EAG is adding employee owners to a family business

Joining the team at Emil Anderson Group to work on the massive Kicking Horse Canyon highway expansion project in Golden, B.C., was a roll of the dice for Erin Kearney. Coming from an oil and gas background, the project co-ordinator was unsure what to expect – but the bet paid off.

“I took a bit of a leap of faith, as I had never worked in construction before,” says Kearney. “That was almost three years ago – I've loved it.”

Being thrown into a major project from the start was an exciting learning experience for Kearney, who had spent the previous year working from home due to the pandemic.

While the hands-on aspects of the job were a big upside for Kearney, it was the people at Emil Anderson that really sold her on the group.

“When I came back to the Kelowna office and interacted with the people, I really felt that this was the right choice for me,” she recalls.

Kearney was taken by the closeness of the culture at EAG, where senior leadership knows employees by name and will make time to ask how they are doing.

“Everybody knows you and that makes it really intimate,” she says. “It feels like they really care about your career development and not just about you being productive.”

As a fourth-generation family company, EAG has putting people first in its DNA. But being able to maintain the family feeling as the company has scaled – or “staying small” as CEO Robert Hasell puts it – is no coincidence.

“We put a lot of energy into our culture to make sure people feel like they belong,” says Hasell, whose great-grandfather, Emil Anderson, founded EAG in 1938.

“It's a lot of work, but it's also probably the single most important thing for any business.”

The result is that even though the company has grown sizably to about 600 employees, it still has a small company feeling, Hasell explains.

After years of research, the familial culture has also made its way into succession planning for the company, which rolled out a new employee ownership model at the end of 2024.

“We saw it as a great way to evolve and set a foundation for the future of the organization,” Hasell says. “There’s going to be a ton of power in having employees more involved over time, become owners and adopt an ownership mindset.”

Being people-focused also means putting community first, whether through its projects, charitable giving or strengthening diversity in the construction industry through the Women of EAG (WEAG) committee.

“Being in a male-dominated industry can be really lonely for a lot of women,” says Kearney, a member of WEAG.

In three years, Kearney has already seen an uptick in the number of women on board and appreciated the connections made through the committee.

“It feels like you have a community,” she says. “It's more fulfilling.”

The Give Back committee supports worthy causes with the help of rotating adjudicators. As the beneficiaries are constantly changing, support can take on many different forms, but community is at the heart of every action.

For example, in 2022 EAG donated a parcel of land in Nanaimo to The Nature Trust of BC to be protected and managed by the Snaw-Naw-As (Nanoose) First Nation.

“If our business is about connecting communities by building roads and infrastructure, we want to be connected to the community as people, too,” says Hasell. “People want to know that at the end of their career they didn’t just go to work, they did things to be proud of.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's BC’s Top Employers winners, published February 11, 2025 in the Vancouver Sun. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.