Before joining Balfour Beatty, Adam Masterson honed his craft in the trades as a fifth-generation mason who spent the last 20 years as a masonry project manager. That experience shapes how he approaches our work and serves our clients, giving him a practical, field-informed perspective on workflows and where they can break down.

When he recently participated in a natural stone flooring quality control (QC) inspection on a project in Dallas, Texas, he didn’t just see a “black and white” checklist. He saw an opportunity to improve.

Seeing What Others Might Miss

The checklist was solid, Adam maintains, but not every item described was clear for our people and partners using it every day. Drawing on his firsthand masonry experience, Adam identified a few key refinements:

• Missing best practices such as crack isolation and water membrane applications
• Confusion between materials, such as vapor barriers, versus what’s actually used in stone flooring
• Technical language that didn’t translate easily for entry-level engineers or teams outside the trade

Adam believed he could make the checklist stronger and thereby improve the end results for our clients. So he submitted his idea into Balfour Beatty's employee engagement platform, My Contribution.

A Checklist Built for On-Site Teams

Adam’s proposed updates were grounded in real jobsite experience. He refined language, clarified technical terms and added best practices that crews rely on day to day. His goal: make the checklist broadly usable and beneficial for everyone.

Within weeks, the updated natural stone flooring QC checklist was revised and delivered via My Contribution, with additional improvements already underway.

For the field, that means:

• Clearer expectations before work starts
• Less guesswork during inspections
• Fewer issues showing up later as rework or punch lists

The Power of My Contribution

The idea came from the field, but Balfour Beatty’s My Contribution program is what helped it move.

Adam leveraged the program to share his idea, gather input and connect with others who could help refine it. That collaboration built momentum and helped his idea gain traction with other QC experts across the company. Just as importantly, it reinforced something he hadn’t expected as a newer Balfour Beatty teammate: fresh ideas are welcomed here.

“It was very encouraging to see. My Contribution is not just somewhere to put ideas, but somewhere people are actually reading them and taking them seriously,” he says.

That experience stuck.

“It makes me want to utilize My Contribution more in the future,” Adam maintains.

One Idea, Broad Impact

Adam’s idea started with one checklist, but it’s already driving broader improvement. He shared the idea on a recent National Quality Control and Safety call, hosted by Senior Vice President of National Safety and Sustainability Richard Ryan, which was received with incredibly positive feedback and thoughtful questions.

Adam is continuing to brainstorm new checklist ideas and is actively encouraging his teammates, especially those in the field, to share their ideas in My Contribution.

The best improvements to our operations don’t come from theory. They come from real experience in the field, and a platform that empowers and equips people to deliver them.