"Bringing together people who will challenge us and each other, allowing different disciplines to step up and lead a project, making sure that we’re taking full advantage of diverse talent"

Last month we partnered with Regeneration Brainery at UKREiiF, supporting a delegation of young people to attend the conference in Leeds. It was encouraging to see such an engaged group of teenagers and young adults who seemed genuinely excited about pursuing a career in construction and regeneration.

It’s no secret that this industry is facing a skills shortage, which shows no signs of letting up. It’s vital that the built environment sector continues to attract talent, and that we open up opportunities to young people who might not even know that the sector exists, let alone how to access it.

Related to this, we have also recently been thinking about what acts as the ‘glue’ in our organisation – the stuff that keeps us together. Stimulated by a thought-provoking event by the Coaches On The Couch team for London Festival of Architecture, our MD Damien Sharkey spoke about our approach at HUB, and what keeps our team together, as well as how we bring together our design teams.

We deliberately hire people with experience outside of property development – whether that be in architecture, planning, or elsewhere – precisely because we recognise the value in having diversity of thinking on a team. The ‘glue’ at HUB seems to be found in the fact that we try to give everyone space to draw on their own experience and expertise, allowing people to carve their own way rather than attempting to mould them into something homogenous.

And it’s the same in our project teams. We always aim to bring together people who will challenge us and each other, allowing different disciplines to step up and lead a project when appropriate. For this reason, we have begun asking a different consultant to chair each design team meeting across many of our projects, which for us is a great way of making sure that we’re taking full advantage of the diverse talent around the table.

This is also the reason we’re hosting our upcoming Engineer pitch with Archiboo, which we hope will further challenge us with new thinking from a wide range of talented teams - our most successful projects have always been the result of us bringing in a fresh perspective.