This optional pre-conference workshop gives you the tools and techniques you need to align your firm's salary structure to the current talent market, using the latest A/E/C compensation data, forward-looking metrics, and proven formulas. Your workshop coach is Jenifer Navard, Senior PSMJ Consultant and CFO at multi-disciplinary architecture firm Eskew + Dumez + Ripple. Jenifer has helped hundreds of A/E/C firms right size their compensation strategy though her A/E/C Compensation Master Class and will compress that powerful multi-session program into one eye-opening day. Stop paying too much, or too little, to find and keep the talent your firm needs to thrive!

 

Leaders in A/E/C organizations navigate challenges with recruiting and retaining an engaged, qualified workforce, and the challenges continue to build. This interactive session examines our current workforce landscape and delivers workable strategies for recruiting, retaining, and engaging talent. Yes, there are things you can do RIGHT NOW to make your firm become an “employer of choice”. 

• Identify current challenges and future workforce implications
• Employ strategies to improve diversity when recruiting, retaining, and engaging your A/E/C workforce

Dr. Furman wowed the thousands in attendance at PSMJ's MetalCON conference in 2022 so we had to ask her to speak at A/E/C TalentMAX. While an accomplished professor, she is not your typical “academic”. She served as the Assistant Dean at the Hull College of Business at Augusta University for 10+ years, but her passion for career, leadership, and organizational development inspired her to launch Career Potential, a consulting, training, and coaching organization. Her expertise includes generational diversity, unconscious bias, and leadership development. She also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the Professional Education division at GA Tech and the Kenan-Flagler Executive Education division at UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Furman has previously served in a variety of career services roles at other universities such as Emory University, The University of Georgia, and Johns Hopkins University. She obtained her Doctorate of Business and Masters of Science in Professional Counseling from Georgia State University and her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Susquehanna University.

 

Is your firm’s website your most valuable talent recruitment asset? It CAN be! More than two-thirds of job seekers visit a firm’s website before applying and nearly 90% believe it's essential for finding key information. A site that successfully attracts top A/E/C talent differentiates, tells your firms's story, and engages candidates. However, many A/E/C websites lack the design, content, features, functionality, and technical foundation necessary to excite potential recruits and make a lasting impact. So how can you turn yours into a talent magnet? Tim Asimos, CPSM, Partner and Director of Digital at circle S studio, will share innovative ideas that can transform a website into a dynamic recruitment machine. Leveraging his extensive experience in A/E/C web development, he’ll share cutting-edge best practices, offer practical tips and tricks, answer FAQs, and give attendees actionable takeaways for optimizing their websites for talent acquisition.

In this session, you:

• Discover the latest website best practices that drive recruitment results
• Learn the metrics that score the effectiveness of your firm’s website
• Identify vital content, functionality, and design elements essential to maximizing impact
• See the fundamental changes and website enhancements you should make immediately
• Learn how to make the business case for your recruiting site upgrades

Your firm is probably chock-full of technical experts that excel at their craft-- they understand the built environment, they leverage technology to produce thoroughly detailed and coordinated documents, they consistently meet project deadlines, lead project meetings and teams, they are versed in codes and compliance, they create artistic renderings to visually communicate design intent and consistently enhance their technical prowess to bring their clients vision to life. But here's the problem... Projects and processes don’t sell work, people do! Designers and engineers need to see the larger purpose to what they do, which is what resonates with clients and partners and wins projects. Once they experience this magic, ‘a-ha’ moment, they become engaged and energized, seeing how critically important they are to the firm's mission. They see growth, opportunity, possibility, and THEY start coming up with innovative ideas, best-practices, strategies, ‘what-ifs,’ ‘how abouts,’ ‘can you imagine?’ This culture fosters an innovative, collaborative environment where beliefs drive decisions, not deadlines, and creates a movement that can transform businesses to attain and even exceed the loftiest of goals, The employee-driven market is here to stay, and executives need to embrace a dynamic shift to contend and thrive in this competitive market. Dennis Burns and Mary Moore use Pulse Design Group as an incubator case study to showcase how a strong message, clear company purpose, mission and vision can amplify each employee’s personal passion to deliver results. We'll share KPI’s, growth curves and lessons learned so you can adopt and apply this methodology to scale your firm, transform your culture, increase growth, and drive results.

In this session, you learn:

• Proven strategies and best practices for challenging traditional business norms to reinvent and reinvigorate your business.
• how the implementation of a strong and convicted message, company purpose, mission and vision leverages each employee’s personal passion to deliver results
• How to create an employee-driven culture that fosters an innovative, collaborative environment where beliefs drive decisions, not deadlines.
• Data and metrics to support the shift, based on number of new employees, percentage decrease of employee turnover, new employee referrals, value of new clients and new partnerships, and increased profitability

In the war for talent, who comes out on top? Is it those who can recruit the best talent or those who can retain them? In this market, retention is just as important as recruitment, so engineering firm WalterFedy made a strategic decision to institute a cultural shift and become a People First organization. But what does that mean in the real world, and does it really move the needle for keeping the best employees? We go deep inside the leadership philosophy change, how we got leadership on board, what changes had to be made internally to get there, and how it has made a huge impact on our recruitment strategy.

• What is People First, and how does it work in the A/E/C industry?
• The critical foundation upon which you can build your firm's People First Culture.
• How changing to People First affected the recruiting strategy, and the measurable impacts of the shift.

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It seems that everywhere you look, organizations are concerned about retaining their employees. Why? Is it pay? Is it benefits? Is it policies? Maybe, but these variables fail to confront the fact that people often LEAVE MANAGERS, NOT ORGANIZATIONS. This is because some leaders don’t understand the impact of their current behavior, even when they are leading from the best of intentions. Further, many leadership development initiatives fail to equip leaders to understand their employees uniquely and adapt to their true needs. Please join us to learn a hidden and deeper truth about ADAPTIVE CAPACITY, and its power to retain employees through effective leadership.

Talent acquisition is the new business development. Finding the work isn’t the hard part these days, it’s finding the quality talent to hire that is the challenge. Sound familiar? Join us as we take a deep dive into “how to find, engage and nurture talent”. Having worked with 700+ AEC firms across North America, we will share some best practices and approaches, along with eye-opening statistics and realities, to help you unlock the keys to success.

• Strategies and tactics to gain talent pool visibility and effectively nuture relationships within your talent pools.
• The tools companies are using to retain their top talent.
• One assumable, yet underemphasized tactic, to achieve success in the form of hiring passive candidates in today's competitive market.
• What KPI's should you be paying most attention to when it comes to your Talent Acquisition strategy?

When it comes to employee engagement and retention, your firm’s purpose, mission, and values—its unique vision--matters more than we think it does. Deloitte notes that purpose-driven companies have higher market share gains and grow on average three times faster than their competitors while achieving higher employee and customer satisfaction. Sixty-six (66%) of prospective candidates say that a company’s culture and values are the most important factor when considering career opportunities. Often the problem isn’t that our firms lack a vision, it’s that we fail to communicate that vision effectively. In this session, Jonathan Wilson will take you through a simple framework to help you better communicate your firm’s vision. Learn the secrets to crafting a compelling message that further engage and retain your superstar employees.

• Cite the essential elements of your firm’s vision: It’s purpose, mission, and values
• Identify a simple leadership framework to persuasively communicate your firm’s vision
• Compose a shortcut “one liner” mantra that clearly distinguishes your firm from your competitors.
• Communicate a vision that redefines your employees' experience, promotes cohesion, and sets the stage for meaningful teamwork.

Our industry is based on helping talented people in the Talent Cycle: the hiring, the retention, the development, and the end of employment. Throughout the Talent Cycle, a balance and partnership between Talent Acquisition and Talent Management is imperative to serve both the employee’s and the firm’s objectives. This interactive session will walk you through the Talent Cycle, Kleinschmidt’s approach to talent, both acquisition and management, especially at key touch points including onboarding, the review process, and employee exits. And you get models for integrating talent acquisition and talent management functions at a range of firm sizes. You’ll learn:

• How a talent acquisition strategy differs from talent management.
• How to develop A/E/C talent and course correct.
• How to maximize talent integration impact at the onboarding stage.
• Engaging your managers in Talent Development in the review stage.
• Letting go through corrective action plans, succession planning, and celebrations.

In a hybrid world, mixing in-office teams with remote staff, side-by-side with clients who do the same, a consistent brand presence becomes harder and harder to maintain. It’s one thing to develop your confident presence for your own networking, interviewing, selling, work presentations, and the customer experience. It’s another to have synergy with your teammates. Entirely different is Team Unity, a team wide set of communication behaviors that embody your differentiated AEC brand. Experience the tag-team unity of two former filmmakers turned interview prep coaches, who share the simple steps of group communication and presentation, to get your team from “me” to “we." Learn the principles of presence, synergy, and collaboration, that elevate the experience with staff, clients, and communities. We call this the Presence Effect™, the result of translating your brand into human expressions, around which your team can align to present themselves with unity.

• Improve your own presence in meetings, conversation, presentation and virtual "Zoom-style" interactions.
• Communicate to protect team member vulnerabilities.
• Become your firm's presence champion, with specific actionable steps to elevate your team.
• Model “the new bold,” a presence that is all at once “command yet also nurture.”
• Avoid negative impacts of group-think, emotional volatility, and overly assertive individuals.

What's REALLY going on when your best A/E/C talent makes a decision to build their future at your firm -- or start looking elsewhere? Your firm's leaders are the fulcrum upon which that decision balances, and effective A/E/C leadership today is less about titles and hierarchy and much more about the experience felt by people in the organization. Leaders must embrace the overwhelming scientific evidence proving that a healthier workplace culture is the key to increased retention and lasting engagement. In this keynote, Don Rheem breaks down the science that triggers exemplary workplace behavior at a neurological level, sharing valuable trends from his architectural and engineering clients, you see what others in our industry are experiencing. You get actionable tips you can implement right away to see increased engagement and retention in at your firm.

• Hardwired drivers of employee decision making, through the lens of neuroscience and behavioral science.
• Apply relational leadership strategies that meet employee needs.
• Distinguish employee engagement from employee satisfaction.
• Gain insights into industry-specific employee engagement global data trends.
• Improve workplace culture, staff performance, team dynamics, and retention.

Don Rheem is CEO of E3 Solutions where he empowers organizations to build engaged, high-performance cultures. One of the nation’s principal authorities on leadership science, he travels the globe speaking to business leaders about creating healthy workplace cultures and deepening employee engagement through the lens of neuroscience. Don is also a two-time TEDx speaker and author of Thrive By Design: The Neuroscience That Drives High-Performance Cultures

 

Great design and technical staff, the lifeblood of your firm, are the hottest thing in recruiting right now, and that means yours are probably getting approached by other headhunters on a daily basis. Problem is, you can't throw money at all of them to keep the wolves at bay, so you need a formal, logical, and defensible professional staff pay structure supported by sound financial underpinnings. In this action-oriented session, A/E/C firm CFO Jenifer Navard uses hard salary data and real-world examples to explain::

• Why position descriptions are a terrible way to set salaries right now -- and what works better.
• 4 critical factors that must guide every salary offer for design and technical professionals, and the high costs of ignoring them.
• How the latest survey data on chargeability, billing rates and direct labor multiplier can help you determine the financial impact of salary increases.
• How to establish an equitable market-based salary structure for key contributors and potential new hires.
• The right way to look at gender pay equity in staff discussions.

Building on what we learned in his keynote, Don Rheem walks us though the application of our new understanding of emplyee behavior neuroscience to building a highly successful culture at our A/E/C firms. Don't expect to sit and listen - this is hands-on, active-participation experience that turns high-level understanding into a clear implementation strategy you can apply the week after you get back. Don has helped dozens of organizations rethink, renew, and re-energize their workplace cultures, and see measurable increases in top talent engagement, productivity, and retention .

How do A/E/C companies develop their talent to remain competitive in the market while nurturing and sustaining a strong culture of succession? For decades, our industry has struggled with effectively managing performance improvement. We have learned the importance of key performance indicators such as utilization, multipliers, A/R, and overhead expenditures. However, how this information is distilled and conveyed can be daunting, and messages are often used as a hammer to drive results. This approach can cause unintended consequences. How do we drive better KPIs without adversely impacting our culture? We need a paradigm shift in business – one that moves from focusing on results to concentrating on our people. Coaching is the key to success, but only when coaches care more about the player than their own wins and losses. See how to apply proven coaching techniques to transforming your A/E/C firm's culture.

In this session, you learn:

• How to relate to your staff
• What are the keys to coaching success.
• How to expand your team's skills.
• What kind of feedback drives positive change.

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Does your C-Suite want honest performance feedback on what they can do to improve for the good of your firm? Are you exhausted trying to get more than mid-level performance from your business unit leaders? Could you be losing top talent because their direct supervisors and PICs lack crucial people skills, but no one knows how to tell them? PSMJ Senior Consultant Jay McRae shares his experiences helping two mid-sized A/E/C firms radically rethink honesty and candor through 360 feedback, and how it directly led to improved talent retention, project performance, and employee job satisfaction. You learn how to carefully implement a new communication paradigm at your firm, get buy-in from senior leadership, and most importantly, make the process positive and permanent. Using actual case studies and first-hand anecdotes, Jay explains:

• Who to interview for feedback, and the questions to ask
• How the information is best packaged for individual and team results
• Setting accountability expectations with team endorsement for results

Your A/E/C firm's ability to attract, hire, engage and retain the BEST talent has a direct impact on your bottom line. But it's getting harder and harder to find that talent, given a rapidly recovering economy and firms' committment to retaining their key contributors. Website postings and job board ads only attract candidates in an active job search, NOT the 85% of the talent pool who are employed. Skill based requisitions and long hiring processes could also put your firm at a competitive disadvantage. But fear not! You CAN achieve your talent recruiting goals using the tested techniques that global talent expert Barb Bruno brings to her closing keynote:

• Six words that dramatically improve the talent you will recruit and hire.
• Voice mail, email and in mail that will be answered by top talent.
• Triple your referrals of top talent and fill requisitions faster.
• How employee engagement and retention starts with recruiting.
• The impact on recruiting post-Covid
• How Salary Ban Laws are affecting compensation
• New emphasis on DEI