Jenifer Navard
CFO
Eskew + Dumez + Ripple ▼
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!
A/E/C Talent Watch: Let's Find and Keep the People You Need to Grow the Bottom Line!
Dr. Melissa Furman, Nationally Recognized Speaker, Author, and Consultant▼
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”.
Proven Strategies for Engaging Top A/E/C Talent on Your Firm’s Website
Tim Asimos, Partner, circle S Studio ▼
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:
A/E/C Firm Culture Breakthrough: Reinvent and Reinvigorate Growth Through Manifestation!
Mary Moore, Associate Principal and Dennis Burns, President, Pulse Design Group ▼
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:
Is Putting People First the Answer? A Proven Talent Strategy For Becoming a Destination Employer
Victoria Campbell, Director, HR, and Garth Cressman, CEO, WalterFedy ▼
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.
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.
Prepare Tomorrow's Leaders -- Today! Creating Equity in Your Leadership Pipeline
Mel Butcher, Lead to Soar
Advancing in any A/E/C organization requires achieving and sustaining extraordinary outcomes. Although many more women earn engineering degrees today, they exit the profession at a higher rate than male counterparts because they aren't adequately supported. We know that the advice/training given to women is too often focused in becoming more confident, being more assertive, and team-building, managing staff, not the training, mentorship, and feedback in the areas for which their success most deeply depends -- achieving and sustaining the firm's business, strategic, and financial outcomes.
We cannot afford to continue losing talent. Nor can we expect equitable outcomes in closing the gender leadership gap without taking steps to level the playing field. In this luncheon presentation, leading A/E/C DEI process development expert Mel Butcher provides research-based methods for supporting women to advance.
Creating a Talent Acquisition Strategy to Win in the Current Market
Shaun Leeper, AEC IQ ▼
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.
More Than a Paycheck: Persuasively Communicate Your Firm’s Purpose, Mission, and Values to Engage and Retain Superstars
Jonathan Wilson, Senior Consultant, PSMJ Resources▼
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.
Hand-in-Hand: A/E/C Talent Acquisition and Talent Management Throughout the Life Cycle
Kristal Genwright, SHRM-CP, HR Business Partner, and Jennifer King, P.E., SPHR, Talent Management Business Partner, Kleinschmidt Associates ▼
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 to Create Dynamic Team Unity Anytime, Anywhere!
Troy Parkinson and Dean Hyers, SagePresence ▼
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.
What's Driving A/E/C Talent Retention: The Neuroscience Behind Employee Behavior
Don Rheem, E3 Solutions ▼
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.
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
Join your fellow attendees and speakers for a casual light hors d'oeuvres and cocktail reception. A great way to make new connections in the A/E/C industry and share your best takeaways from day one!
FROM THE INSIDE OUT: Use Emotional Intelligence to Transform A/E/C Leadership Recruitment and Retention
Clay Kirkland, Senior Consultant, Wisdom & Creativity Consulting
How can you find the leadership talent your backlog demands, as bigger A/E/C firms poach top talent, proven managers become part of the exploding retirement bubble, and rising stars seem less interested in greater responsibility? Learn creative and innovative approaches to improving your business culture, hiring techniques, and leadership development by recruiting for Emotional Intelligence. Clay Kirkland, a certified Emotional Intelligence Coach and Consultant, demonstrates how to increase EQ in current employees, explain how EQ development programs nurture emerging leaders, and guide you on creating an emotionally intelligent business culture that directly enhances your ability to recruit and retain top talent. This session will help you to understand, incorporate, and capitalize on EQ for the betterment of your firm and business.
Is Your Comp Strategy Smart and Equitable? Win the War for Highly Trained Professionals
Jenifer Navard, Chief Financial Officer, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple ▼
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::
A/E/C Employee Engagement Workshop: Move from Theory to Action!
Don Rheem, E3 Solutions ▼
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 .
A/E/C Leadership Focus Shift: Coaching for Culture, not KPIs
Jeff Tibbitts, Senior Vice President, CESO, Inc. ▼
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:
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:
The A/E/C Workforce and Workplace Has Changed – Have You? Land Critical Talent with Proactive Recruiting, Performance Objective Communication, and Career-Arc Planning!
Barb Bruno, Good As Gold Training LLC ▼
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: