Why excellence matters

The challenges facing the world as a result of climate change are well documented and daunting and engineers have a hugely important role to play in helping tackle these issues. We are trained to identify problems, break them down into manageable parts, find solutions and then communicate this to the wider team. Our leadership in tackling the climate crisis is crucial and we have to attract the most creative and brightest into our industry to help with this.

However, in my experience engineers tend to be modest about what they do and all that they achieve. It is often the other collaborators in construction projects that take the glory. The projects that we undertake are undoubtedly the outcome of successful collaboration between the entire team including the client, the architect, engineers across multiple disciplines, the project management and commercial management team and the contractor/manufacturers. However, the contribution of the engineering team is often the one that makes the project viable by solving some knotty problem or by utilising some new tool or technique. Engineers will often say that this is just part of their job and that they are paid to solve difficult problems before moving on to solve the next one!

I believe that we need to take the time to capture the great work that we do and recognise and celebrate the achievement. We will soon be celebrating the 10th year of the Cundall Excellence Awards which we set up for exactly this purpose. When we first started these awards, we focussed on technical excellence within our business and we unearthed some amazing work. The fascinating truth about these awards is that a winner can come from anywhere in the business. This year's winners included a partner leading on an innovative project and a former intern, who had just re-joined our business as part of our graduate cohort.

The submission criteria for the awards have been kept as simple as possible and, in our time-scarce jobs, this has encouraged participation. We have celebrated and publicised all the entries to the awards and this sharing of knowledge has led to better design and has helped spread good practice around the whole Cundall business. It is hard to quantify the impact that recognising and celebrating excellence has had within Cundall but seeing how participation in the awards has grown year on year suggests that this has enthused our engineering community.

As time has passed, we have broadened the awards to acknowledge that there is excellence in many non-technical areas within Cundall. Kieran Thompson’s work on setting Cundall’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2020 to 2025 illustrates this perfectly – a key strand in our business improvement that already has had significant impact and will continue to do so into the future. We have seen many submissions that feature our digital skills ranging from coding required to manipulate huge data sets to tools that capture and display the embodied carbon in our designs. Our work in sustainability and building performance design results in many excellent submissions and the overall winner last year showcased the industry leading piece of work Cundall did with the Construction Industry Council in Hong Kong to develop an industry leading embodied carbon database along with a web-tool to assess the embodied carbon performance of building and infrastructure projects.

The process of recording, recognising and celebrating excellence, whether that be individual or collective, has helped foster a culture of excellence that attracts the brightest and most creative people to Cundall which in turn inspires us all to strive to do better and achieve more.