20% of Turner Construction’s Detroit office LEED-accredited
A lot is happening at Detroit-based Turner Construction. It has been named one the area’s best places to work and is aggressively pursuing LEED certification on many of its projects, while seeing many of its staff get LEED-accredited.
Turner Construction Company is the largest in the nation, and its Michigan office is no slouch. It was recently named one of Metropolitan Detroit’s 101 Best & Brightest Companies to Work For by the Michigan Business & Professional Association, which recognizes a company’s human resource management, employee satisfaction and amenities, such as training opportunities.
“We have a really great training program that helps our people stay on the cutting edge of new technologies,” explains Steve Berlage, vice president and general manager. The compnay’s intranet features Turner University where employees can take LEED courses and form study groups. This in turn, has led to Turner having the most LEED-accredited professionals in the construction industry nationally and a full 20 percent of its Michigan staff.
Berlage says the company is “very committed” to green construction. Metro Hospital, in the Grand Rapids area, will be the first LEED-certified hospital in Michigan and Henry Ford Hospital’s West Bloomfield campus will pursue LEED gold. While LEED might not be standard operating procedure these days, Berlage believes, “It will be the norm in the future.”
Berlage says the company is attuned not just to client satisfaction, but to the “work-life balance” of its employees. Some community involvement of which he is proud is the company’s work with Habitat for Humanity and Karmanos Cancer Center, among many others. The company will kick off a mentoring program to raise awareness of the construction industry in urban high schools this fall.
Turner opened its Michigan base of operations more than 30 years ago and currently has 100 employees in its Detroit office. “We’ve been level for a while, although we do see eventual growth,” says Berlage.
Sources: Steve Berlage and Dann McDonald, Turner Construction
Writer: Kelli B. Kavanaugh
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