Q&A With Summit Materials Employees

When can you start.

The environment at Summit Materials as far as schedule goes is more lax than any other company I’ve ever worked with in the past 40 years.

In the past five years it appears that it has nothing to do with what they look like but who they know. Skills and background seem to play secondary to who you know and who likes you.

They were young and very inexperienced in the things that I was tasked to do.

They don’t take advantage of the work from home philosophy with a forward thinking attitude. Only certain people at certain levels are allowed to work from home. They disregard the savings and efficiency in working from home.

They do very good drug and alcohol testing and background checks. All are in compliance with EEOC and FMCSA.

It appears to be quite lucrative for young interns.

For the most part pretty well. Take away the top two layers of HR executives and they handle it quite nicely.

They don’t measure success they measure who they like. The only thing they appear to be concerned about is the bottom line. Not recognizing that the bottom line could be better if they had the right people making the right decisions. There’s a phrase from the movie we were soldiers where in a sergeant tales a young second lieutenant who was inquiring about how he would lead his man into battle with no expire And the sergeant replied just remember there are no bad soldiers just bad leaders.

If a business could make money without employees it would but unfortunately that’s not the case. Things I would do to change the culture at Summit Materials‘s get back to the basics and look at the people. Summit Materials has grown so rapidly and without a defined growth plan. They have individuals who are yes people who care about their titles and bonuses rather than being producers like the small companies they are acquiring. Summit has too many layers of managers who are nothing more than high paid glorified score keepers not producers. The culture has to be changed from the lowest level of supervision whether it’s about making money and profit or creating a culture of safety in the workplace.

Poorly! Laying off people in late fall and winter indicates that it has nothing to do with cost savings. Those who are leg go during late fall and winter generally from my perspective only appear to be the people making the revenue and those who are managing and accounting for the revenue are the ones that are slacking. Using only my position I found that I created an ROI on myself for six years running of 300 to 800% and I was let go because of budget cuts. The most disturbing thing about my layoff was that I was let go by people who didn’t generate one dime for the company. They were merely scorekeepers at the end of the day.

It is merely my opinion from my experience, that growth opportunities did not exist very often within summit Materials. In my opinion there were too many layers of managers managing metrics rather than actually doing work. It is a very cliquish environment where in only those who are part of the elect group seem to make any movement careerwise.