Watterson Construction: maintaining quality relationships.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: 2016 CORPORATE 100: COMPANY PROFILE - Company overview

Watterson Construction has been providing construction services to Alaska since 1981, when it was opened by Watterson Construction President Bill Watterson and his wife, who has since sold her shares in the company. Watterson now shares ownership of the company with five other shareholders.

Employing Alaskans

Many Alaska companies see the wisdom in local hire, and Watterson is no different. Not only does the company focus on hiring Alaskans to do work in Alaska, but it makes an effort to employ people from the region in which the work will be performed. "We've had a job up at Fort Greely for a little over a year now," Watterson says. "We hired about twelve or thirteen people from the Delta area, good quality people. That community has its own culture, and [our employees] that live there love it. Most of the people who go there from somewhere else don't like it at all," he laughs. "But [local hire] is good for us, and it's good for the community."

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As another example, a superintendent and foremen were sent to work on a project in Seward; the remainder of the employees needed for the project were hired out of Seward. One hire stood out: "He's really good; we knew right away," Watterson says. At the initiation of the second part of the project, this employee was promoted to superintendent. Watterson says that employees hired in this fashion can have opportunities to move to other sites, if there's work available and they are interested.

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Watterson also hires locally for their staff positions in their Anchorage headquarters. "Fortunately we have low turnover," Watterson says, but it's inevitable to need some new employees over the years. Watterson's brother Jim is on the advisory board for the Construction Management program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and so far Watterson has hired five employees from that program, and three employees have come from the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, one of which is Watterson himself.

"We had one gal stop in cold and I interviewed her and twenty minutes later I said: I think we better talk to her a little longer. And so we hired her," he says. Just recently, one of their employees, one of Watterson's site safety personnel, is taking an extended leave for health reasons. To find someone to fill in for him, the company "started calling around and leaving messages and found a former employee that had worked with us until about a year ago, and she said...