It is fair to say that we were all happy to see the year 2020 in the rear-view mirror. The new year brings the promise of Covid19 vaccine relief, and maybe (just maybe) a return to some normalcy. In the meantime, many of us remain working from home. To be honest, it sometimes feels like living under house arrest! At MSG, we miss being physically in the presence of our colleagues. We miss the water cooler conversations and casual interactions. We stay close over Teams, but it’s just not quite the same. Such isolation can be unnerving and wearying, but in the spirit of the new year, we asked our teammates to share some silver linings they have found inside the cloud. What are some benefits about working from home?

More time to spend with kids. For those of us with children, we can spend more precious time around them. The kids aren’t going to be little ones forever. OK, OK, maybe that sentiment held for the first month or two, before everyone started climbing the walls! But you get the idea. It’s good to be reminded how much our families matter.  

Being more productive without worrying about commute. Honestly, how many of us miss the drive to work? The past year has made us more aware of the time we spend moving from home to workplace. That is time better spent catching up on email and planning our day.  And think of all the money saved in gas and wear and tear on your automobile! One thing you might miss about the commute, however, is the transition time. Commuting gives you space between home and work life. How do we cope when that buffer collapses? On to our next point….

Being more strategic about time management. One of the major challenges of working from home is finding ways to juggle all the responsibilities of homelife on top of the regular workday responsibilities. We have become better planners.  It is important to set some boundaries and rituals to give your day a semblance of structure. We have also become better multitaskers, finding ways to be more flexible, like say, doing the laundry and feeding the pets in between meetings.

Closer bonds and time with the family. The pandemic has made us appreciate the time we have together. We’ve become closer and more appreciative of our loved ones.  As one of our salespeople puts it, “if it were not for COVID we would not spend this much time together, and because of the pandemic we have all learned to be flexible and to get creative with entertaining ourselves.” Cooking, crafting, doing puzzles, and decluttering—these kinds of activities can be shared with loved ones. They are opportunities to make memories that will be cherished in years to come.

More “outside time”. Because we’re not stuck in the car each morning and afternoon running to and from work, it’s a lot easier to step out for some fresh air, walk the dog, recommit to that morning exercise routine. Attendance at local parks and open space preserves is up. You’ll find plenty of people enjoying quality “back to nature” moments. All of this is good for the spirit.  

More time with our animals. Let’s talk pets. Better yet, let’s revel in the cameo appearances they make during virtual meetings. Who doesn’t love seeing this?! Pets make us smile. They reveal our better nature. They have been faithful companions through a very difficult time. Where would we be without them? They make the workday much more bearable.

As the months wear on with no clear end to the pandemic in sight, working from home is going to remain challenging. Hang in there and take time for self-care. Recognize how the slower pace allows us to appreciate the simple things in life.

In the past year, we have all been struggling to maintain some measure of work/life balance. Blame it on Covid19, if you like, but even in the good old so-called “normal times,” workers have had to juggle competing demands from work, family, friends, service, and that all too rare commodity known as “me time.”  

It being Black History Month, we would like to share some wisdom from one of our greatest African-American writers, the novelist and Nobel prize winner, Toni Morrison. Toni published a brief essay in The New Yorker magazine back in 2017 called “The Work You Do, The Person You Are.” The essay recalls an early job she had as a child in the 1940’s, cleaning the house of a presumably white, wealthier lady, for two dollars a day. Toni would give half her wages to her parents. “The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound,” she writes. Morrison took pride in the job, but also became frustrated as more duties were asked of her. When she complained about it to her family, Toni’s father gave her some sage advice: “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” 

Toni derived four lessons from that quote, which for those of us trying to navigate the turbulent waters of work pressures and responsibilities and home, serve as helpful reminders of what really matters.  

 
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. 
 
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. 
 
3. Your real life is with us, your family. 
 
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. 

Morrison concludes, “…I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.”  

To read the full essay, check out https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are 

To commemorate Black History Month, let’s do a retro music rewind to the year 1976 and the classic album by musical genius Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life. This Grammy award winner for album of the year is famous for the hits “Sir Duke” (a tribute to Duke Ellington), “Isn’t She Lovely,” and “I Wish.” When digging into the album’s deep cuts, you’ll find a song called “Black Man,” an 8-and-a-half-minute history lesson about the contributions made by black and brown people to American history. The timing seemed fitting, seeing as the album was released in the USA bicentennial year. 

In this funky exercise in consciousness raising, we learn about African-American figures, many of whom never got the attention they deserved in history class. People like the first man to die for the American flag (Crispus Attucks), the first heart surgeon (Dr. Daniel Hale Williams), the first clock maker in America and surveyor of the District of Columbia(Benjamin Banneker), the first man to set foot on the north pole (Matthew Henson), the founder of blood plasma and director of the Red Cross blood bank (Dr Charles Drew), the inventor of the first stop light and gas mask (Garrett Morgan), the founder of the city of Chicago (Jean Baptiste), and the woman who led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad (Harriet Tubman).  

Essentially, “Black Man” presents Stevie’s vision of a multiracial democracy, as expressed in the chorus:  

We pledge allegiance 
All our lives 
To the magic colors 
Red, blue and white 
But we all must be given 
The liberty that we defend 
For with justice not for all men 
History will repeat again 
Its time we learned 
This world was made for all men 
 

Words to live and learn by!  

For a full listing of the celebrated historical figures mentioned in the song, check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Man_(song) 

Youtube version of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEoE2UQXduA 

Sometimes you lose a relative, or even a friend, but then comes a time when you lose a buddy. Rumi says, “Set your life on fire and seek those who fan your flames.” There are those who douse your fire, but a buddy fans your fire to take your flames to new heights. The MSG family has lost a buddy.

I am sad out of my skull to think that Ashley is no longer with us, but then, I am delighted to have had her in my life as a buddy. She was always there to help me curb my ego to have empathy for others, yet she knew exactly how to rub me the right way so that I would go to the next step because she was good at fanning my fire.

With nearly three decades of impeccable service, Ashley Hyon was an irreplaceable pillar of MSG. She was the source staff would go to for seasoned counsel and solace, which are exactly the reasons why her clients would seek her out. You would go to her with a technical or personal problem, but then walk away forgetting the reason why you craved her companionship in the first place. People skills and the ability to see good in everything and everyone are innate qualities that are not acquirable by reading books or even getting older – you either have it, or you don’t.

I envy the time John and Sophie have had with Ashley all these years. She was not a drop in the ocean, she was the entire ocean in a drop. When I first met her almost 15 years ago, I told our late Dale Kulp that “she’s good.” Dale smiled back and replied, “I know.”

Verbosities aside, life must go on – though at the moment I’m just not sure why.

Surely you know how it feels when someone close to you has to move on. That’s how we felt when our Vice President and leader of our statistical services group, Mansour Fahimi, Ph.D., assumed a new position as Senior Vice President & Chief Statistician position at GfK in 2013. Mansour was like family to us, but we were happy and proud for him and wished him Godspeed.   

Sometimes in life, after a long odyssey, paths will cross again, and there comes a coming home. We in the MSG family are excited that Mansour is rejoining the company. He will hold the position of Executive Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of MSG’s Advanced Analytics and Methods department. Mansour will play a lead role heading MSG’s Online solutions and new methodologies for survey sampling applications in the Digital Age.   

Dr. Fahimi is an internationally recognized research statistician and data scientist, with over three decades of hands-on experience in survey research methods and applications. Throughout his professional tenure Mansour has served as a senior statistician at leading research organizations, such as Westat and RTI, supporting survey projects for the government, commercial, social science, and nonprofit sectors.   

“Mansour is a respected leader and scholar in the field,” says Jeff Palish, Senior Vice President, MSG. “His stellar record of innovations in design and administration of complex surveys for both public and private sector clients speaks for itself. His research into online data collection improvements is nothing less than groundbreaking, particularly the refinements he has developed for selection of nonprobability samples and cutting-edge weighting and calibration methods for samples with coverage limitations.”  

Dr. Fahimi has a vast collection of publication and presentations to his credit. He has served on expert and technical advisory boards for reviewing government surveys.   

“We are thrilled to have him back on board at MSG,” says Jeff, “as our mission now includes providing high-integrity online options to our clients who for decades have been relying on MSG as the leading provider of sampling solutions. Mansour will be responsible for providing strategic vision for improving the inferential integrity of our online sampling product umbrella, with a focus on increasing online market presence, creating high-efficiency project solutions, transitioning survey projects from traditional to online protocols, strengthening MSG’s analytical services, and enhancing our sampling and weighting / calibration offerings.”  

To others in the profession, he is the esteemed Dr. Fahimi. To us, he is also Mansour, a trusted colleague, friend and member of the MSG family. Welcome back, Mansour!  

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