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ABOUT THE CONFERENCE ELEVATE AEC VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE The safety and well-being of our loyal clients, friends, and family is our number one priority. That is why Zweig Group has decided to switch our Elevate AEC Conference and ElevateHer Symposium to a 100 percent virtual experience! You’ve asked. We’re answering. The Elevate AEC Conference can now be experienced 100 percent virtually. That’s right – the same
world-class experience, but no travel required. The 2020 Elevate AEC Virtual Experience will be an eight-week event, providing attendees meaningful content and networking opportunities from afar, highly produced with live interactions. This virtual experience will include daily doses of keynote speeches, Ted Talks, breakout sessions, virtual social mixing events, and awards celebrations.
Driving Financial Results Webinar
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CHAD CLINEHENS, from page 1
Solid financial management is crucial to the success of any company, and firms in the AEC industry are no exception. This short course provides an overview of business financial management – specifically tailored to our industry – to help firm leaders make informed decisions that drive results.
at the year ahead, you should be thinking about what new things you need to implement and measure in order to be able to celebrate next year, because a lot is changing. What makes a firm a great place to work, what effective marketing looks like, what drives growth is all going to be impacted as this illness affects our lives longer-term. So what can you do to keep driving excellence in your firm while quickly adapting to internal and external conditions that are changing due to COVID? Consider there is one common driver in every award: Your people. They drive growth, define culture, create marketing excellence, and the list goes on. Start now, and think big – really big – about how you can evolve the employee experience at your firm. Beyond the changes that are being forced by COVID, what can you do now to take a quantum leap in the employee experience? To guide your decisions, I’m challenging you as a leader to develop dramatic and extraordinary empathy for every person in your company. COVID brought down the house of cards and exposed the fragility of our system, putting tremendous pressure on people in a variety of ways. Now there is wide disparity in how individuals and family units are coping with all these new pressures, most of which are a result of trying to protect physical health. All the while, the toll on mental and emotional health is mounting. If you are not concerned about the well-being of your people, you should be. The way our awards data was trending post-COVID gave us concern, and continues to with difficulties growing as we approach the half year mark of this illness. Shooting to the top list of challenges for employees is distractions, work-life balance, and loneliness. Add to this the pressures that caregivers are facing as the uncertainty around schools will put additional pressure on the issues listed above, and the firm overall. With recruiting and retention still being the number one challenge firms face, losing valuable people because of work- life complications will be a costly tragedy. If it seems like I’m sounding the alarm, it’s because I am. Per the data, our industry was already struggling with employee burnout and the ability to appropriately staff projects before COVID. Losing additional workforce will make an industry crisis even worse. And while we were making some progress with diversity initiatives, especially in regards to gender equity, the months ahead could send us back decades if we don’t figure out a way to radically adapt our businesses to deal with a work-life balance cataclysm that will eclipse the first round in the spring. Embracing extreme flexibility now will put you ahead in the coming months. It’s time for radical empathy. As we proudly put our 2020 awards on the shelf and look at taking our award status to the next level in 2021, get radical in your thinking. We must quickly decide what is important and get to work on a structure that can deal with all the uncertainty ahead. As our lives and profession continue to become intertwined like never before, award winning firms will be made up of heroes at home, not just at work, What does an award-winning firm look like after a full year of COVID? I can’t fully answer that, but it will certainly be one that focuses on its people in extraordinary ways. For now, celebrate like crazy, envision a celebration a year from now, and get to work building the structure to make that happen. Congrats to all the 2020 award winners. It will certainly be a year to remember! CHAD CLINEHENS is Zweig Group’s president and CEO. Contact him at cclinehens@zweiggroup.com.
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1200 North College Ave. Fayetteville, AR 72703 Chad Clinehens | Publisher cclinehens@zweiggroup.com Sara Parkman | Senior Editor & Designer sparkman@zweiggroup.com Christina Zweig | Contributing Editor czweig@zweiggroup.com Liisa Andreassen | Correspondent landreassen@zweiggroup.com
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© Copyright 2020. Zweig Group. All rights reserved.
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 24, 2020, ISSUE 1358
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