they draw employees back to the office environment. How will they introduce workplace culture to employees, particularly younger ones who haven't been in the office, right. What are the spatial environments that will foster mentorship and a sense of belonging. And one of the things that I've talked about, which I think corresponds to what we chatted about, is that we're not just as anthropologists, or I don't just necessarily do field work in one building or one office. I mean I might want to understand how do people work together in teams, across space. When do they come together in the office? What are the props so to speak, which is the technologies they need, the lights, the furniture. Who are the assistants they need, who are the people that they need, to sort of really grasp that experience of the employees. Their practices, the hours that they're spending, what kind of lighting do they need. right? What works best, right? What kinds of technology communications do they need? What are the spaces that they're working in? When are they going to do quiet work and move off. So that you know for an architectural firm right, they can really distill the essence and the values of a company or a group. And then translate them into what designs that workplace environment right. Create some kind of common cultural narrative right, through the spatial arrangements, the material objects, the choices, the design language, the feel of the place, so that then the employees based on the information gathered by the anthropologists, myself, working together, can really be creating. The anthropologists and architects together and designers create a distinct sense of a place that will ultimately strengthen the community. So that's one, sort of trying to understand people's work habits, and sort of what will be sort of the optimal kind of design. So that's design.

But then you have you know firms like the Wall Street firms that are interested in not just only

physical design and the hybrid work, but what are the ways in which they can recruit, train and advance women and underrepresented populations like the Latina, people of color and so forth. That is also about the design, but it's also about rethinking the kinds of policies that can be implemented in the current environment. Let me take an example. And this would be for hybrid work or not hybrid work. Traditionally Wall Street has recruited, especially when it came to the, what we would sort of call white shoe firms in the earlier days, would recruit at sort of the Ivy Leagues right, for investment banking, Princeton so forth, right? Okay, so what's happening now is one of the things I'm trying to help some firms to think about, which they're already doing, is where do you recruit? How you democratize, being the operative word, recruiting. Well, you look at, for example, you think about where you're not going, right? So, you send people to historically black colleges, black women's colleges. So, it's really sort of opening up the spaces, of sort of what we would call, under tapped labor markets. Or moving out of the traditional pathways which of recruitment which would only serve to reproduce a traditionally white male, even though it's changing a little bit on Wall Street. So how do you even think about creating a new kind of pathway. Another issue would be how do you create mentoring opportunities, especially in the context of the hybrid environment. So, one of the things that I'm working with firms to think about is coaching, which is becoming even more important, somewhat with the advent of Ai, but in general. So one of the things that I'm advocating in this larger report that I'm working on, this report by the way is for about 10 firms, is thinking about how you bring in coaching that's not just about individual coaching or career coaching, but coaching on multiple levels. So how do you think about career coaching, what about financial coaching, right? I mean even on Wall Street I mean this and now I'm advocating by the way, I mean not just executives but people at all levels. So if you really, really want to create an inclusive culture, then you don't just target at the very top or even at the middle levels. You think about the secretaries, the people that are at the entry way, right? Sort of how are you going to sort of serve your population to create a glue a sense of community after three years of not being together so going back to coaching professional coaching is one dimension. Coaching about and of course this has to be private, your finances, right? People have gotten very worried; people were out of jobs for a while. The economy is tough, I mean yes if you're high up in finance, you probably have much more you definitively have much more of a financial privilege and cushion. But you'd be surprised.

32:29.17

Melissa Fisher

At that level. There are concerns too, right? Their kids to send to college, whatever so the financial part you know how do you anticipate having you know an elderly parent who will need these things? That's really important. Why, because people have been under a lot of mental stress. Right? And so how can this benefit the firm right? If you don't have somebody like the woman I was referring to, who's a sandwich generation. If you have somebody kind of helping you that's a big difference. Lastly is more wellness, right? We're talking in the physical mental wellness as a coach, so you can have three different kinds of coaches. But then it's like okay one of the things that we've found, and I should say that the person that I've had very important conversations regarding this is DJ Castro who's at Synchrony so I want to give him you know a shout out. Because what they've done which I think is really important and I recommend to the firms that I'm now working with, is the idea that you also have coaches that look like you, that are like you. So a woman of color would often voice I would be much more comfortable having a coach who's a woman of color. So what is it that I've done? I have spent two years and sometimes it's only a week, trying to understand the experiences the issues that particular individuals experience in the workplace. And that can be sort of feelings of exclusion on the training floor. So it's a very physical sense of exclusion feeling ah that they can't get to work because of commute. So it's all encompassing.

33:58.41

Melissa Fisher

Taking it all those ethnographic findings distilling the seams the issues the patterns that we see and then coming up with depending on the client a set of recommendations workplace strategies. It can go from soup to nuts. It can be about the design of the workplace to policies. So I think in the end of the day, anthropologists because they are such a holistic discipline we started off looking at the entire culture kinship family. I'm talking one hundred years ago, we're doing the same we see things in the broader us landscape. We do not look at things that are siloed. It's not just looking at technology. It's not just looking at people we have what my colleague Gillian Tet who was up until recently the editor of the financial times. She calls it shes and anthropologist lateral vision. It's connecting the dots across and this is so important in a hybrid work environment where you can't just look at the workplace and then it's coming up with the analysis. It's not that it's qualitative data just sort of out there. It's a systemic way of looking at data, analyzing, understanding the deep structural cultural economic phenomenon that are impacting people's experiences And coming up most often, not just by myself. But in conjunction with leaders or employees with a set of recommendations. The latter being important because I'm an advocate of collaboration, collective working. For example I'm not a complete expert I have not been an architect for forty years but I can understand and talk to architects. How can we I'm very interested is one of the biggest parts of my own current work. How can we create what I'm calling an anthropological architecture. Architectural anthropology where we bring our expertise together to create and design more inspiring inclusive workplaces. So at the end of the day, we can bring as a wider lens as possible as anthropologists but we need to imagine what the future will be in the analysis with other experts. It's not about doing it by ourselves. It's like doing with someone like you right, or your company. What.

36:31.74

CCB

Excellent. So I'm going to wrap us up because oh my gosh Melissa you have shared so much information and I feel like it's ah it's a primer on the importance of cultural anthropology in all aspects of our living today. Moving away from the compartmentalization if you will that it's specialization, and you talked about silos...how are we weaving things back together and I hear that over and over again, no matter the discipline or the industry it things are broken. And the covid experience kind of opened the doors or pulled back the curtains on kind of where a lot of the the breakage is. So I want to say thank you so very, very much for all the listeners on the ONEder podcast. You know that there will be a ONEder podcast web page specifically about Melissa's conversation and links to alot of the references that she's made so you can go back and find more information. And there's also a link to Melissa, so you can find her if you if you're driven to either utilize a cultural anthropologist or get a little bit more insight. And with great gratitude I'm going to say, thank you Melissa! We appreciate your conversation.

37:44.60

Melissa Fisher

It's always ONEderful talking to you, and your questions and the whole conversation was incredibly engaging. It's fascinating to hear that we all sort of agree that in this moment of breakage, that we sort of, that all of your guests, and you yourself are like bringing it all together that we we know that we need to work together. I mean it's critical.

38:04.20

CCB

Yeah, perfect, let's go forward and work together. Thanks for listening to the ONEder podcast.