Improving employee experience may be the AEC industry’s most important group project.
In the most serendipitous way, I’ve somehow become fortunate enough to find the north star that guides my career. Through my time at AIA Dallas and now at Zweig Group, I get to play a role in studying and improving employee experience in the AEC industry from all kinds of perspectives and angles; and I get to be a connector and community builder.
I hold a lot of information on the topic in my head. Every webinar, conference, meeting, report, white paper that I come across – they stay with me. I will admit though that I am not as effective as I had hoped at actually connecting this information and resources. There are, however, a few that are very much front and center for me at the moment, and I want to make sure you know about them:
- Measuring a firm’s effort. The Community Building Roadmap reflects the state of inclusion and belonging across the engineering industry and highlights opportunities for firms to strengthen their workplace culture and community impact. It is a self-reported assessment of the participating firms’ practices and structures across four domains: Workplace, Marketplace, Workforce, and Supplier/Community. It offers engineering firm executives a comprehensive, data-driven tool that assesses the maturity of a firm’s inclusion and belonging program and provides actionable suggestions on how firms can make further progress. Read the executive summary here.
- The industry-wide employee’s perspective. The People & Culture Survey captures how employees are experiencing the workplace. It is a carefully designed survey that impartially measures AEC employee sentiment in the workplace through the lenses of fairness, belonging, psychological safety, and other intangibles that do not regularly make a company’s KPIs but often directly influence whether talent stays or goes. This measures sentiment across the entire industry, allowing firm leaders to compare employee experiences across roles and regions – for example, how a mid-career project manager in Arkansas compares to one in California, or how a geologist in Pennsylvania compares to one in rural Texas.
- The experience inside each firm. A periodic internal measurement of employee experience within a firm is essential, and that's where Zweig Group’s Best Firms To Work For program comes in. This is a non-negotiable for any AEC firm in this era of persistent talent shortage. More than just an awards program, Best Firms To Work For is a customized firm-wide assessment that gives firms a structured way to benchmark culture, better understand what employees actually think, and identify where improvement is needed. More importantly, for firms that are investing in retention efforts, this is how to know if the investments are working or if you need to pivot.
- The industry coming together. The Engineering Workforce Consortium (EWC), led and steered by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), the American Public Works Association (APWA), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), is a coalition of engineering and public works associations, academia, and government working together to share resources and to amplify effective strategies from each organization, so as to grow the nation’s engineering workforce. An impressive 20+ associations have signed on since its inception two years ago, committing to three core objectives: attracting the next generation of engineering talent, retaining the existing workforce in engineering and public works, and advocating for industry growth and sustainability.
Representatives from the EWC gather in Washington, D.C. for their annual meeting.
You cannot recruit your way out of an experience problem. You cannot message your way out of a trust problem. And you cannot expect people to stay simply because your firm says the right things on paper.
From my how-to-eat-an-elephant (I would never!) perspective, step one of solving the talent crisis is to improve employee experience. And each one of the above is contributing to that in a big way, but the most impactful results can only be achieved if we combine resources and amplify.
That is the work ahead – and it is work worth doing.
As much as I believe in the power of one, I appreciate and long for group projects. So, here’s my call to action for you – my “dearest gentle reader” (a small nod to Bridgerton) – please join me in this simple step: participate in SMPS’ People & Culture Survey before May 15.
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Shirley Che is a field marketing and PR strategist at Zweig Group. Contact her at sche@zweiggroup.com. |
