Real Estate and Construction
Train ’em up
How to keep employees happy and fulfilled
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Cleveland | March 2008
Paul Westlake Jr.
Managing principal, Westlake Reed Leskosky
Paul Westlake Jr. doesn’t like
to brag, but he’s proud that his firm has a specialist in computational fluid dynamics on
staff. That’s because Westlake,
a managing principal at
Westlake Reed Leskosky, pushes his employees to do additional training in areas that
interest them. By encouraging
them to pursue industry specialties, the architectural design
and management services firm
is building a stock of niche
experts and opening up more opportunities both for employees and for the firm. Not only
does the push to pursue their
interests help keep the 135 employees engaged, it also gives
Westlake employees with talents that few others can offer.
As a result, the firm has taken
bigger projects in other markets
and has grown revenue more
than 50 percent in the last
decade.
Smart Business spoke with
Westlake about how to encourage employee retention in ways
other than compensation and
why you need to put in some
Saturday hours if you want to
earn employee respect.
Offer employees more than compensation. Anybody can go on
Monster.com and find if you’re
in the third quartile for your
profession for compensation,
so how is that going to be a
differentiator? What differentiates you is culture and the
opportunities that it provides
beyond financial. Compensation and reward have to be
there, but the key to attracting
and retaining is in all of the
other things.
We give people experiences
that they didn’t have growing
up. There’s a woman in the firm
that has been with us nearly
seven years, and we put her on
a performing arts project, it
was a theater in Tennessee and
for her to travel there and then
go to the opening as a black tie
event and be part of the celebration created a positive attitude about the correlation of
her work to the success of the
project. She just loved that; it
was a life experience.
Those are cultural things
where it’s not about money; it’s
about life’s experiences and it’s
about seeing the impacts of
what you’re working on. And
the broader that it is, the more
success you have at retention.
Help your employees grow. We
don’t hire the specialist, we
hire someone who is motivated, and then we challenge
them to go out and do something they haven’t done and
we pay for the training.
We’re sitting here saying, ‘It
may take two years before we
get a dollar on this, but go specialize in computational fluid
dynamics, and we’ll find an
application where you can do
that on a project.’ You find
someone you believe is both
intelligent and motivated and
then incentivize them to leverage themselves with the support of the firm.
People developing within the
profession, one of the main
motivators for them relates to
their ability to grow, develop
and learn. They’re like sponges;
they want to reach their professional potential. And if they
don’t feel they are getting
exposure and experience, they
will leave.
The key is to involve them in
your processes. If we design a
program for them and we don’t
talk to them, we have trouble
retaining them. But if we sit
them down and say, ‘Let’s
design a program for you. What
do you want to do?’ they’ll tell
you. And we can map out a
four- or five-part plan, and it’s
training; it lets them work out
whatever void they have in the
ideal model of their education.
Cut through the hierarchy. There
are generational differences
between people in the firm, but
the key in that regard is that
when I’m working with people, I
want to be working with them
in a nonhierarchical framework
where we’re both contributing
to the same goal. Then people
see you as a contributing, collaborative resource, and that’s kind
of a quiet mentoring, as well.
We typically gather people
around the table, explain a problem and ask each of them to
independently work on an idea
or a concept to solve that problem. A principal would have the
same assignment that a 28-year-old might have, and we come
back and share those ideas and see what seems to be working.
At that point, people don’t care
about individual authorship or
ownership; it’s the team trying to
figure out what seems like the
best approach to the problem.
Typically, some part of every investigation seems to find its way
into the solution, and then it’s
not necessarily Paul Westlake’s
scheme or this person’s scheme,
it’s a collective work. That kind
of involvement really helps to
break down the hierarchy, so
my ideas aren’t any more important than your ideas, unless the
group thinks so.
It’s critical to the business, but
it’s also critical to the motivation. Being immersed at the
highest level and the lowest
level is exciting, and it helps you
create change, and forces you to
[create change], because you
can really see a lot of the consequences; you really know the
business in a deep sense.
Lead by example. You have to
lead by doing, and you have to be
seen as the hardest worker within the culture. I wouldn’t ask anybody to do something that I’m
not doing. For example, I’m often
here on Saturdays and Sundays.
If we have a deadline, I’m going
to be here with the staff.
The point is that you’re present
with them at the table regardless
of the logistics of travel or whatever else there is. And if they
think it’s important to me, then
it becomes important to them.
If they don’t think it’s important to me, then they don’t think
it’s important to the firm.
HOW TO REACH: Westlake Reed Leskosky, (216) 522-1357 or www.vwrl.com
