When Bill Mandaria was a young architect decades ago, he would follow senior designers around his office to pick their brains to learn the profession.
“In architecture, and I’d imagine in a lot of other industries, what’s particularly important is the mentorship,” said Mandaria, now co-owner of Mancini Duffy, a Manhattan-based architecture and interior design firm with about 90 employees.
Mentorship, collaboration, and productivity, Mandaria argues, suffer in remote-work settings. So he began asking his employees to return to the office as soon as Manhattan would allow it during the COVID-19 pandemic — in June 2020.
