Company Culture with Curt

Spray Foam Magazine – Spring Issue 2025 – Trade workers put in long hours doing the dirty, difficult labor necessary to build and maintain the world’s infrastructure. Working in trades is essential, so what’s with the influx of headlines describing a dire shortage in construction and related industries throughout North America?

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that since 2007, in the U.S. alone, the trades have faced a steep drop off in workforce, losing a whopping one million workers in less than two decades. What can companies do to attract and keep talent when the candidate pool is stretched so thin?

Good Help is Hard to Find, but Never Beyond Hope

According to Curt Janzen, CEO of Calgary, Alberta’s multi-division Beyond Group, the answer begins with cultivating a company culture that everyone is proud to be a part of. However, culture and relationships weren’t always a top priority. When he started the business in 2006 with his brother-in-law, Kevin Boschee, their approach to hiring seemed simple—if a candidate had spray foam experience or related any experience, they were hired.

As they soon found out, having relevant experience is only the tip of the good-fit iceberg. Despite being highly-skilled, many of the folks they hired in the early days had interpersonal issues that brought teamwork and cooperation to a stalemate, resulting in wasted efforts, profit loss, turnover, and stress. For the company to continue to grow, they’d need to do something radical to address the ongoing staffing issues.

Janzen and the other leaders began to filter their approach to hiring through a relational lens. They resisted the knee-jerk reaction to throw any warm body with foam installation experience on the rig, and instead focused on the kind of work environment they wanted to cultivate.

Janzen describes the simple guiding questions that gradually set Beyond on the path as culture connoisseurs: “We just started asking ourselves, ‘what does our ideal team look like?’ and ‘would I want to hang out with these people if we weren’t working together?”

This perspective shift led to hiring an employee who had zero foam experience, but whose stellar interpersonal skills made him easy to train and a delight to work with. Janzen noticed that clients responded well to this employee and were none the wiser to his relative lack of experience.

This friendly, reliable employee learned the ropes, stuck around, and became a high-performer. For Janzen, this was eye-opening. It hammered home that being personable having good intentions can triumph over being the most skilled or knowledgeable.

“Everything has feelings attached. How do clients feel about their interactions with us? Are we perceived as loyal, as optimistic, as principled? That’s what they’re going to remember.”

Growth at the Roots: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

In the years that followed, Janzen and Boschee deep-dived into the company’s meaning, beyond making sales. They met with a corporate forensics’ consultant and dissected the minute details of Beyond’s culture to map out how they wanted to grow while also defining “the why.” Ultimately, they found that people and relationships were the key.

“Working in construction, it seems like hippie-dippy stuff. What is culture? To get people to work harder you either yell at them or give them more money,” he explains. “But we think we’ve really found a way to turn culture into dollar bills.”

Leadership didn’t want to make decisions in a vacuum, so they brought everyone on the team together for a one-day workshop to define Beyond’s core values. And everyone included employee’s spouses and families, since loved ones are so frequently the driving force behind staying or going, career-wise.

With the whole team assembled, they broke out a white board and sticky notes, and asked everyone to define what Beyond means to them using one word.

After much heartfelt discussion, they settled on three core values: Belong, Create, and Mastery. These values went on to serve as the pillars that inform everything else about Beyond Group, from its (re)branding right down to their approach to business and hiring. Keeping these pillars top-of-mind in all decisions acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy that paved their way to success as a relational company.

Belong, Create, Mastery: Employee Experience First

Work impacts life in a major way, and Janzen does not take the give-and-take between employee and employer lightly. After defining their company pillars—Belong, Create, and Mastery—Beyond’s leadership team put their money where their mouth is and developed a framework called Employee Experience First (EX1).

EX1 aims to foster a sense of belonging while providing employees with a scaffold to personal growth. It’s a holistic, opt-in program with eight distinct stages:

Foundational skills and assessment: This two-phase stage is all about “know thyself.” Employees take a personality assessment and also receive five free counselling sessions they can use at any time.

Conflict management: The second stage builds off the first by identifying conflict management styles along with coaching on how to be a more effective communicator.

Job-specific training: Provides skills tailored to the employee’s role at Beyond.

Health and wellness: Covers physical and mental resilience, including diet, exercise, and mindfulness.

Ongoing professional development: Builds universal career skills such as goal setting, public-speaking, and leadership.

Advanced skills in leadership development: Inspires confidence and draws out the leadership qualities innate within everyone.

Community involvement: Encourages volunteering in the community and maintaining a positive presence.

Continuous learning and adaptation: By the end of the program, employees will have created a long-term learning and development plan to propel them into the future.

Janzen is proud of the supportive and growth-minded team at Beyond, but acknowledges that this laser-focus on culture isn't for everyone. The occasional loss of skilled employees due to culture-clash happens sometimes, but Beyond stays the course and rewards loyalty with loyalty. As with all things worth doing, building a vibrant company culture is about trusting the process, and most importantly, each other.

“We just lead by love and see what happens,” said Janzen. “Big burly dudes caring for each other in a construction organization? Well, so far, so good.”