Engaging Engineers with Company Wide Collaboration at AEI | Krista Murphy of AEI

I am very excited to be back here and very appreciative to Knowledge Architecture for giving me the spot after lunch on the second day of a two day conference. I feel like I have to be particularly charismatic and there's no better way to do that than to talk about engineering. So we're going to talk about engineering at Affiliated Engineers and before we do that, talk a little bit about myself, just for a second. I was born smack in the middle of a generation that might be defined between 1965 and 1980, which pretty much means you might forget to talk about us. I think a Gen Xer put this slide together and said, you know what, let's just skip over them. There's a lot to talk about with the Millennials and the Boomer. So I'm in the middle of this group. I feel like I'm in the middle of a career, in the middle of a life that is about connecting. And we're trying to connect at AEI those junior engineers who might be defined as millennials or Gen Ys. We're trying to connect the senior staff, the traditionalists, the boomers, the silent generation, and those of us that are making connections, as are many of us in this room, we are knowledge managers or knowledge brokers. And all of us can probably relate to that need to connect up and down across the generations. As far as AEI goes, just to give you a bit of context, we are a national firm. We have 18 offices, nearly 700 people, with 60 people here in the San Francisco office, which is my office, we are a building systems engineer. So mechanical, electrical, piping, fire protection, anything that's building systems is what we, what we do. And we focus on projects that are highly technical in nature. So we find that we need something to bond all of these disciplines together and our process for doing that. Our terminology for our communities of practice are company wide teams. And company wide teams at AEI are discipline specific teams. So this is focusing on our technical engineering practice to share standards and design tools with each other, to create some consistency across offices so that we can advance our practice so that we can work better together. Workload sharing is definitely a big part of that. And the elevator pitch for company wide teams is to improve quality, provide training and implement continuous improvement. And so we're doing this for each one of those engineering disciplines that are listed there, mechanical, electrical, et cetera. And we're putting some focus on it. We're even giving ourselves a logo. We're in the process of rolling this out and there's something that speaks to me about the hands. Like many hands, make light work is a bit of a mantra for how these groups work together. The real reason that we're working on company wide teams is because it's about connection. And there's a real importance, as we've noted here over the past couple days, is that you need to connect people across generations, across ages, across levels of experience. There's a need to connect people geographically, there's a need to connect people across disciplines, to give the best service to our clients. And connection is built on trust and respect. And I believe that trust and respect is best built in person. That it's not something that can be fully developed behind a computer or using an Internet. There has to be a personal connection. Even just one meeting of two people can change the dynamic of that relationship going forward. At aei, I think we focused the way a lot of people have. I love the picture on the left of just that connection, that two people can have a mentor and a mentee sitting down, looking at a set of drawings together and passing on lessons learned and developing that personal relationship. And I think today it's harder and harder to do that as we are pulled in many different directions and we're working on projects all over the country or all over the world, we're working in big rooms and we're using our computers and our Internet systems and our prologues and our new formas to get work done. And we need to remind ourselves that a personal touch is what's going to make us most successful. For me, a lot of that started in just that need for personal connection. Started in December of 2010 and I was invited to a company wide team meeting in Fridley, Minnesota in December with a bunch of electrical engineers at the Cummins generator factory. So I had at that time two young kids and my youngest was turning four that December. And I live here in California. So this idea of going to Fridley, Minnesota with a bunch of electrical engineers at a generator factory for Fridley, Minnesota was just like a hard thing for me to wrap my head around. But I went and I enjoyed it immensely. And I met people from all over the country who were doing amazing things. And it really helped me bond with some individuals that to this day I know that I can pick up the phone and call them and ask them a question if I'm in a bind and have a knowledge sharing that just never would have been the same had we not met in person. We got together and we talked about things that were happening with our clients. We had a bit of an external focus to that conversation. We had a bit of an internal focus to that conversation. Some of those conversations we're still having today about how to improve certain master specs or certain master details. But it was really a game changer for me in terms of how I felt connected to this national organization. At the time, I was the only licensed electrical engineer in our Bay Area office. And I felt by meeting the electrical engineers across the country who were doing similar types of leadership in their individual offices, that I'd found my tribe. So company wide teams predate me. I joined AEI in 2008, but I was recently handed a piece of paper that was dated December 1999, and it had a list of disciplines and a list of people and a list of offices. And these teams were definitely, they definitely existed at that time. I have a feeling it went back before then. And these were individual silos of disciplined teams that were getting together on probably a semi regular basis, as far as I know. And I certainly know that by 2010, regular calls were happening amongst the various disciplines and this electrical team summit happened in Minnesota. But in 2013, things started to take a little bit of a change with our executive team. We had a strategic plan effort that happened throughout the firm and many things came of that strategic planning. Most importantly as it relates to this group and this initiative is this focus on knowledge management. And that was a focused outcome of that strategic plan. So we launched Synthesis in 2015. Phil is our version of Synthesis. Phil, the Knowledge cup affiliated engineers. Ask Phil, do with that what you will. And in 2017, we were able to connect our various company wide team leaders across disciplines with this meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. And it just so happened to coincide with a synthesis event, I think. And so Chris Parsons joined us one evening and kind of got us started for our session and we started connecting across disciplines in a way that we had never connected amongst these various discipline silos in the past. In 2018, now that all of these folks have met in person, they are now meeting regularly on the phone and I lead those calls across disciplines so that what one team is doing over here in instrumentation and controls might be applied to our commissioning group or to our mechanical group. And we're setting some kind of expectation that these teams operate in a somewhat similar fashion, or at least they're drawing upon each other's ideas and not just trying to draw upon those that are in their group to advance our practice. And certainly by this year we've got a lot of objectives and expectations for each of these teams and the summits of getting people together in person is becoming a bit of a regular thing. And we are back at strategic planning as an executive team. We're putting together the new plan where we're pretty sure that quality is going to be a specific focused outcome of the latest strategic planning efforts. And we have this whole company wide team structure that is ready to receive some input and take their activity to a new level. So focus of the company wide cross discipline effort is to collide your disciplines, please. What would happen if piping and process engineering worked together for valve detail consistency across their practice? Or what would happen if the building performance practice asked the digital Practices group to join one of their meetings to talk about the latest custom development software integration? What would happen if the technology services team and the lighting design group got together to put together power over Ethernet lighting specifications and did that jointly? What if the commissioning team brought back those lessons learned from the field and applied that to the mechanical engineering group? And how much are those two groups speaking? And what if the electrical team and the INC team put together details for metering in a way that was more comprehensive than what we were doing before? And this is an exact slide that I used at that meeting for our company wide team leaders in Madison, November of 2017, where we brought everyone together to meet, to connect, to socialize and to set some goals and hold each other accountable with some of the things that we'd like to do for the next few years. Some of the leaders from that cross discipline session were able to take that momentum and get their teams together. The piping group met for the first time ever, following what electrical had done in 2010 in Minnesota and 202015 in Houston, I think. And we got the piping team together in Chicago last year for their first summit. We got the mechanical team together in October of last year in North Carolina. And this was a really big deal because we have so many mechanical engineers in our firm and so many opinionated mechanical engineers with lots of activity. But this group had not met in a very long time. And so we were bringing them all together under one roof and work on a lot of activity. And there's just been a lot of momentum that's come out of these sessions. So I want to talk a little bit about how we make this happen. We promised you some behind the scenes look of what it takes to get these groups in action. And it comes back to a group of leaders that each one of those teams needs someone who's driving an agenda, who's acting as A facilitator who's making a connection within those teams, monitoring attendance across offices. And this is a really important group at aei. They are amazing individuals who are long term AEI employees who are naturally, who were naturally already doing this work, but were also confirmed or selected by the executive team. When we really took a hard look at this in the 2016, 2017 kind of timeframe, just to make sure that we had the right leadership in place, that was the first step of this reinvigoration of our company wide teams. And so they're assigned by discipline, one or two people for each of these disciplines. And like any good engineering firm, we started to put together a really big spreadsheet to document this. And we listed each one of our teams and we listed each one of our leaders and then we went through and started talking to office leadership across the country and asking for office leaders to confirm or reconfirm or assign the company wide team representatives for each office. The idea here was to have one or two people per team per office. It's not an exclusive club. Many more people are welcome to participate. But we wanted to hold a couple people accountable in each office to say that, okay, if you can't attend a monthly meeting, who can? And we wanted to see no more than two names, ideally in a box for a given office. So we did that across the east, across our central region, across the west region, and now we have our big spreadsheet which represents our volunteer army and we've got a bunch of people that are ready to go to start tackling various items. As the company wide team leaders helped identify initiatives for a given year and we've given them the tools to do that across offices, we use, as I said, file. We have knowledge communities by market, but we have these knowledge communities as well by discipline, where we have the streaming activity, but we also have static content and I think the static content on our Internet is incredibly important to make these teams effective. That's where design guidelines and wiki pages and tools that people need to reference on a regular basis might live. And we have expectations of how frequently these groups should meet. So the individual technical teams have some kind of Skype or Webex that occurs once a month, hopefully on a regular basis. We have the leaders from each of the technical teams meeting about every other month and I lead that conversation. And the goal is for each of the individual teams to meet in person once every two to three years. So we're not trying to get them together every year, but there is an expectation that they'll hold some kind of summit. And we're using a calendar on fill to show the activity of all of these groups so that there's the opportunity to have that commissioning agent attend that mechanical company wide team call. So we're tracking every group with a different color and making sure that their monthly call is not happening at the same time. And then these groups are either posting their summits or if they're hosting a tech talk, we use this calendar for that as well. There's a big divide and conquer approach, the many hands make light work approach. And I love that. Our mechanical team coming out of their summit last year, put together this diagram that started just breaking it down. All right. We have so many things that we want to do together now that we've all met and we have all this excitement. Let's get a group together that's looking at specs. Let's get a group together that's looking at quality. Let's get a group together that's looking at our improvements that we want to make on fill. And there are names that are going in each one of these boxes so that there's focus groups. So now we've empowered a bunch of leaders across discipline to empower the people within their group to each own something. And it takes a village, right? It takes a team, it takes a tribe to get things done. To say that one person is going to do something or can track all these different activities of what we want to get done simply isn't realistic. So this matrix process, I think is very successful and critical to getting some momentum behind what we want to achieve. We have each one of these teams host a tech talk. So this is a discipline knowledge sharing session that might be a Skype for all AEI employees, so available to all 700 employees. Each team has to host a TechTalk. And we go through in January and make sure that every team is assigned a month. And then there's a whole process of hosting a talk, videoing the talk, making that accessible on fill afterwards. So we're building a library of content that each team is responsible for and we're surveying the entire staff. Staff, all of our employees participated in a TechTalk survey at the end of last year so that we could get feedback on how these TechTalks were going and what should the company wide teams focus on next. So we got a little bit of content information on what we should do next year and we got feedback that these one hour techtalks were entirely too long. And so in 2019, we've shortened them down to 30 minute techtalks and hopefully makes it a little bit easier to pull off for everyone involved, both the organizers and the receivers of the information. So when we talk about company wide teams, who benefits? And I would like to think that all generations benefit from company wide team activities without necessarily using the generational labels. We've got the 0 to 7 year engineer, we've got the 8 to 20 year engineer, and we've got the 20 plus year engineer in each one of these groups interfaces with company wide teams in a different way. If we kind of break it down, we've got the zero to seven year engineer that we're onboarding. And I see this group as really the beneficiary of all of the company wide team activities. They are able to access design standards, wiki pages, toolkits that are established and hopefully consistent across a national team. And they are able to streamline requests for information or know who the subject matter experts are in their given area of focus. And there is certainly an opportunity, as these engineers are integrated within AEI to be seen as a bit of a shining star or a person that we want to track and integrate into a larger organization, a broader group than just the group that's within their office. So they might be tapped on the shoulder by a department supervisor or by a company wide team leader and they might be invited to a company wide team call to start seeing what's going on outside of their office. The 8 to 20 year engineer, the powerhouse of AEI as I like to think of it. This is a group that's very active on projects. And this is also the group that's frequently selected to either be a team leader or an office representative. This is the group that's probably most likely to be at an in person company wide team summit. They are using their project activity and project lessons learned to make improvements to a spec, make improvements to a detail, make improvements to a drawing based on RFI responses that they're seeing or other project activity and ideas that they're bouncing off of a peer group. So they're making personal connections with a set of champions that hopefully will form the types of relationships that I was able to form when I was back in Minnesota. This is what this group hopefully is seeing as a benefit of company wide team activities. And it certainly gives them an elevated exposure in the company. And this is a critical part of employee engagement, is understanding a path and understanding individual strengths. There are reasons that these folks are being asked to engage and there's an opportunity for for these folks to show what they're doing. And we're asking office leaders to give them the showcase at a staff meeting. We're asking just these folks to also take a moment to coordinate efforts in their office and be seen as a leader. They're being asked to engage with this process for a very specific reason, take advantage of it and then sharing lessons learned from the senior engineer. This is a group that has so much to give and we have so much work to do to connect. So many lessons learned that maybe weren't documented before we had an intranet or have been lost along the way. What can we do to bring all of this wealth of knowledge to the younger generation? This is a group that is a resource to company wide team representatives or we might even find a legacy member. Got this great story about Jimmy in our Madison office. He, he has been with AEI 50 years. I had to fact check that last night because I was like Was it really 50 years? And the company wide team refuses to take him off the spreadsheet because he's an honorary member. He has provided so much to the mechanical team over the years that he will always be considered a company wide team member. This group of senior engineers might be interviewed for select design guidance or posts that are on fill. Folks might tag them or even document their stories and put it on fill themselves. Even if this group isn't responding directly, they have enough connections that they're making their stories known through the company wide team activity. And this is a group that's certainly influencing our quality control efforts and the next initiative. For each company wide team it's all about connection. Connection across generations, connection across offices, connection across employee groups, connection across disciplines. And I think some of the things that make company wide teams successful at AEI is a very clear set of objectives and expectations. We have a wiki page for that and we refer to it semi frequently. But laying out what does it mean to instill quality and continuous improvement in training throughout AEI is written down. We are making that connection in person. We're not expecting that to happen online in and of itself, but actually getting people together so that they can meet face to face. We have leadership, support and empowerment really tracking who are part of these teams and what does that mean to be part of it as it relates to someone's career. And then we're expecting these teams to reach out to all of AEI so that the efforts of the company wide teams is not just for those that are involved but that this group touches everyone. And I leave you with this. What is your role. It's very easy to go to conferences like this and to get very inspired and want to go back to the office and conquer the world. And I would ask you to think about what is something tangible that you've heard over the next few days that can be actionable to. To go back and say you're going to do 12 things and you're going to do it by yourself probably is not going to happen. But if you take one or two things, you take something that speaks to you and you go back and you bring it to a group and you go back and you empower a group, you now have a team that is engaged and part of this effort, and you're not running around saying, oh, gosh, I have so much to do. I need to figure out how to do this and how to do that. You're actually bringing the whole experience of something like this back to the office. And I would ask you to think about how can you do that in each of your organizations. That's what I've got.