Employee survey data reveals the hidden drivers of culture, retention, and performance in AEC firms.
In the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, leaders often believe they have a good sense of how their employees feel about the firm. They talk regularly with staff, watch utilization rates, and keep an eye on turnover.
But perception and reality are not always the same.
Many of the most successful firms in the AEC industry rely on structured employee experience data to understand how their people truly experience work. Culture, engagement, and retention are difficult to manage through intuition alone. They require measurement.
That’s one of the reasons employee sentiment surveys have become more common across the industry in recent years. When firms take the time to gather structured feedback from their workforce, they often discover insights that would otherwise remain hidden.
Sometimes those insights confirm what leadership suspected. Other times they reveal gaps between how leaders believe the firm operates and how employees actually experience it day to day.
Listening at scale
One of the largest sources of employee sentiment data in the AEC industry comes from Zweig Group’s Best Firms To Work For program. While the program is widely recognized for its annual rankings, it is fundamentally built around an extensive employee survey that captures how people experience work inside their firms.
Each year, thousands of AEC professionals respond to questions about leadership, communication, compensation, career development, workload, and overall engagement. When aggregated, those responses provide a valuable snapshot of what employees across the industry value most in their workplace experience.
For participating firms, the data can provide useful context. Leaders are able to see how employees within their own organization perceive the firm and how those perceptions compare to others across the industry.
That benchmarking often provides clarity that internal conversations alone cannot.
Turning feedback into insight
Employee surveys are only valuable if firms are willing to examine the results honestly and use them to guide improvement.
Structured survey programs allow firms to move beyond anecdotal feedback and begin identifying patterns in how employees experience leadership, career development, recognition, and communication.
Joe Kulp of Mulhern & Kulp says the feedback his firm receives through the Best Firms To Work For survey has helped validate decisions and highlight opportunities for improvement.
“They’re validation that we’re making the right decisions,” Kulp says. “It’s validation that we’re doing the best we can for our people. We get feedback every year that gives us new insight and new ideas on where there are opportunities for us to strengthen our game even more.”
Just as important as collecting feedback is what firms do next. Employees notice when leadership takes the results seriously – sharing key takeaways, outlining an action plan, and demonstrating that the survey wasn’t conducted simply for the sake of surveying. When employees see their input translate into meaningful changes, it builds trust in leadership and reinforces the value of speaking up.
For many firms, the most useful aspect of the process is the ability to see where they stand relative to peers. When leadership teams can compare their employee experience metrics with firms of similar size, it becomes easier to identify where they are performing well and where improvement may be needed.
That context can turn employee feedback into something much more actionable.
Culture that attracts talent
Employee experience also plays an increasingly visible role in recruiting.
In a competitive labor market like the AEC industry, candidates often look beyond compensation and project portfolios. They want to understand what it’s actually like to work at a firm.
Recognition programs can help reinforce that reputation.
Victor Harris, business development manager at CMTS, LLC, says being recognized as a Best Firm To Work For has strengthened how candidates perceive the firm during recruiting conversations.
“I will say that it’s helped a lot,” Harris says. “Quite honestly, I’m in the middle of a hiring blitz for a program we have in the U.S. Virgin Islands. When I talk to candidates about what they know about the firm, it comes up. ‘We hear that you’re a great firm to work for. We hear great things about what you do and how you treat your people.’ It’s a net positive when that kind of information is out there publicly.”
For many firms, the recognition itself is less about awards and more about reinforcing a culture that employees already experience internally.
Celebrating the work behind the culture
Recognition still carries meaning for employees as well.
When firms earn a place on the Best Firms To Work For list, it often becomes a moment to celebrate the culture that has been built collectively across the organization.
Brian Bowers, president of Bowers + Kubota, says the firm has long treated the recognition as something worth celebrating with the entire team.
“We’ve been lucky enough to be in the top three and first many times,” Bowers says. “We actually go back and have a celebration just to say that we were the number one best place to work nationwide in the A/E space. I think all our teams really enjoy that.”
Those moments can reinforce a shared sense of pride in the workplace environment employees have helped create.
The value of understanding your workforce
At its core, employee experience data offers something many leadership teams struggle to obtain: a clearer understanding of how people inside the firm experience their work.
For AEC firms navigating tight labor markets, growing backlogs, and increasing competition for talent, that understanding can be valuable.
Programs like Best Firms To Work For provide a structured way to gather employee feedback, benchmark results across the industry, and track how workplace culture evolves over time.
More importantly, they provide an opportunity to listen. And for firms that are serious about building strong cultures and retaining great people, listening is often where improvement begins.
Interested in learning how your firm compares?
Participation in Zweig Group’s Best Firms To Work For program includes a comprehensive employee experience survey, benchmarking against AEC peers, sentiment analysis of employee comments, and interactive dashboards to explore your results. Firms that participate gain both the opportunity for national recognition and valuable insight into how their employees truly experience the workplace. Learn more and enter your firm here.
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Kyle Ahern is manager of Data and Analytics at Zweig Group. Contact him at kahern@zweiggroup.com. |
