As we approach the three-year milestone of the outbreak of the pandemic, many organizations are still working hard to improve employee engagement and happiness. In fact, only 33% of full-time employees in North America feel engaged at work, according to a recent Gallup survey.
So, how can a business improve employee engagement? Of the many strategies being debated, one approach that’s worked for us at DPR Construction is to continually look for ways to flatten the organization.
We’ve grown our business into one of the largest commercial construction companies in North America (more than 10,000 employees and 2021 revenue of $7.4 billion) while focusing on a framework that rejects a conventional, seniority-based pyramid. Rather, we emphasize roles, responsibilities, and individual expertise. In other words, we aim to highlight what is right for the business, not who is right.
This approach avoids the limitations of job titles, while trying to break down walls that prevent people from taking on multiple roles and levels of responsibility. Simultaneously, we constantly work to refine our structure to encourage collaboration and support people on project teams who are taking care of customers and building great things. Ultimately, this has helped lead to employees who feel more engaged and satisfied with their work.
Flattening an organization is not easy, and a completely flat business is very rare. But almost any company can embrace these three principles to improve collaboration and reduce bureaucracy.
Lay the right cultural foundation
Breaking down hierarchies begins with defining the right purpose, vision, and values. DPR’s purpose is to build great things. What works for us is embracing a culture of shared servant leadership focused on taking care of our people and our customers. With all of us pulling on that same oar, an employee who has worked here 30 days has the same motivation as one who has been here 30 years. Obviously, they each have different experience, but they will respect each other because they’re striving for the same objective.
Fostering respect for individual expertise and viewpoints may be the key to flattening an organization, and everyone has to live it. Leaders need to be authentically interested in and committed to serving both their people who do the work and their customers. With no rigid vertical framework to dictate how decisions are made, mutual respect will engender trust in each other’s competency, consistency, and intentions to make the right choices within the parameters of purpose, vision, and values.
Another critical point is that employees must feel safe to admit what they don’t know and when they need help. They should be encouraged and supported when they admit they don’t feel equipped for a specific responsibility or their load is too heavy. In fact, people raising their hand for help is a good sign a flatter organization is working.
Focus on roles, not titles
We have always resisted the use of formal titles except for those required by regulators (e.g., CEO, CFO). Titles imbue authority and power, so they can intimidate people and prevent them from sharing their ideas. Many of the best ideas come from the bottom up, not vice versa, so removing as many as titles as possible from an organization makes people feel free to speak out.
To flatten your company, focus on roles, responsibilities, and competencies instead of titles. Gain an understanding and create a matrix of who actually leads specific projects and what their responsibilities are. What competencies do they have, and which stakeholders must an individual collaborate with to be successful in the role? Then you can create robust job descriptions for each role and link them to precise skills.
Through gaining that alignment with other team members and stakeholders, individuals are empowered to execute their roles. For example, a project manager overseeing a specific scope of work on a project must gather information from across the project team and other stakeholders, but will make the decisions related to that scope and make sure it stays on schedule. Everyone trusts them to make choices by using the skills they’ve mastered and involving the right people to gather input. So, can a person with more experience and expertise question the decision or even ask for changes? Absolutely. But not because they have more seniority. It’s because it’s the right thing to do to reach the collective goal.
Train and develop people differently
Developing your talent to thrive in a less-hierarchical structure begins at onboarding. That’s when you kick off the work of reinforcing shared purpose, vision, and values and empower people with the mindset necessary to succeed. It’s about developing the sense that people should feel accountable to each other to do great work, not obligated because someone above them is watching over their shoulder.
Key to this is showing people how to have conversations and collaborate with team members across their working groups and the organization as a whole. The emphasis should be on helping individuals become part of high-performing teams. This can be as fundamental as training people to always ask, “Who else at the company do I need to contact on a particular project?”
Leveraging the roles and job descriptions you developed in the previous step, this should be a straightforward answer. You also need leaders to not only trust that people will make the best decisions, but also recognize their work and the role it plays in any project’s success.
Most people think of construction like a manufacturing business. But at its heart, it’s not. It’s a service business. The same is true about any organization: You’re not selling widgets or preparing tax returns—you’re providing a valuable service to your stakeholders. Once you’ve committed to that reality, you’ll see the critical importance of building a culture that makes certain all employees are on the same journey to surprise and delight customers and that everyone’s ideas and perspectives should be accepted authentically and equally.
Mike Humphrey is a management committee member who focuses on supporting people practices, communications, and other company-wide initiatives at DPR Construction.
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