Maintaining a Culture of Honesty

It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are. - Roy Disney

Everyday, we make hundreds of decisions. Some are simple; some are significant; some may even be wrong - but hopefully, all of them are made with the utmost integrity.

At DPR, we empower people at all levels to make decisions, whether in regards to safety, projects, teams, or general business practices. And, to help make the right choices, we continuously come back to our core ideology, the four inviolable values and beliefs of DPR:

• Integrity. We conduct all business with the highest standards of honesty and fairness; we can be trusted.
• Enjoyment. We believe work should be fun and intrinsically satisfying; if we are not enjoying ourselves, we are doing something wrong.
• Uniqueness. We must be different from and more progressive than all other construction companies; we stand for something.
• Ever Forward. We believe in continual self-initiated change, improvement, learning and the advancement of standards for their own sake.

Displayed on the walls of every jobsite trailer and office, these fundamental values serve as the foundation of DPR. In today’s scrutinized business environment, it is more important than ever that we hold on to our core values to sustain our culture of honesty.

Why should customers trust us?

We do what we say we are going to do. When we founded DPR, we made a commitment to build an entrepreneurial, employee-owned organization that differed from other hierarchical, traditional companies. We have maintained our promise by remaining privately held, allowing us to concentrate on what is best for our customers and employees. Rather than having to answer to non-employee shareholders and the quarterly financial pressures of Wall Street, DPR can focus on providing quality service, meeting customers’ needs and creating new opportunities for employees.

We also openly share information.

Although privately held, DPR provides open-book financials, including revenue, bonuses, DPR Phantom Stock dividends, profit margins and capital expenditures. We review these numbers line by line at quarterly company meetings, encouraging people to ask questions and giving straightforward answers. Having a greater knowledge and understanding of the financial side helps individuals become smarter business people and often leads to better, informed decisions on the job.

Share Difficult Moments and Experiences

As much as we like to talk about DPR’s successes, we must also openly discuss times when we fell short and learn from each other. At quarterly meetings, superintendents and project managers volunteer to speak candidly about what went wrong on a project, what could have been done better, and share lessons learned.

DPR also conducts an extensive, in-person Customer Satisfaction Survey for each project to solicit honest customer feedback. Comments are shared with the project teams throughout the job, as well as posted in a database available to everyone at the company.

At DPR, we go to great lengths to actively seek opportunities to increase and improve honest communication. We place a high value on our core values and sincerely hope that our actions speak louder than our words.