Hello Everyone!
My name is Gage Ekström, and I am happy that you were able to find your way to my blog. I am a fourth year in Construction Engineering Management, and I aspire to find a career as a project manager for a construction company in the near future. But with that, I hope that you are able to enjoy this blog!
This week in class we were asked to look at 3-4 companies from the “2020 Fortune Best Companies to Work For,” and discuss how they practice HR, as well as what type of manager we would like to be one day and what we think some of the most challenging aspects of being a manager are.
The first company I looked into was a financial services firm called Baird. It has offices across the globe but is based out of Milwaukee, WI. Many employees who worked there said that Baird did an amazing job of developing a positive culture at their company, as well as ensuring that they put people first and prioritizing family time and mental health. This does sound like an amazing place to work, because I know how important family is to me, and work-life balance is something I am very conscious of. I know that it can be really challenging as a manager to promote a healthy work-life balance and to tell your employees to put their family’s first when you have a bottom line to keep up and profits reign as king. But I would like to be a manager who supports his subordinates, and makes them feel respected. For if your employees are mentally healthy, they are much more likely to perform high quality work.
We can also see how having a team who is happy to be at work can pay off in effectiveness in Chapter 1 of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book, “First Break All the Rules.” In this chapter we see a manager under the name “Michael” who describes the best team he ever had. The amazing thing is that the only true common denominator between the four employees he mentions is that they all had a positive attitude at work and were happy while they were there (Buckingham & Coffman, 13-14). I thought of this chapter as I read what the employees were saying for why they enjoyed working at Baird, and it sounds like having a positive work atmosphere where employees are happy with the work they are doing is key to having an effective team. I hope that I can foster this type of team on the constructions sites that I will manage in the future.
While Baird was the company that mostly stood out to me, I saw this same pattern across many of the different companies that I looked into, with some prominent examples being Pinnacle Financial Partners, Plante Moran, Rocket Companies, and many more.
At the end of the day, it seems like many effective companies are that way because they put their people and their culture first, and then see profits follow.
Works Cited:
Buckingham, Marcus, and Curt Coffman. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. Gallup, 2016.