Exploring The Right Environment

Their notion of the Right Environment extends beyond the company to all those who would make a project successful. In this article, Charlie Whitney (VP & GM of Turner’s New York business unit) and Kevin Chase (Turner’s Regional Lean Manager NYC) discuss how this is practically achieved.They discuss the role of leadership, of individuals, of teams, and of themselves. For Turner, the Right Environment is not a buzz-work. Lean is not something from a box. They are crucial tools employed to make multi-billion dollar construction projects come in safely, on-time and on-budget, while building up the Turner professionals, not wearing them out.

Jim Benson: Tonianne and I have been blessed over the years working with a lot of really great clients. And working with Turner Construction was particularly rewarding across the board. It's not just because they've been really great at rolling out lean ideas or they've been really great at rolling out continuous improvement, but they've been single-minded in practically building humane working environments. That allow the professionals at Turner, the professionals and the trades that they work with, the professionals and the architects and the engineers that they work with. The professionals and the owner’s offices, even the professionals at the city or the regulatory agencies. Finding ways to work more collaboratively, so that the company can be safer more effective and make more money.

So, today Tonianne and I talk to Charlie Whitney and to Kevin Chase, two people who are instrumental in making that happen. So, with us today are Charlie Whitney and Kevin Chase from Turner construction in Manhattan. In each in their own way, they are responsible for making sure that job sites run effectively, run smoothly, have a good culture, have a professional environment. In to do that, they have implemented something that is called the right environment and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. But first if each of you could introduce each other. You should introduce yourselves and talk about what you do to make the right environment possible. So, we'll start with Charlie.

Charlie Whitney: Hi, my name is Charlie Whitney. I’m the Vice President and General Manager for Turner in New York city. I oversee a group of about a thousand professionals every day. We have about 6,000 trades showing up for work to help us build the buildings all over the city including the 5 boroughs.

Kevin Chase: All right good afternoon my name is Kevin Chase, the regional lean manager of Turner construction here in New York. I’ve been with the organization for a little more than 18 years. What my job is to help our groups both out in the field as well as some of our support departments. Help them recognize problems, put together comprehensive coherent solutions to those problems this overall process improvement. Physical process as well as improve kind of just general behavior and how we manage and look at our work. With respect to the right environment, I will talk about here in a little bit. But my role is to be an active listener and listen to again the challenges of each of our colleagues our peers. And create systems that are specific to their environment, so that they continue to feel valued within the organization.

Jim Benson: And to give you the total authentic New York experience Kevin is in a cab. So, we had the good fortune to work together for several years. Not just for lean things, but for the right environment for trying to make an entire system that where all stakeholders were able to get the information they needed when they needed it. So, that they could make good decisions. And the right environment was something that I have found was actually moving. It showed a level of care and a level of concern for the professionals in Turner and the people that Turner works with. That is uncommon everywhere, it's just very uncommon. So, Charlie can you talk a little bit about how it started? Like where did this come from?

Charlie Whitney: Actually, came from the chairman of our company Peter Davern. And back in 2016, he decided that we really needed to focus on four things if we were going to take our business to the next level. We wanted to become a leaner organization, its critical. We wanted to drive our safety, and we wanted to create the right environment in all of our offices and all of our job sites. And we felt that if people should feel comfortable coming to work, people should like where they work, people should feel safe when they work. And I don't mean physically safe but I mean emotionally safe, people should feel like they have a voice and they can participate in every single discussion.

When those things aren't present and people really don't like to come to work, they don't work at their best. You know it becomes more of a job, it's no longer a career and they're not contributing at a level that they are capable of contributing because they're shut down. So, we wanted to enable all those great things that everybody has inside of them.

And Peter intuited that we didn't really have a definition for the ideal work environment. It was something that we all felt in our gut, but we didn't really have a definition for it in the organization. So, he asked Dave Robinson and myself to set out and try and define this as an organization. So, we set off on pretty much almost a year-long journey to figure out what the definition of an ideal work environment was, and to socialize it internally.

And then we spent the next three years trying to figure out how to drive it into our organization and make sure that everybody owned the concept. And especially the general managers making sure that an ideal work environment was present throughout all of our business units.

Jim Benson: So, the interesting thing about that is that Peter was asking for this. He didn't have a very clear idea of what he wanted, but he knew that it was important. And the people at Turner you know yourself included, were able to pick up that vague request and turn it into something useful. That is also uncommon. Usually what happens when people get a vague request is, they say okay what's the least amount of work I need to do in order to make it look like I’m fulfilling this vague request. So, there was an existing culture at Turner that made that vague request fulfillable. And I saw multiple times at Turner where there were big problems that came up and the company swarmed around fixing those big problems. Can you talk a little bit about that culture? It's not just a bias to action but it's a bias to kind of effectiveness?

Charlie Whitney: Well, I would say it's a bias to not wanting to see any of us fail. And the company the one I’ve been here 33 years, the one thing that has always been present from my very first day forward everybody's here to support you and help you. And that's part of our DNA as an organization. It's not something they teach you when you come on board, it's something that you kind of live and experience every day. But when we have problems then the cavalry shows up and you're going to get help you're going to get support whether you resist or not. And it's really one of the things I think that makes this a special place to work.

Jim Benson: That was that was definitely what I found. So, when you and Dave started to actually go places and ask people what do you need to set this right environment. You know what are the physical things you need? What are the social things that you need and so on and so forth? What are the range of things that you've seen people ask for to create that professional comfort?

Charlie Whitney: When we first started doing it before we knew to even ask something that specific. We set out we told everybody, think back in your career. Everybody has worked on jobs that were good jobs and they've worked on jobs that maybe weren't so good. And think about the things that made the good job special. Then we started accumulating all of that information and we did what engineers do. We made the biggest matrix you've ever seen in your whole life. And then we started to look for concepts to incorporate for creating an ideal work environment. Not specifics like I need to have Starbuck Keurig’s in the coffee machine, but general themes and we found out that there you know things like emotional safety as I mentioned before it was important. Leadership, good communication, you know things like that that really contributed to the success and a good environment on a project.

And once we got there, then we were able to start drilling down and being a little more granular. You know  initially we focused a lot on the physical components of the right environment, but we got to a point quickly where we realized that you can have the ideal physical work environment in the world, but if you have bad leadership you're not going to have the right environment. Conversely you could have a terrible physical environment but with the right leadership then you could have a good environment. It might not be as good as it possibly could be. But that really was a clue that let us start looking at the softer side of this.

It's not a hard skill, it's not about physical structure. You know what are the things that we don't talk a lot about as engineers that become really the oil in the machine. It's the things that enable all of our technical abilities it's the things that really enable us to be successful. And those were the things that were the hardest to define.

Tonianne: You know walking the halls at Turner and listening to conversations and interacting with your team members at every level of the organization. It's evident that there's not simply an unrelenting level of attention paid to physical safety, but like you said before Charlie to psychological safety as well. Kevin you mentioned your dedication to active listening. What behaviors do you feel the right environment has propagated and nurtured?

Kevin Chase: I think it really is just that. I think there's an intentionality from our leadership to really understand how we can affect our greatest resource. If you know the culture of Turner construction, you'll hear often our greatest resources are people. The only way that you can help influence an impact in a positive way of that resource is to really understand what is its ideal work environment. What do the people who work first? What do they what do they think that they need to feel successful? Why do they actually want to come to work? So, by developing these really attuned ears to listening to the specifics not just about can I make that submittal process better for you or that RFI come back a little bit faster.

But what are the values that make you want to come to work for our organization and interact in the environment that we actually create here. You can only do that by actually going closest to the source. The term that we use here is ‘Go to the Gemba’s’, the Japanese term. We've heard many times in our work environment, and for us from a management perspective the Gemba is really our people. In order to have the best organization, we have to have the best people. And they need to be operating at their best and they can only do that if they have an ideal work environment where they feel safe to do so.

Tonianne: I appreciate that. You know a lot of organizations; they embrace the concept of Lean. They some I actually feel hide behind it; they focus on the ways. And what I have always appreciated about Turner folk is that you all really tap into the perhaps the least spoken about ways that sense of untapped human potential you know with your focus on people and the skills that they bring to their position.

Jim Benson: Kevin, when you're listening and somebody has a need and there’s some conceptual ways that they can get to that need to finish that need to meet that need. But they're super busy, they've got a bunch of stuff going on and the solution feels like work. Do you have like a story where there was an expressed kind of cultural or right environment need? And then there were some possible solutions those didn't happen right away but then they happened later as people as change inevitably happened or opportunities came up on the job site.

Kevin Chase: Yeah, they're probably a lot of specific solutions, but I'll just give you a general scenario in our overall approach to these types of things. In our industry in general, like most industries there's high intensity and a lot of demands. And the one complexity that we have is we working in these dynamic environments. So, there's this constant pressure to perform, because I’m not sure what if I’m going to have the ability to complete that task tomorrow. So, in your example, where some of our colleagues feel like I know that I have a problem but I don't have the time to fix that solution. There are a couple of approaches and the one that seems to be the most effective at least now anyway is to continue to allow them to kind of feel that pressure of that pain that they're experiencing.

We sit down and we have a conversation about why are you experiencing those things? Do we really understand the true root cause of your challenges? Are we really talking about systems or symptoms? Are we talking about systems? Do we have an opportunity to really dive a little bit deep and understand? What it is about your work that is making you feel this way? When we get the response where team members say, ‘I just don't have the time to fix it I know it's a problem I’m going to continue down on my path’. We'll take a step back and we'll revisit. We'll take a week two weeks etc. and we'll come back in two weeks and we'll say, ‘How's that matter result itself?’ And the response says, ‘Well, no of course I didn't have time to fix it.’

So, that conversation that given that space for the user to understand that they too need to be active in helping to change what they're experiencing is very important. It's important to be vulnerable and express what it is that you are challenged with. But it's also important to understand you have control to affect positively the change that you are actively seeking. So, that would be a kind of our current approach and we seem to be having some success. It really is value based. I think we are straying away from in the classroom's right environment. We're straying away from these prescriptive based solutions based on our own personal experiences. We're really having these value-based discussions, what are you physically challenged with and let's create a system that's going to help you. But you've got to be an active participant in it in order for it to be sustainable.

Jim Benson: I love that the. One of the things that I noticed with, when we arrived at Turner originally or initially was that, there was kind of a strong division between the things that happened in the headquarters in downtown and on the job sites. And even from the first project the that we started working on together Kevin, we originally had an Obeya set up at the main office for a pretty large project to handle the procurement process. But then as soon as that project moved in and had a project group, a lot of the elements of that Obeya moved up to sit with the group. And then it moved with them to sit with them when they moved actually to the trailer you know out on the job site.

It felt to me like some of the walls of the silos in the company got a little perforated then and better conversation started happening. Because the visualizations and the systems began to give in for people more information that they could act on. So, I guess it might my initial question like for, I guess to go back to Charlie is. Have you been seeing improvement there in the basically the communications between what's happening in the main office and the job sites, based on right environment and the other visualizations that we've been doing or that you've been doing?

Jim Benson: Yes, we have. We got a lot of good learning. When we set up our first Obeya room, we set up a Kanban room, it was a thing that we had to do and I think we struggled with it to some extent. But we kind of muscled our way through it. And at some point, people started to realize there's a lot of value there. The concept of making work as visual as possible really became something that we do now on all of our projects to facilitate an ideal work environment. I think we've reached the point now where we probably couldn't turn it off, but do we literally use a Kanban board for every procurement exercise. No, we don't but do we use it a lot we do. We just had a sales proposal go out last week. We did a pull plan for a sales proposal we processed the whole thing using a pull plan.

I mean that's something that we never would have even contemplated four years ago. But we had a joint venture partner and nobody understood what everybody's roles and responsibilities were. And we said what a great way to make everything visual, so there's no miscommunication. We do it with schedules. We do work and place track hacking. It's pretty much prevalent throughout the whole organization. And obviously it's not the same tool on every job every job is a little different. But people find what that thing is and they use it and it makes us better.

Jim Benson: So, I know this might be an unfair question, but do you feel that like those big proposals especially have become less stressful for individuals because of the visualizations.

Charlie Whitney: I think anytime you're able to drive visualization into any process it becomes less stressful. Whether it's a big proposal or a little six-week look ahead or a one-week work of a weekly work plan. Whatever you can do to get it up so everybody can see it and everybody can understand it. There's none of that, I thought you were doing or realize you were going to do that. I can't believe we both did the same thing. Are we perfect? No. But are we a lot better? Yes, and we're slowly wicking waste out of our processes and our systems. It's really a thing to see.

Jim Benson: I think if you were truly perfect, we would all know. Because you would be elevated to some deity type status and we'd all be worshiping at the Turner altar. There's a situation where groups will start to visualize their work. They start to talk about that work in different ways, because they're seeing what's in the visualization. And then that becomes socialized. So, maybe it starts with the team just at Turner and then some of the owner’s teams or the designers or the trades start to see what's going on and they want to be a part of it. I saw this on a few sites where the trades initially were like, you know pull planning who wants to do that. And then when they started interacting with the visualizations around pull planning, they became interested. Or when they started to see the visualizations around safety, that gave them something to kind of measure themselves against.

I know that you've been having some pretty deep conversations with some of the trades. And I kind of consider that to all be part of the right environment that it extends outside the trailer, outside the Turner sphere and into the trades as well. Can you talk a little bit about how you've been working with external stakeholders to make some of these ideas for creating an ideal work environment real?

Kevin Chase: Yeah, so it's interesting. So, the meeting I’m actually just coming from, we've only been working with this specific team and their trade partners for a little less than a week, maybe about a week exactly. They were challenged not just by the trade partners but principally by the client that we're working for. It's a prominent location here in the city that has some conditions that we need to be done by you know middle of the fall season. And the challenges that were being expressed was that there wasn't a high level of communication. The owner has identified that we have unlimited resources to help clear problems for you. All we need you to do is to develop a system that actually makes those challenges transparent with enough time for us to affect positive change.

Same way with the trade partners. Trade partners felt like they were constantly being challenged to meet these dynamics gadget requirements. So, every day the due date shifted and it shifted just based on what the project leadership had in their head. Because there wasn't a plan, that plan wasn't communicated effectively. So, it's interesting our approaches don't and then most cases aren't different. When we talk about the right environment the environment is not just within the walls of Turner construction. The environment is where we have influence where we participate etc. And so, in this particular instance, the trade partners were craving stability.

And the mechanisms used to stabilize that environment was physically visualizing the plan. We took some elevations. We pulled out color pencils not a very low-tech solution. We identified dates and we spoke really about the why behind these things. These dates cannot shift because we've got a milestone commitment to our owner, here is how we're going to execute that plan together. I need your feedback, but we spent more time talking about the why behind things and what were the needs of the trade partners to help inform the system. So, the system that we have now developed as a low tech as it is coherent. We left a discussion with a trade partner said., ‘I finally understood what you said to me two weeks ago.’

Because they now had an opportunity to introduce this context on a drawing with a red and yellow color pencil and sketching. That made very clear on what the expectations were. And really that's ties into what we're talking about. If we can create an environment where the expectations are clearly understood communicated to all of the stakeholders, then we have an environment where everyone understands how they can be successful. So, I know your question was specific about engaging of external parties, but for us it's the same. We have to treat it the same. We have to execute it the same in order to have that kind of stable predictable outcome.

Tonianne: Kevin, can you talk a little bit about Turner's concept of active caring and how that fits into what you just said?

Kevin Chase: It's very very similar. So, it's interesting, when you introduce that concept especially in our industry where stereotypically or maybe actually kind of rugged and rough kind of aggressive. And you start using the word caring the immediate perception is that you're talking about soft hugs and cuddling. It really isn't about that; it really is about what can we do together to create an ideal work environment that is respectful. And then respectful is also laid as well. An environment where we're going to be accountable to each other where we're going to meet upon our commitments based on what we said that we're going to do, so that I can actually execute my own work in our own process as an environment that is truly caring.

I need to be done today, so that my partner, my peer and my adjacent trade partner can do their work tomorrow. They've got the same constraints as far as being productive and profitable for their suppliers their owners etc. If I understand what it is that they need and they understand what it is that I need, at its core that really is an environment that truly is caring. I think there is again to make the difference between this soft approach, it really is hard work to get there. And I think by using these really practical examples about respect and accountability for kind of an aligned approach to success, has made definition a little bit more clear for ourselves included as well as our trade partners. Hopefully that’s clear.

Charlie Whitney: Clear, but if I may, still include active, caring, lean and right environment. But I’m going to say as time passes, we're really starting to see that these three spare concepts are really all demon variation on the same thing and you can't really have one without the other. And I would say with every day that passes the lines between them become blurrier and blurrier.

Tonianne: That's beautiful.

Jim Benson: Absolutely.

Kevin Chase: Yeah., I would echo that. Our ideal state is not to call it anything it's just the way that we should be behaving, right. It's not the right environments, this is really about us a way that we know is the right way to actually act within any given system.

Charlie Whitney: I mean it's going to reach a point we hope in the not future, but blurring the lines between active carrying, Lean, right environment and safety and just general production planning on all of our projects and in all of our departments. Everything's is really starting to look like it should be the same.

Tonianne: Immediately I’m thinking about you all are what 119 years old as an organization.

Charlie Whitney: And Kevin looks really good.

Tonianne: No, but I’m thinking about some of our organizations that are so stuck in the status quo into, this is the way we've always done things around here we can't possibly change. And then I look at an organization like you all, talking about things like caring and listening and respect.

Jim Benson: And practically, talking about those things practically.

Tonianne: And rationalizing those things, yeah.

Kevin Chase: I think it's really important to acknowledge that this is all very hard. It's uncomfortable for a lot of people. So, those organizations that have a hard time and making that shift into saying where we're going is going to continue to do it our way. We still have a large faction of our own group that still struggles with this adoption. I think it would be disingenuous to say that the flip switched and everyone is kind of on the same train. It has been a slow arduous process to create an ideal work environment. We are starting to see the benefits of it, but we still have a lot of work to do. So, that's if there is no other message to give to anyone that might be listening to this is that, there's got to be a tremendous amount of patience and it's got to be a tremendous amount of leadership to keep folks aligned with our overall vision. We'll get there, when we get there, we're just going to be committed to getting there.

Charlie Whitney: We started our Lean journey in 2014 and we're just now getting traction. I would say that we're nowhere near being a Lean company, but we're a heck of a lot better than we were two years ago, which is way better than we were four years ago and six years ago and eight years ago. Even now, this all is so new to us. You look back at things that we did even two or three years ago. Like when the right environment was rolled out, it was really about the ideal work environment for Turner. And I don't know when we had the aha moment, but one day I was like, ‘Well, if there's a thousand people that work for the New York business unit we have six thousand trade partners and seven thousand trade partners on our job. Why are we talking about the right environment for Turner? Why isn't this extending out and rippling through every person that shows up on a Turner site?’ Being a tradesperson, an owner, an architect, an engineer. Whoever that person is the environment really is an umbrella that should cover everybody.

That's been a big part of our focus probably for the last three years. It's not about making things visual for Turner, it's about making things visual for the whole team, like Kevin did earlier today. But that was, it took a long time for us to come to that realization I’m kind of excited to see what's the realization that we're going to have next year.

Tonianne: I appreciate that you just distinguished between not just Turner but the whole team not meaning the team of Turner. So, it's that you are giving the best possible experience, not just to your employees but everybody who actually engages with Turner.

Jim Benson: Because if you don't, they'll return the favor. So, we're pulling up to the end of our time here. The thing that you just said about the distance covered by Turner over the last four years or so. I certainly you know enjoyed being in the middle of that kind of whirlwind of change. And the one thing that I'll also note is that you know an advance would be made on one project and other projects would kind of watch. And then some other intrepid project would take it one step further and then one step further. Then by the time you got a certain number of steps, the original experiment kind of becomes SOP for new projects. And that continuous improvement cycle is being waged every day.

So, it's not that Turner isn't perfect, it's that Turner is actually engaged in continuous improvement and that's a good thing. And that if you were perfect, you would have nothing else to improve and you just sit around and say, ‘oh, well okay we've got this this proposal. I’ll just hit the build button and then and the nanobots will go out and build the building and in 15 minutes I'll be all done.’ So, that's been what I’ve really enjoyed watching. And like every time I talk to you two, you have some amazing new story of something that's happened recently. That's I don't know it's moving for me. Do you guys want to wrap up? Do you have any closing comments, or are you feeling pretty good?

Charlie Whitney: I just want to say one thing. We've made remarkable progress in the last I’m going to say 12 to 18 months. And you say that's kind of counterintuitive because of COVID and everybody was dispersed. But somehow in the midst of all the problems, we were having we really managed to put a bright shiny light on fact-based problem solving. And we started leveraging that tool in a way that we never had. If we have an incident on a job, why did it happen? Well, you know now we're using terms like I want to do an A3 on that and I want you and you're going to present it to the general manager and the senior vice president and the regional Lean manager. So, you've got four days to go out and do some in-depth problem solving and figure out some pretty good countermeasures. We're doing that all over the business unit now.

I’m probably on three or four calls a week to follow up with A3’s Jim who gotten here. But what's happened is in the last I would say 16 months, we've seen our recordable incident rate get cut in half. A 50% reduction in recordable estimates on our projects, and our man hours are about the same and we're attributing it to what we're doing with fact-based problem solving identifying what are the cause of issues. Two years ago, it was the guy stepped on a nail we need to work on a situational awareness. Now it's somebody stepped on a nail why was the nail there to begin with. And that's the transformation that I’m talking about and thinking and that's what fact-based problem solving really daylights and makes you look at the whole world differently.

Tonianne: So, solutioning was never an issue for you all. Going into a problem and people saying they already know what the solution is.

Charlie Whitney: Oh good, we'll do an A3 tomorrow. And people will be telling us the answer as they're writing their problem statement. I had a conversation with one of our senior construction execs who was very good friends with Jim Benson. One of our Lean leaders in the business unit and he had an incident on a job and it was one of those things. He came back to me, exactly what I just described. Charlie it's situational awareness, what do you want from me. And then we started going through. It just a really simple interrogative about, well why did it happen because of this, but why did that happen why. You know and 10 minutes later is, ‘Oh, I guess it wasn't situational awareness we're going to do a presentation for you on Thursday.’

And I didn't have to ask him to do an A3. He just said, ‘I’m going to do an A3 and I’m going to present it to you.’ I didn't have to ask for it. But people are starting to see that the answer to everything is not, you can't fix stupid or we really work on our situational awareness. Because five years ago, that's kind of the answer to every safety issue. Now it's not. It's probably never the answer. It doesn't mean you have to bubble wrap people, but it means we need to be more thoughtful with our planning and our execution.

Kevin Chase: I think something that Charlie unintentionally highlighted just now was also the behaviors of leaders, right. So, it would have been simple because we know that this particular individual senior ranking executive, have a lot of respect for that individual in the realm of continuous improvement. It would have been convenient to allow them to just say social awareness and just move on to the next problem. But by developing or by showing that we're committed to having you dig deep be really now be really deep be intentional in understanding why that thing happened. And it coming from the general manager, that sets the example for that exec on his or her project moving forward that we're not just gonna be complacent.

We're going to continue to chase that line of perfection. We're going to continue that behavior continuous improvement. The only way that this sustains is if it's led by our leaders.

Jim Benson: Awesome. I never have a bad conversation with you guys. I’m very much looking forward to when my wife will let me get on a plane and fly to New York. The four of us will have a awesome dinner. So, Kevin, Charlie this has been fantastic. You guys just always blow me away with what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Tonianne: Every conversation we have with you all, it's like I leave with intentional thoughtful and humane. And I’m grateful you guys are out there doing this, I really am. Thank you.

Charlie Whitney: If my lights were on, you'd see me blushing right now.

Kevin Chase: Well, thank you guys. You've helped us.

Charlie Whitney: Thank you very much.

Kevin Chase: Well, thank you.

Tonianne: Super appreciate you all.

Jim Benson: So, I think you can all see why we enjoyed working with and talking with these guys so much. I want to of course thank Kevin and Charlie for showing up and for having such a great conversation with us. Just like Tonianne said, we're always amazed by how thoughtful and how deep their approach is to visual management and to working together. And their just kind of innate understanding that culture drives, quality drives, safety and our abilities to set up systems that communicate well with people. That respect them that build good relationships, that build flow that build good feedback loops. All those things are what makes quality work happen and they get it. They deserve more attention than they're getting, whether they want it or not.

So, thank you for tuning in to Collaborwocky # 5. If you want to hear more conversations about Collaboration about work visualization, about how to get by in the working environment in the 21st century. Just click the little head in the lower corner there and subscribe. See y'all next time.