www.martinmarietta.com | January/February 2018 The Conveyor 13
industry leader, but we want to further
elevate that position,” she said. “When
people hear our name, we want them to
know exactly what we do and who we
are. We want them to know what we
value and how we conduct our business.”
It wasn’t long after that April meeting
that attribute teams began to take shape.
Supervisors from across the company
were asked to submit employee names
for consideration on the task force. From
there, senior leadership narrowed the
list to 66 names, breaking that group
down further into smaller teams of six
to eight people.
On each team are men and women
with various levels of experience and
responsibility. Team members have
diverse backgrounds and specialties. Each
of the company’s divisions and product
lines is represented.
Kasey Copeland, a senior internal
auditor employed with the company for
the past three years, said the deliberately
crafted group dynamic has led her Ethics
team to several insightful conversations
about the current state of ethics at Martin
Marietta and the higher level of ethics
the company hopes to one day attain.
“Our team is not only from different
regions, but different departments as well
and I think that’s helped us gain a better
perspective of the company as a whole,”
she said. “To be a truly world-class
organization, we need to be united, so
this dynamic is helping us formulate
guiding principles around ethics that we
hope will suit all areas of the business.
Overall, Martin Marietta is an ethical
company, but there’s always room for
improvement.”
Matt Rosenthal, the Kansas City
District’s sales manager, expressed a
similar sentiment while discussing his
work on the Brand Recognition team.
“Learning how Martin Marietta’s brand
is perceived by people across different
divisions has been incredibly beneficial,”
he said. “I think each of us on the team
is seeing how that perception affects
employees in a variety of roles. I’ve been
impressed with the talent of our people
and by the dedication of this team, which
is fully committed to growing Martin
Marietta’s brand to world-class status.”
Completed this past fall, the first
assignment given to each team was to
draft a charter in which its assigned
attribute was broadly defined. Teams
then identified “in-scope” activities to
strengthen the attribute’s presence.
Inherent in the exercise were listing the
key issues, risks and dependencies of
these in-scope activities and specifying
a number of “out-of-scope” activities
beyond each team’s purview. The charters
were then submitted to an executive
steering committee for approval.
The task force process has since moved
into its second phase, where teams have
been asked to complete a detailed
analysis of the current state of each
attribute across the company.
“The information the task force is
gathering now is exactly the type of
knowledge we’ll need if we’re going to
make our company stronger,” Osberg said.
“We want to have a good understanding
of how each attribute is currently working
at Martin Marietta because we can’t effect
change until we know what we already
have in place.”
In the coming months, task force teams
will be reaching out to employees across
the company to ask for their thoughts and
opinions about the current state of each
attribute, Osberg said, adding that the
input received will be “extremely valuable
and greatly appreciated.”
In a related effort, the People team –
co-led by Bennett and Southwest Division
Vice President of Human Resources Jill
Reeder – has begun working with an
outside vendor to design a survey for
distribution in March that will ask
approximately 2,000 employees for their
views on Martin Marietta’s culture,
recruitment and training activities,
benefits, work/life balance and a number
of other aspects related to the well-being
of its people. Once compiled, the data will
allow the team to determine what changes
are necessary and how to implement
those changes for maximum benefit.
Overall, the work of the World Class
Task Force is expected to span at least two
years and, in some cases, much longer.
The goal, Osberg said, is to ensure that
Martin Marietta is continuously improving
and moving forward on all fronts.
Speaking for both the People team and
the task force as a whole, Bennett said the
ongoing timeline is by design.
“I think the work of the task force will
never be done,” she said. “These goals are
like the carrot dangling from the stick
that continues to move. We’ll get closer
to it, but if we’re truly going to be world
class, we’ll never sit back and think that
there are no more opportunities for
improvement. We’ll always be striving
for something better, something safer
and something more efficient.” ▼
2018 While drafting charters, each Task
Force team was asked to use a shaded
diamond to evaluate where its
attribute currently stands at Martin
Marietta. If a given attribute warrants
just a single shaded section of the
diamond, for example, it is viewed as
an area that “Needs Improvement.”
Attributes where the company’s
performance warrants all four shaded
sections are seen as “World Class.”