Procore's Lisa O'Brien, Yasmeen Tonnos, and Craig Fischer run the company's Industry Culture team — not HR, but a purpose-built group that sells nothing and charges nothing to help construction firms build the kind of culture that keeps crews, wins work, and survives the coming generational handoff.
Most construction executives know their culture is not what the laminated poster in the lunchroom says it is. They just haven't found a way to act on that gap between stated values and daily reality. Procore's Industry Culture team — three coaches and culture strategists working out of different time zones — has spent the last few years building the programs to close it.
Host Daniel Arsenault brought all three onto the Atlantic Construction Podcast: Lisa O'Brien (PCC, CPCC), Director of Industry Culture; Yasmeen Tonnos (CPCC), Culture Strategist; and Craig Fischer, ICF-certified executive coach and Industry Culture Strategist. They'd just returned from Procore's annual Groundbreak event, where the topics weren't software features — they were mental health, mentorship, and raising up new leaders. The conversation that followed is a fifty-minute argument that culture and business are not two separate conversations.
Here's what a builder takes from it.
Culture is the 'how,' not the poster
Before any program, there's a definition problem. Most people hear "culture" and think branding: the values statement, the swag, the all-hands speech. The team's working definition is more useful: "culture is actually how we work together." Not what you build or why — the how. The daily operating system of a firm.
That matters because it closes a gap that's easy to miss. A firm can have excellent values on paper and a culture that systematically contradicts them — because the real culture isn't written, it's practiced. The measure that cuts through the gap: "your culture is usually determined by the worst behavior that you're willing to accept." Tolerate a bully on a high-revenue project and you've published a culture memo more powerful than any statement on your website. Pressure is the test, and the test comes for every firm eventually. "if you operate outside of your stated values Under Pressure that becomes your culture."
A founder or executive who accepts this definition has already done the hard philosophical step. What Procore offers is the structured path forward.
Working on the business, not just in it
The operational trap the team names is familiar to any construction owner who's made it past the first decade: you get so deep in active projects that stepping back becomes impossible. "they forget at the executive level to take a step back and work on the business." Culture work is exactly the kind of strategic investment that gets deferred when the next bid is due.
The reframe the team offers is financial rather than philosophical: culture and business form a flywheel. "culture drives business and business drives culture and that's why we think culture needs to be such a priority." The mechanism is concrete. High-performing teams — built through intentional culture investment — carry more output per employee, hold onto people longer, and run safer. "cultivating High performing teams do to five whatever x amount of work for the same FTE." Lower turnover, fewer safety incidents, and the same headcount doing more work are business outcomes. Culture isn't the cause of those things in addition to the business — it is the business.
The team positions consultants in this work specifically as coaches, not operators: "we're there to be a resource because they have to vote with their time and their language." Culture change only sticks if the leaders inside the firm are the ones doing it. Outside help adds capacity and perspective; it doesn't substitute for the internal work.
Three programs, one throughline
Procore has built three distinct offerings for the industry, each targeting a different kind of need.
Culture Academy is a two-and-a-half-day immersive executive experience, capped near twenty people, offered three times a year, with plans to expand to Tampa and Austin. The design choice that separates it from a generic leadership retreat: the program is built for at least two representatives per company to attend together. "the more leaders that we can get on board from day one the more successful that will likely be." One person returns from a culture program energized and alone; two people return with a shared framework and someone to hold each other to it. That design decision reflects a hard-won insight about organizational change.
Project Engage is the longer-form offering: a six-month leadership development program co-designed with the Associated General Contractors of California, construction-only, launching in March 2024. It runs with in-person bookend events, virtual cohort sessions in between, and one-on-one work with ICF-certified executive coaches. It's sized for four to ten people per company, at any leadership level — not just the executive suite.
Culture Consulting is the bespoke path for organizations dealing with acute culture challenges: a firm navigating a difficult ownership transition, a team fragmented by rapid growth, a leadership group that has never articulated what it actually believes. This is the least structured of the three and the most tailored.
The throughline across all three is the same: leaders commit their time and language, not just a conference fee, and the work stays with the people inside the firm.
The generational transfer that can't wait
Beyond any individual firm's culture challenges is an industry-wide inflection point the team returns to more than once. An entire generation of construction professionals — the people who built the trades, carried the institutional knowledge, and established the project delivery systems that most firms still run on — is preparing to leave. What replaces them is not just a headcount gap.
"you can't have one or two of those you need to take all three together in tandem through this pipeline of change." The three transfers required are knowledge (how things get done and why), digital (the tools and platforms that have changed everything in the last decade), and human (the relationships, judgment calls, and culture that don't live in any software system). Miss any one of the three and the handoff is incomplete.
This is where the conversation connects back to what the next generation of workers actually wants. "what people want out of their jobs is meaning and it seems to me that this industry is incredibly well poised for that." Construction is among the most visible, consequential work anyone can do — what gets built shapes cities, communities, and daily life for decades. The firms that can articulate that story and build a culture that reflects it will be the ones people want to work for.
Procore as industry partner, not software vendor
There's an unusual business logic underneath all of this. Procore is a publicly traded construction-management software company. Its Culture Academy and Project Engage don't sell software, don't require a Procore account, and don't pitch the platform. Lisa O'Brien says the intention directly: "we do not want to be seen as a tech company actually uh we want to be seen as an industry partner."
The distinction is meaningful. A tech vendor shows up with a product to license. An industry partner shows up with a problem the whole industry shares — labor shortages, burnout, generational transition, the gap between leadership intent and daily reality — and builds infrastructure to address it. Procore's Industry Culture programs are that infrastructure, available to the industry regardless of what software a firm runs.
Procore's public-facing Industry Culture page at procore.com/industry-culture is where the programs live. The company's platform — cloud-based construction management across preconstruction, project execution, financials, quality, safety, and resource management — is at procore.com.
The measure that matters
The episode ends on the people side as the central variable in every problem the industry faces: talent attraction, retention, burnout, the coming generational exit, technology adoption. Not as a soft consideration that lives below the P&L — as the lever that determines whether a firm can actually execute on everything else.
The team's closing call to construction owners and executives is direct: if you're working in the business and not on it, the culture you have is the culture you've allowed by default. The programs exist to give that default a different direction. The work belongs to the people inside the firm, but the tools — and the community — are there.
Guests: Lisa O'Brien PCC, CPCC (Director of Industry Culture), Yasmeen Tonnos CPCC (Culture Strategist), and Craig Fischer (Industry Culture Strategist, ICF-certified executive coach) — all of Procore Technologies. Featured on Episode 71 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Programs: Procore Culture Academy and Project Engage; Project Engage co-created with the Associated General Contractors of California. Receipt: Procore's industry-partner positioning confirmed at procore.com/industry-culture.