Employee ownership drives engagement at PCL

Madison Blom fondly recalls her first days working at Parliament’s Centre Block. Her PCL Construction team was about to begin the most complex heritage rehabilitation project ever undertaken in Canada. The assistant superintendent says one of her favourite moments was when the PCL team went inside and she could see what interested her the most: exactly what’s holding up this country’s most iconic structure.

“It’s amazing to see the trusses and structural members behind the century-old craftsmanship we walk past every day,” she says. “We spend multiple hours reviewing how we’re going to dismantle some of the stonework, figuring out how it was put together, and wondering how they ever manoeuvred some of the heritage assets – there are heritage elements 20 feet long!” It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Blom agrees, and one that PCL was uniquely positioned to offer.

“Not very many construction employers in this country can build projects to the scale we can,” says Harmony Carter, PCL’s vice president, people and culture. When it comes to “the stadiums and the arenas, power plants, roadways, even hospitals in all their complexity,” not to mention Centre Block Rehabilitation, “we’re there for the big iconic projects that impact our communities.” Building communities, legacies and people are PCL’s three purpose pillars.

For Carter, the size and success of the 116-year-old Edmonton-based company ultimately stem from the same reason PCL has landed on the list of Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 14 consecutive years. “We are 100 per cent owned by our employees. Our ownership model means that everyone is an owner and has responsibility for our success.”

Through PCL’s strong mobility program, employees who relocate can take advantage of opportunities to develop their careers quickly. In 2021, more than five per cent of the company’s workforce transferred to different locations to take on new roles and projects.

“We like to put people with the best expertise at our projects and surround them with people who can learn from them,” says Carter. That can be on the job or in one of the many courses where the company’s veterans pass on what they know to their newer fellow employee-owners.

Then there are the leadership courses like the one in which Blom is enrolled. “There is no other company that invests in leadership programs like PCL does,” Carter says. “Not just for high-potential individuals, but also programs that allow any employee to come in and make leadership part of their role and part of their journey.”

Such programs cement PCL’s community ethos and facilitate career advancement, resulting in over 600 promotions company-wide last year. These programs are crucial tools in Carter’s job, which the VP sums up as recruiting top talent and keeping them engaged.

Carter herself, like Blom after her, arrived at PCL through its extensive educational outreach, moving from a post-secondary co-op term to full-time employment. Retention isn’t an issue, with a healthy number of employees in the company’s quarter-century club and even a few in the half-century club.

It’s all directly connected, Carter says, to the ownership model and the long-term thinking and commitment it fosters. It’s no wonder Blom, 28, takes joy in looking years ahead to a time where, “one day my kids will walk through Centre Block and I can say, ‘I was there.’”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top 100 Employers winners, published November 18, 2022 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

PCL people take pride in building vital services

Sohayl Bhatti was born prematurely and spent a few weeks in the University of Alberta Hospital’s Neonatal ICU in Edmonton. Three decades later he found himself in the same ward, but this time working to demolish it and replace it with a state-of-the-art NICU as a project manager for PCL Construction.

“What are the chances that you would end up doing something like that?” Bhatti says with his characteristic enthusiastic smile.

Bhatti has made a specialty of leading renovations in healthcare facilities for the Edmonton-based construction giant. His work requires technical skill – but also diplomacy and solid judgment. The renovations often are done in the heart of busy hospitals where medical staff can be performing difficult procedures and patients are trying to recover.

Bhatti has worked next to operating rooms, ICUs, even a sleep lab. It’s not just the noise of procedures, like cutting holes through concrete; the vibrations can be disruptive for doctors – such as neurosurgeons in mid-operation.

“It’s definitely a lot to juggle,” he says about the careful nature of his job. “You’re working in a very complex environment, so I guess it makes it challenging, which can be fun.”

And hugely rewarding too.

“When you’re in the midst of a project, you’re working hard, there’s a million problems you’re trying to solve,” he says. “But then at the end of it you realize it was worth it. There’s a recognition of the importance and purpose of what you do.”

The pandemic added another level of complexity to PCL’s in-hospital work. Over and above the rigorous construction- industry regulations, PCL had to add such things as COVID-19 health-screening and masking restrictions. The pandemic also generated a greater sense of urgency to the work.

“Everyone saw very quickly that it was important to get the ICUs up and running ASAP,” Bhatti says. In fact, the new pediatric cardiac ICU they completed in the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute was immediately converted into a COVID-19 ward.

PCL employees gain satisfaction knowing that facilities they build support essential services in Alberta, says Mike Olsson, vice president of human resources and professional development.

“Our purpose is not only building infrastructure,” Olsson says. “We’re building communities, and a better future.”

Another focus at PCL, which has offices across North America and Australia, is training and development. The company offers technical and behavioural training in many different forms, and leadership-development training to any employee who’s worked at PCL for over a year. “We really do believe in investing in our people.” Olsson says.

The pride staff take in their work is further fuelled by PCL’s employee share ownership program. All company shares are held by employees.

“We want to have employee ownership for the next 100 or 200 years,” Olsson says. “We don’t want to think quarter to quarter, we want to think long-term.”

Bhatti says the employee-ownership component means you’re not just there to collect a paycheque. “Everybody’s success depends on the next person’s success,” he says. “So you will go out of your way to help another person.”

Similar concepts are at play in PCL’s community involvement and charitable initiatives.

The company’s participation in the annual United Way campaign is “huge,” Bhatti says. Making staff feel like stakeholders in their work and part of their communities is pivotal – and motivational.

“Some member of your family might end up in the same room that you are building,” Bhatti says. “So it gives people that extra bit of incentive to do their best.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Alberta’s Top Employers winners, published January 25, 2022 in the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

PCL is building a more sustainable future

As the employees at PCL Construction have shown, saving the planet sometimes requires a little ingenuity.

That was certainly needed when the construction giant took on a project in Saskatoon to renovate facilities at the University of Saskatchewan’s Huskies football field. The construction team had hoped to send the old turf to be recycled, but soon found out a local company wouldn’t accept the old rubber because it was mixed with sand.

“So instead of sending it to landfill we asked the university to reach out to alumni and community partners to see if they wanted a piece of the old field as memorabilia,” says Mark Wiegers, a Saskatoon-based project manager. The plan worked, allowing PCL to divert 375 tons of waste.

In another case, a team working on a big-box store renovation rescued tons of perfectly good ceiling tiles and donated them for re-use in local public schools.

“Stories like this are happening all over the company,” Wiegers says. “It really inspires us all to do better every day.”

Across its operations, which span North America and Australia, PCL has worked with project partners to achieve diversion rates of 90 per cent or greater. In 2020, for instance, it reached a 91 per cent recycling rate for all projects in its home base of Edmonton.

Waste diversion is just a small part of PCL’s overall sustainability program, which covers its own operations and extends to the projects it builds. It has been expanding those efforts by promoting its Sustainability Strategic Plan, which aims to create better environmental awareness among staff and external partners.

“Just like operational excellence, safety and quality, sustainable construction practices are ingrained in our people and operations,” Wiegers says.

One of the keys to success is the company’s network of “sustainable construction advisors.” The SCAs – who include Wiegers as the rep for Saskatoon – work with local teams to provide expertise on sustainability for company offices and construction projects.

To further spread the message and support PCL’s learning culture, the company offers all staff “Sustainability 101” training, an in-house program that teaches the technical aspects of sustainability, says Mike Wieninger, chief operating officer, Canadian operations.

He says PCL already has over 260 staff who have LEED certification, a globally recognized designation of environmentally responsible construction practices. That’s helped give PCL the expertise to work on some impressive projects. Wieninger points to Limberlost Place, being built for George Brown College in Toronto. The building will be a 10-storey tall-wood, net-zero carbon emissions structure on the city’s waterfront.

“The knowledge, the size of our organization and the experience we have allows us to build these pretty spectacular innovative projects for forward-looking clients,” Wieninger says.

PCL has also pushed heavily into renewable energy. PCL Solar has already worked on more than 40 major solar projects in Canada, is expanding into the U.S. and Australia, and will have powered over 500,000 homes and businesses by the end of 2022, he says.

PCL’s green drive has led to the use of some significant innovations, including a cloud-based system that uses sensors to monitor and regulate such things as temperature, humidity, vibration and sound. PCL uses Job Site Insights, a smart construction platform, during and after construction to make buildings “a little bit greener,” Wieninger says.

Company leaders have encouraged PCLers, as they’re known, to partner with local organizations to make a difference in their communities and build a better future. In addition to monetary contributions, employees have donated thousands of hours to events like tree planting, adopt-a-highway cleanups and recycling events.

“There’s certainly a strong focus on community involvement,” Wiegers says. “Being socially responsible is both good for business as well as for the communities where we all live and raise our families.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Greenest Employers winners, published April 20, 2022 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

PCL finds tomorrow’s leaders in today’s students

Simon Lamy, a PCL Construction project coordinator, never had any real doubt about what he’d do when he grew up. He was one of those toddlers, the ones with eyes fixed on big machines digging big holes in the earth and tall buildings rising into the sky.

But where he would work was an open question right into his civil engineering studies at the University of Ottawa, until he learned of a possible co-op stint with PCL in 2014 on the site of Montréal’s Deloitte Tower, the first commercial office tower built in that city in more than 20 years.

But if that’s why Lamy began with the Edmonton-based construction industry giant, it’s not why he has stayed on ever since. “I started my co-op work with PCL because their projects were famous across the country and socially important,” says Lamy. “But I went on to do five more co-op terms there – and knew right from the get-go that I wanted to work for PCL after graduation – because of the people I met. That's what PCL is about: people who are passionate about construction.”

That’s the kind of outcome PCL – which is marking its fourth year in a row on the list of Canada’s Top Employers for Young People – has worked hard to create, says Harmony Carter, vice president of people and culture. “We have connections with more than 75 schools across Canada, and more than 600 student placements this academic year,” she says.

The company’s goal, Carter adds, is for its entry-level hires to emerge from among its former student workers. Nearly 100 full-time offers went to former PCL students this year. “We encourage them to consider careers with us, and that starts with their first work terms,” she says. “We give students an opportunity to work all their co-op terms with us, and we provide an incredible experience so they don’t feel compelled to go elsewhere.”

Except to other PCL sites, that is. The company’s student mobility program subsidizes student movement around the country. “We place them in areas across Canada,” says Carter, “and into other projects and jobs to really give them well-rounded experience.”

That experience includes significant responsibility and support, adds Lamy. After co-op terms in Montréal and Ottawa, he asked PCL about opportunities in Western Canada. “I was told about a very exciting project in Vancouver and kind of fell in love with it, and stayed there for three co-op terms.” Lamy took on more and more responsibilities, and felt the whole Vancouver team was behind him after he was nominated for, and won, PCL’s $3,000 Canadian Buildings National Student Scholarship.

The support doesn’t end after a student becomes an employee. There are numerous technical and leadership programs for younger workers, and even an assigned buddy for each one – a more experienced PCL employee who can advise and inform.

Mentoring, in fact, is a core company value, Carter says, rooted in PCL’s 100 per cent employee ownership. “We’re all owners and we all want everyone else to succeed too.” It’s a culture where mentees quickly transition to mentors. Lamy is proud to say that, after he was hired at PCL, one of the co-op students he supervised and advised won the same national scholarship he did.

“We want to separate ourselves from the pack, as the best builders, not just the best technical builders,” Carter says. “This is a people business, and that’s why we’ve invested a lot in training and career development. We want employees to build a fulfilling career with PCL.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top Employers for Young People winners, published January 24, 2023 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.