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COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP, from page 7
GAI Consultants’ Summerset at Frick Park Residential Development project, a 2003 Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence winner.
we introduced a new maternity, paternity, and adoption paid leave policy that provides two weeks of paid leave for full-time GAI staff to care for a child new to their family. More than 30 employees have already used it. TZL: It is often said that people leave managers, not companies. What are you doing to ensure that your line leadership are great people managers? AM: Through GAI’s Stay Interview program, we actively check in with employees at designated points in their careers at the company to help make sure that their positions meet their expectations and personal goals. Through individualized, customized interactions like this, we improve retention and build a better workforce from the inside out by gaining the information to implement effective, staff-focused business practices that will benefit all GAI employees at every level of tenure and experience. TZL: How are you balancing investment in the next generation – which is at an all-time high – with rewards for tenured staff? This has always been a challenge but seems heightened as investments in development have increased. AM: This year we launched a mentorship program, which pairs volunteer employee participants with veteran GAI staff, supervisors, and leaders. The program’s goal is to support career development and leadership potential while helping cultivate connections, relationships, and cross-organization engagement within the company. “I facilitate a quarterly lunch and learn session for junior GAI staff that teaches them about the importance of customer service. I stress the need to develop an internal culture of respect for each other and to provide extraordinary service to our clients every day.” TZL: In one word or phrase, what do you describe as your number one job responsibility? AM: Optimized business operations. TZL: Do different states tend to have different needs? What are you doing to provide solutions? AM: There are unique needs based on location, but we’ve overcome them. Although we have 24 office locations, from a geographic perspective, we prefer to look at our business as having three major regions – Midwest, Northeast, and Florida/ Southeast. Also, it should be noted that GAI is not organized geographically; it’s organized nationwide by business units/ sectors. This means that each business sector is comprised of staff from all or various GAI locations. The challenge we face year-to-year is balancing hot and cold markets versus hot and cold geographic regions. From a geographic perspective, research shows that currently the Northeast and Midwest are
very cold, and Florida/Southeast is very hot. From a market perspective, our research shows the strength of the markets that we are in as:
■ ■ Transportation: Very hot ■ ■ Environmental: Very hot ■ ■ Renewables/clean energy: Very hot ■ ■ Industrial: Hot ■ ■ Land development: Flat ■ ■ Education: Flat ■ ■ Retail: Cold
■ ■ Commercial: Very cold ■ ■ Oil and gas: Very cold Let’s look at the two extremes.
We offer transportation in all three geographic regions, but our Florida transportation business is overachieving since it’s a hot market in a hot geographic region. Because our transportation business unit/sectors are made up of staff in all our locations, we can balance the workload over the whole company. On the other hand, most of our oil and gas business is in the Northeast. This is a cold market in a cold geographic region, so it’s easy to understand that we have had to downsize or reassign some of the oil and gas staff. We do mostly environmental service for the oil and gas business, and since environmental is a hot market, we were able to reassign many staff. Lastly, a flat market – land development. This market is flat in the Midwest and Northeast, but is doing well in the Florida/ Southeast region. Once again, we can balance the workload by sharing staff across the company. By conducting research and analyzing it, we can plan where we want to expand our business. This not only includes strategic hires, but mergers and acquisitions as well. Lastly, it’s common for GAI to hire staff in cold geographic regions to build staff that can assist other geographic areas in hot markets.
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THE ZWEIG LETTER JUNE 27, 2022, ISSUE 1447
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