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Good choice: Matt Hoying (part 2) President, Choice One Engineering Corp. (Best Firm Civil #2 for 2018), a 45-person firm based in Dayton, Ohio.
By RICHARD MASSEY Managing Editor
“W ork-life balance is a phrase thrown around a lot, but we believe more in work-life satisfaction,” Hoying says. “Regardless of anyone’s best intentions, we all bring work home and home to work, so do we really have balance? What is happening in one area of our life affects other parts of our life, so we focus on making Choice One an enjoyable place to live.” A CONVERSATION WITH MATT HOYING. The Zweig Letter: There is no substitute for experience, but there is pressure to give responsibility to younger staff. What are you doing to address the risk while pursu- ing the opportunity to develop your team? Matt Hoying: We identified our lack of experience in young- er employees as an obstacle for us to overcome several years ago in our strategic planning sessions and have been work- ing on this ever since. We have one of our engineers whose responsibility it is to help our designers and engineers to shorten the traditional experience gap. He has developed training programs for our people that include both on-site
and in-house training as well as leading discussions in our monthly production meetings to make sure knowledge is being shared within the company. We also make sure that we have our more experienced people taking the roles of plan and design reviewers. “If we can be super clear on what our culture is and make it clear to our employees and potential employees, then they will know whether they will enjoy being a part of our company.” TZL: Engineers love being engineers, but what are you doing to instill a business culture in your firm? MH: Transparency, education, and hiring with intention. Not only do we share the financial numbers, we take time to educate our employees on what the numbers mean, how
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