Developing and Keeping a Good Work Force

ENM prides itself on the strength of its workforce, from the site coordinators and tradespeople on-site to the executives in the office. Our co-founder Daniel Greenhalgh, has some strong convictions about what it takes to develop and keep a good work force in the construction business. Today, he is sharing some of his philosophies.

One of the things that made Colin and I want to form our own business together was our shared ideas regarding hiring for our company and staffing up a project. We both agree that the most important aspect of evaluating a new hire is their character, not their skills. Of course we make sure the skills are there and they’re solid, but we’re not just looking for the most experience.

We developed an acronym to describe what we’re looking for – C.H.A.I.R.,      stands for Competent, Hard-working, Ambitious, Intelligent, and Reliable. We have a chart in the office to remind us of this. We don’t think these are traits you can learn; these are innate, internal things. When we hire, we evaluate their overall characters and we rate people on those traits. Everyone we’ve hired rates highly on all of those traits. There’s huge value in maintaining quality employees, especially at the management level and we’re both very proud of the team we’ve formed here.

When we’re building our work force for a project, ideally we want to bring together a team that has worked together before. They’re familiar with each other and the way each individual approaches the work. Of course that’s not always possible with the cycle of projects, but we try to stay within a core group of people.

It’s important to have a balance of all personalities, and that’s across all areas, from management to sub-trades to carpenters and laborers. We want to make sure we’re considering how the team will gel and work together. As our projects get bigger and bigger, the teams get bigger too, so we’re constantly working on that balance.
 

We know that our reputation is what’s going to determine our success, and the team we form is the key aspect of maintaining that reputation for reliability and quality. So, Colin and I have been lucky that we’ve attracted such a great team, and we want to keep them together and keep them working for as long as we can.