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dramatically increased number of women in our industry, including within the highest positions at consulting firms, owner agencies, professional societies, and industry forums. This rising prominence of women, in my opinion, has been as important to the recent success of our industry and H&H as any other factor and is vital to our future. TZL: How much time do you spend working “in the business” rather than “on the business?” SB: It depends on how things are going. Ideally, I’d like to spend the majority of my time, say 80 percent “on the business,” focusing on our strategic plan (driving growth, building business, firm improvement, and high-level initiatives), our clients, and ownership transition. When our operation runs well, and there are no major operational matters to deal with, I can hit this target. However, matters such as performance issues (firm, group, or individual), work slowdowns, resource issues, claims/legal issues, and the like are a distraction from my target work breakdown and result in spending a much higher percentage of my time “in the business.” Because of such issues, I’d estimate that overall, my time spent working “on the business” rather than “in the business” is 60/40 rather than my target of 80/20. During the pandemic, this ratio has been more like 20/80, unfortunately. TZL: Hardesty & Hanover has been around for more than 130 years. Is there still a culture that is adhered to that resembles the firm’s founding mission? Please provide an example or two. SB: Hardesty & Hanover’s culture very much remains based on our core values of engineering excellence and professionalism, which were established and practiced by our founders. And our drive to improve the nation’s infrastructure by solving the most challenging engineering problems has been an enduring part of our mission for more than a century. Our culture is pervasive throughout our company, and we take proactive measures to hand our values down from generation to generation. In fact, we have identified maintaining our 130-year-old culture and core values as we aggressively grow as one of our biggest challenges and a fundamental component of our strategic plan. Our enduring engineering and client- first culture leads to a collaborative
environment throughout our company, whereby we draw on our best resources without internal barriers between offices and groups. There are many recent examples of this in our project work. On one project this year, we performed a major emergency inspection and rehabilitation design for one of our primary New York City clients. Knowing how critical it was to our client, we took on this task at risk, with no budget in place and with high uncertainty as to when funding would be allocated given COVID-related financial impacts on the client’s program. Given the highly-accelerated schedule, we engaged some of our strongest technical resources and inspection personnel from multiple offices. We worked around the clock to complete the inspection and deliver the design on time and to the high satisfaction of our client. A further example is our recent design of a highly complex and highly unique bascule bridge in Canada. Given the extreme complexities of the design, we engaged our most skilled technical experts from a half dozen offices in various capacities to ensure this movable bridge design’s quality and functionality. TZL: A firm’s longevity is valuable. What are you doing to encourage your staff to stick around? SB: Staff retention has been critical to our success through the decades and remains a focal point of our strategic plan. We intend that every hire we make, whether right out of school or more experienced, spend the remainder of their career with H&H. In fact, one of our four core values is to “build long-term relationships” – this applies as much internally as externally. To achieve this, we focus on creating a work environment that is positive, team- oriented, friendly, and conducive to career development. We consider training, mentoring, and collaborating in an “open door” environment to be essential. And we are committed to creating and offering leadership training and opportunities at all levels. By committing to supporting our employees both professionally and personally, we’ve gotten a commitment back from them to go the extra mile for the company. In addition to creating the right work environment, it’s also critical to our employee retention goals that we continue to win and deliver interesting and challenging projects and provide opportunities for developing engineers
HEADQUARTERS: New York City NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 450 YEAR FOUNDED: 1887 NUMBER OF OFFICE LOCATIONS: 24 MARKETS:
❚ ❚ Roadways and bridges
❚ ❚ Rail/transit
❚ ❚ Kinetic systems
❚ ❚ Tunnels
❚ ❚ Marine and port
❚ ❚ Municipal
SERVICES:
❚ ❚ Planning/PD&E
❚ ❚ New design
❚ ❚ Alternative delivery
❚ ❚ Inspection
❚ ❚ Rehabilitation
❚ ❚ Architectural design
❚ ❚ Geotechnical engineering
❚ ❚ Construction engineering and inspection
❚ ❚ Community planning
❚ ❚ On-call services
❚ ❚ Emergency response
See ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE, page 8
❚ ❚ Asset management
© Copyright 2021. Zweig Group. All rights reserved.
RIL 26, 2021, ISSUE 1389
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