A commercial architecture practice designs offices, retail and hospitality spaces for clients with firm dates and changing briefs. Its people are designers, drafters and site coordinators. This is how to build and keep that team.
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Share your requirementsA commercial architecture practice takes a brief, develops concepts, prepares drawings for approval and construction, and often visits the site during building. The team has principals who win and hold the client, project architects who run jobs, junior architects and interns who draw, and visualisers and site coordinators. Work comes in stages with client reviews, and each review can bring changes that alter days of work. Deadlines for submissions and tenders create long hours. Juniors learn by doing live projects, so their learning depends on who they sit beside. Pay is often modest compared with the hours, and many leave to start small practices or move abroad. For the wider sector, read HR for the construction industry.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in commercial architects. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Their growth depends on which project architect they sit with, and some years teach little.
A reversed decision at review undoes drawings, and no one is paid for the lost time.
Submission nights are celebrated, and burnt-out staff quietly leave.
Project architects cannot grow because they never meet clients.
Design staff attend site only in a crisis, so drawings and building drift apart.
Stipends and salaries stay low while workload rises.
They draw for months without feedback or a letter.
Details, standards and past learning are not stored in a way others can find.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Career and Succession Management; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a commercial architects business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A learning plan per junior covering drawing, detailing, site and client exposure, reviewed quarterly under learning and development.
A learning plan per junior covering drawing, detailing, site and client exposure, reviewed quarterly under learning and development.
A change log with dates and agreed time or fee impact, kept with the project file.
A change log with dates and agreed time or fee impact, kept with the project file.
A rule on consecutive late days with rest after submissions.
A rule on consecutive late days with rest after submissions. See attendance and shift rules.
A staged exposure with supervision, part of a performance process.
A staged exposure with supervision, part of a performance process.
A schedule of site visits by stage for design staff.
A schedule of site visits by stage for design staff.
A written intern plan, mentor, feedback and certificate within your HR documentation.
A written intern plan, mentor, feedback and certificate within your HR documentation.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A junior learning plan that does not depend on luck.
A route for project architects to grow into client roles.
Rest rules after submission sprints.
A clearer view of design staff pay in your market.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead article
What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Give them real responsibility, a clear route to project architect and fair pay. People leave when they stop learning.
Log each one, tell the client its effect on time and fee, and protect the team's weekends.
That depends on the arrangement and law, so confirm with a qualified professional and set a written plan either way.
Plan submissions earlier, set a limit on late days and give rest after a sprint.
Let them attend client meetings with support and own a package of work.
We would look at the junior learning plan, the late-hours pattern and intern arrangements. Scope, timing and fees are written down so you know what you are buying.
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