2004 HRINZ HR Award Winners

Freeflow Alliance

Photography Robert Catto www.catto.co.nz

The Background

The Freeflow Alliance is a virtual organisation formed from staff drawn from 4 separate organisations (Beca, Fletcher Construction, Higgins Contractors and Transit NZ).

They had 2 objectives – to develop a fully integrated team that saw itself as one organisation, regardless of origin and secondly to develop a high performance team capable of breaking industry benchmarks.

At it’s peak, Freeflow employed hundreds of people to build the first significant motorway exchange in Auckland in 25 years. It did this on live motorways, with hundreds of thousands of vehicles moving past the workers every day. It was a $130 million roading project involving roads, motorways bridges, drainage, environmental concerns, iwi, historical features and 200,000 cars passing daily.

However the greatest tool that the Freeflow Alliance used in this project was ‘culture management’. The Culture Management Plan was the principal HR Innovation employed by Freeflow.

Using a culture management plan was innovative within this industry. It has been deemed a success because it enabled Freeflow to generate an extremely high performance culture within the project team. Extraordinary results were achieved that not only met but also surpassed the high expectation of stakeholders. Not a typical outcome on a roading project. Their challenge was not only to weld a team together – but to create a team that could develop significant innovations ‘on the fly’, operate safely in extraordinarily harsh conditions and deliver against some of the most stringent performance criteria ever seen in the construction industry. The Freeflow Alliance also sought to break the traditional distinction between ‘office’ and ‘site’ in order to extract maximum value from everyone involved with the project.

Large projects with a diverse group of people typically encounter difficulties in effectively engaging the team in environmental matters. Freeflow, however has successfully and consistently achieved a high level of team enrolment, enabling the project to deliver results that significantly exceeded what could be achieved by training alone. The use of family open days was an important and extremely successful part of this which enabled team members to explain to the children and whanau what they were doing and why certain actions were being taken with regard to the environment. Staff and their families were involved in Family Open Days, production of a Children’s book and the growing and planting of trees for landscaping works. Such activities fostered and strengthened social bonds across the site and allowed different teams and disciplines to interact.

Innovation was also something that was fostered by Freeflow and encouraged. Two great innovation is came from staff. The first was the casting of the hundred of decorative wall panels lining Grafton Gully, a first in New Zealand. The site crew charged with this task, worked out the whole complex process themselves, including the construction of a giant ‘toast rack’ to help the panels cure properly.

The second significant innovation helped foster relations with the residential neighbours who would be most effected by the noise of construction. The ‘Muff’ was designed by one of the most recent engineering graduates and was a mobile wagon with flaps that drop down which provided excellent noise damping properties. Air filtering provided a safe environment for the workers inside, and although not spacious, it did an excellent job in minimizing the noise of hammers and drills!

Freeflow has achieved a wide range of successes including:

Being the first construction industry project in New Zealand to adopt alliancing as the contractual framework was delivered in a manner that encouraged fuller use of the contractual model

• The stakeholders are quantifiably delighted
• Project was delivered six weeks early and 5% under budget
• The high quality of the finished product is clear to see
• Careers were developed and workforce skills enhanced
• New benchmarks were established in employee relationships and personal levels of job satisfaction
• Environmental initiatives delivered superior results that exceeded expectations