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The SiteVisit
Leadership in construction with perspective from the job site. A podcast dedicated to the Construction industry. Construction professionals, General Contractors, Sub trade Contractors, and Specialty Contractors audiences will be engaged by the discussions between the hosts and their guests on topics and stories. Hosted James Faulkner ( CEO/Founder - SiteMax Systems ).
The SiteVisit
The Buildings Show 2024 | Recording Session 2 | Actionable Strategies for a Sustainable Workforce with Agnes Watkinson and Leslie Dibling
Discover the driving forces behind change in the construction industry with our special guests Leslie Dibling and Agnes Watkinson from AMC Services. Together, they are on a mission to challenge and innovate, advocating for safer and more inclusive workplaces where everyone feels valued and protected.
We confront one of the industry's biggest hurdles: communication silos that hinder collaboration and alignment between HR and other departments. With high recruitment demands and unrealistic expectations, we explore strategies for leaders to engage actively in the recruitment process, preserving the employer brand and fostering a unified workforce. By breaking down these barriers and aligning organizational goals, companies can create a cohesive approach to business operations and recruitment, ensuring a more harmonious and effective environment.
We highlight the financial implications of employee turnover and explore solutions like robust learning and development programs to enhance retention. By addressing these issues head-on, companies can not only reduce costs but also improve overall organizational outcomes. Join us for an episode filled with insights and strategies to revolutionize the construction industry.
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So this is something new to the show here. This is a live podcast that is being recorded here today. I'm James from the Site Visit podcast brought to you by Sitemax, and we have a number of guests on this next two days and it's gonna be pretty exciting. So this will be live at the Site Visit so you can actually go on and listen to this after the fact If you have anything you want to go back at or share with your friends or colleagues, et cetera, if there's something you liked in this podcast, which I'm sure you will find out, because we're going to talk about some cool stuff. So with me here today, from AMC Services, is Leslie Dibling.
Speaker 2:That would be me.
Speaker 1:Hello, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm wonderful. Thank you for having us on this inaugural journey. The inaugural journey it on this inaugural journey, the inaugural journey.
Speaker 1:It is the inaugural journey. And also, agnes Watkinson, hello, hello, hi. So I just found this one thing out is that this is your work anniversary here today.
Speaker 2:Our friendship, our friendship anniversary.
Speaker 1:Our friendship as in like hey, how's it going? What are you doing here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we met. We were introduced through the building show from Glenn Reynolds who runs the Shout out to Glenn. He runs the showroom floor and some of the programming here and he's like Agnes, you gotta meet this girl. And then she showed up and it was just kismet. And it was just a wonderful connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we were in different places in our lives. And yes, yeah, right time, right place so here you go. No champagne though no, not, yet not yet, but you have champagne colored swag on we do, we do very.
Speaker 3:Champagne, the swag's new. Thank you everyone for noticing the swag welcome to the site.
Speaker 1:Visit podcast leadership and perspective from Construction with your host, James Faulkner, Recorded live on stage from the Buildings Show in Toronto. All right, so we're going to talk today about our subject, which is here we go the issue of hiring, retention, culture, everything that goes on in terms of how people get people, how people keep people. It's a very complicated thing in construction. There's a lot of turnover and we're all trying to make that happen a lot less. I'm going to do your bios because everyone gets one and here go you guys ready.
Speaker 1:Thank you, okay, cool, so I have to write these beautiful little notes here. Um, okay, so let's start with you, leslie, all right. All right, so you have been, uh, you got, 17 years experience in this realm. Yeah, that's a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it feels long. It is, I think it ages you a little bit longer than 17 years. It's like dog years, it is. I don't know what that would make me then. It's a multiplier for sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you have an MBA in change management yeah, wow, okay. And then a degree in poli sci I, and then a degree in poli sci.
Speaker 2:I know it's very convoluted, yeah, dangerous, I know.
Speaker 1:And then a sustainable cities specialization from Johns Hopkins. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm a I guess a perpetual student at heart. I think it's when I don't know something, I'm going to learn about it, and online courses now make it easier than ever so yeah, and then lead AP plus and NCSO certified. Yeah, national Construction Safety Officer.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, so you've seen a lot. Yeah, in that realm. I mean that's.
Speaker 3:Hence the aging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah I think that ages you.
Speaker 2:My brother was electrocuted in a workplace accident at 16. So for that our family actually went through tragedy. And for me yeah, thank you For me watching that was kind of just trying to understand, wrap my head around about how somebody goes to work and doesn't come home the same way they went, and how could we make that better. Here we are, 17 years later and just still trying to make a difference wherever we go and whatever faucet we're in, whether I started in laboring, I came all the way up into senior management and then just found that I don't actually fit into a box. Enter Agnes and we're but a year we'll be a year in in March together doing this journey.
Speaker 2:And it's kind of just been Made our own box. Yeah, we made our own box kind of just decide what and who we would like to do business with, and for us we've just found a niche. I think for us it's been understanding, being in this industry for a long time, seeing how everybody's kind of doing the same thing over and over again, with the expectation of being different, which I think is the definition of insanity. And how can we make it better? So for us, focusing on the areas that we do focus on, which I'm sure we'll get into, but for us it's that end of that. Whatever part of the industry you go into, you're finding that is those are the same.
Speaker 3:It's systemic, it's the same issues no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Incremental yeah, every day I think we could incremental. Well, congratulations and also good on you for doing that and having that other altruistic perspective and drive to make change. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we want to be in it. For me, realistically, I really want to just be a part of an industry that I would be comfortable. My son is 15 now and would this be an industry that I would want my son to be a 15 now? And would this be an industry that I would want my son to be a part of? And for a long time I told him to run away because it's a little scary.
Speaker 1:That's something we can chat about a little bit. I think we've got that coming up here, okay so, agnes, hi, hello, okay so, 14 years coming on 14, 14, 14, 13, 14.
Speaker 3:Still a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, that's a lot, of a lot of experience under the belt.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you are a workforce innovation leader.
Speaker 3:I'd like to think of that yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes, just cool. Bachelor of arts in psychology? Yes, wow, you guys are both dangerous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends on who you ask. Oh, come on.
Speaker 1:We know Next Gen Women. Yes, yeah, that's pretty cool. And so you and Leslie work together at AMC Services and you guys do attraction, hiring, onboarding, learning, development and the digital transformation which is my realm of the world, which is very complicated and pulling people kicking and screaming these days and other people are like, hey, it's not going fast enough.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we get that a lot enough. So yeah, we got lots of camps, yeah all right.
Speaker 1:So now that's done, I can get my little bible, we can go on the floor and now we can chat a little bit about um. So we've got some. Just what we typically do is we have like these um pre-conversations. I had a couple of conversations with both of you and it gives us some kind of context, like what are we going to talk about? So I have these points here. Everyone points and uh. So the first one is so how do companies achieve alignment, uh, in the strategy and communication between hr and hiring managers? So like, often, like the, what people expect um on one side isn't in alignment with what somebody else's outcome is. Their desired outcome is manifesting itself. Maybe just take us through that. Why don't I just start with you, agnes? How do you guys bridge that gap with your services and what problems do you find there?
Speaker 3:Well, first off again, this is a systemic issue that we're seeing within organizations is the disconnect between the business unit and the HR team. So the business unit is driving the operations, the productivity, they've got like their mandates, they've got their goals, etc. And then on the other side you have human resources, where we've kind of identified what we call hard HR we call hard HR.
Speaker 3:Hard HR is the payroll, the benefits, the compensation, the policies, the compliance, just really the technical components of HR. But what we're not seeing is the strategy of HR, the strategy behind people as an asset, people as the productivity, people as the revenue, people as a piece of the puzzle in the organization as a totality, as the revenue, people as a piece of the puzzle in the organization as a totality. And what does it look like to have a strategic map for the individuals that is built in alignment with the business unit? So HR is the one who understands how organizational charts work, how career pathways work, learning and development. In theory, they're the ones who understand that. What does it look like to fuse the HR department and put them in alignment with the business unit, saying this is our goals for the next three, five, ten years? How do we get our people in the same car going to the prom?
Speaker 1:How do?
Speaker 3:we get our people moving in the same direction using the HR tools that we have in place, and that's where we're seeing the disconnect. We have the business unit driving the business unit, we have HR doing hard HR compliance policies, but there's no real communication between the two departments. To say, this is where the business unit and the goals are HR. How are we going to get the people, our biggest asset, how are we going to get them there? And when we work with different organizations and leslie jump in, what we're finding is they just don't talk to each other. Yeah, it's like we call it communication silo, one of the biggest things that we see and we have to break. When we get into an organization, the first thing we have to break is the walls between departments and it's communication silos. Hands down is one of our biggest uh barriers we have to break, and what we try to do is when we go in there, we do a discovery series. So we we go into the, the business unit, and we do an audit and we're like it's like an interview, basically like this, and it's just a very casual conversation what's working, what's not working? We have those conversations with the business leaders and then we find commonalities, so some themes that keep popping up. We go into the HR, we have the same conversation and then we see the disconnect where business is like oh my God, we can't get HR to do performance evaluations, or we can't get the right people hired, or we can't. That's not on HR to do that, that's on you as a business unit owner, leader, c-suite, whatever the case is. That's on you to have those collaborative conversations within HR and say, using the tools we have or that are available out there, how are we going to close that gap? These are the problems we're having. Hr comes to the table and says well, these are the problems we're having with the business unit. I'm just going I'm actually like literally going through a scenario in my head right now how this is happening right now, and I can give you an example.
Speaker 3:We have a business unit that we're working with. They hire anywhere from 200 to 250 people a year at any given time. Obviously, it's project work. At any given time the volume might go from like we need two to three hires to we need you to turn around 40 people in two weeks. That is logistically not realistic for the HR department to do Between everything that they have to do with their compliance.
Speaker 3:Their client is federally regulated, which means there's a lot of health and safety. There's a ton of certifications that need to happen. There's a ton of certifications that need to happen. There's a ton of onboarding, and then just like like badges, like just even like getting a badge done and the background checks on that, how am I going to turn around 40 people in two weeks when I at some point will not have control over the candidate, like signing, like I can't control when a candidate signs an offer back? So, um, part of our strategy when we, when we went in there and discovered there was this massive disconnect between the two, is we're putting them in a room together and we're saying play nice, like this is your problem, this is your problem, the process does not work. So, instead of continuing with the process, what are we going to do to alleviate the pinch points so you can get your 40 people and you're not burning out the hr team because they're rotating through hundreds of resumes?
Speaker 3:that may or may not work, like you are burning out the HR team, but it's all because you're just not communicating with one another. So that's just an example of how we get in there and kind of start to get the two to align and collaborate with one another.
Speaker 1:So, leslie, maybe let me ask you on this part is so how do you get the leadership to buy into more of like a wholesale change of ideas, to know that their job is recruitment, like really it is about those leaders can't actually run an organization without great people. This is.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the same with any company and what I find in my industry is you know, I go to a lot of things in tech and and you know all the CEO books and you're a recruiter. That is your, that's your job. Your job is to do that. And I think when, when somebody as companies get bigger and they hire HR teams, they hire their first HR manager, they think they've outsourced that. Yeah, like I don't need to do this anymore. I don't need to go and press palms and meet people and have to put myself out there for possible rejection. They don't want to work for my company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what ends up happening is that in terms of your employer brand and in terms of how the organization is advertising it, a lot of the charisma gets lost kind of process where you're having an HR communication, have to try and you can talk about the company's values, you can kind of talk about all of these things that this is how we do things around here, but very rarely do I find it that you have that genuine connection with the leadership. It just seems to be in this sort of ivory tower kind of thing where you just never get to touch and feel really what they're feeling so when they walk through a job site or they come through the company this is from leadership's point of view you feel a total disconnection because they weren't actually part of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the things that I like to highlight and I say all the time when I speak is it's the division of church and state. Okay, Really like that's the analogy.
Speaker 1:I use which is which.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like again, it depends on the organization.
Speaker 1:Is the leadership the church.
Speaker 2:Oh, depends on who's making the rules, I guess.
Speaker 2:Okay For me sometimes, when you're trying to understand what's good for the church isn't always good for the state and vice versa. So, really trying to understand again how your business unit works, what is holistically going to work for your organization? It's not a one-size-fits-all. You really need to understand the goal. And again to Agnes' point to echo, that is, you really need to make sure that all your teams are aligned in the strategy of the goal. And again to Agnes's point to echo, that is, you really need to make sure that all your teams are aligned in the strategy of the business, right? So what is it that we want to be, what is the culture that we want to attract, what are the people that we want to bring into our organization and what do we want them to say about our organization? I think ultimately, you know, when you're making these decisions, you need to make sure that, yeah, you can make it as a business decision, but does it work for the people that are actually living? Agnes says living and learning it every day. Are we doing?
Speaker 2:those decisions yeah like are we making those decisions based on the people that are actually doing the work? Yeah, there's going to be financial decisions, there's going to be people decisions, all these kind of things, but you've got to get people aligned. You've got to make sure that people are doing the good work, the purposeful work, and everybody's communicating. I think that's really what it comes down to. What we see is just a breakdown in communication. I don't. We say it's easy, like talk isn't cheap, just like have conversations. Recently we had an owner tell us well, I'm the owner and I make decisions and I don't need to justify those decisions. And I said, yeah, you definitely don't need to justify those decisions, but you definitely need to communicate them. So you can't just leave people in limbo. You really have to communicate them. You can decide how you want to portray it. You can decide on that corporate communication, what that looks like, but you need to say something and decide on that corporate communication, what that looks like.
Speaker 3:but you need to say something Control the narrative. What we always find in owning the recruitment practice and right now what we're finding is people will create their own narrative if they do not have the communication.
Speaker 1:Well, they fill in the gaps. Well, they're equal. It's never positive either.
Speaker 3:I mean the amount of times that someone said oh, the reason that they're doing layoffs is because they, like me, like it doesn't go that way. So what we find is like if you are communicating to your direct workforce, if you're communicating to your management, if you're communicating to the whole organization, you are controlling the narrative as the owner and the assumptions that start to happen and you say this really, really well, it's the assumption, and then the ego who's creating the assumption, and then the ego walks that employer right out the door. They just start to think things about the organization because no one's telling them anything and they're like well, I'm just made the assumption that I'm about to get chopped on the block and I'm gone.
Speaker 3:Meanwhile you're like that was my star pm oh crazy I had no, no desire to let go of that pm. Yeah, um, there's actually a really great example, uh, with one of our clients right now, where they have this one site. So they have sites all across canada and they have this one site that has no incidents, no act.
Speaker 3:You know what I'm talking about no accidents, no, nothing, um, and it is running. It is their most productive site, uh, revenue generating the whole thing. They and the leadership is like well, these are our next star. People like the, the people who are running this site, are going to be profit sharing. We're going to envelop them in the organization and then leslie goes and has a conversation with the people on the site and they're like we're on our own planet here. I don't even think the leadership knows we exist wow, okay and it was just this wonder, like at this moment.
Speaker 3:You know, she went back to the leadership and she says you need to go fly out there and visit them and tell them that they are doing a great job, that we appreciate them, that we want to replicate what they're doing on this site and that they're part of your succession plan, because they don't even think you know they exist. So that's just an area where we're like again communication.
Speaker 1:Do you think in that particular organization that that is emblematic of the fact that when leadership wasn't involved, it was much better, because if somebody is living, if they're working in a silo and it's doing a great.
Speaker 3:I think the title of this is and this is a very personal opinion I don't think you're a leader just because it says that behind your name. To me, leadership is not a noun, it is a verb. You enact leadership, you are leadership, you drive leadership. You don't. You're in the trenches, You're in the trenches. You're not a leader because it says SVP behind your name. I just don't believe in that, because leadership to me is like I said, it's the action of being a leader. So if you can kind of just embody leadership, then I think and I know there's tons of courses and whatnot out there but again, think of it from that perspective of like how am I going to enact leadership today, tomorrow, the next day? I think that's like little. Like we're talking about incremental steps.
Speaker 3:It's just a little bit closer to breaking down the communication silos. You know, driving team collaboration together, doing all the things that leadership will do to be the stickiness, that glue to hold your team together.
Speaker 1:Do you think you've seen any differences between sizes of companies and also general contractors versus sub-trades?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a difficult question. I don't think so. Like you know, whether you got 10 people or 10,000 people, companies are messy Messy is the only really word I have for them. You know, I don't necessarily think. I think sometimes where the challenges happen is really just like the growing pains, like when we're just trying to grow it. We don't necessarily know how to grow it. A lot of times we talk about like intent versus impact. You know somebody, you know we'll talk to managers or owners and they'll say, well, that wasn't my intention, well, this was the impact, right? So the consequences of your action, yeah, really understanding that. So no, I don't necessarily think like.
Speaker 2:I think everybody idolizes, especially in this space. You idolize your big, you know your big players. You see that, um, but we see as many delays in those projects as you do anything smaller too. So, um, you know Vicky says it well, more money, more problems, you know. So I think, like it, it doesn't necessarily matter. I think you know you still have that human element when you're a bit smaller and you can still connect with the people. But I think that if that is a value of yours and the people are a value of yours, it doesn't matter what size, you can do that.
Speaker 2:I come from. You know, a large organization where the president, like he, would speak on a webinar every other week and he would just literally talk about what is going on in the company, what are they doing, what are they outside doing, what are the opportunities. He would communicate and it didn't necessarily need to be anybody specific. It was, you know, it was communication to everybody and it was, you know, a State of the Union every other week and it sounded excessive. It's 30 minutes, happened on a lunch hour, it was pre -recorded, much like this, and people could just know what was going on. You know, know where they were going to be, what they were going to be involved in. So it really doesn't take a lot of times we tell companies there's low hanging fruit and a lot of these things like they don't cost money.
Speaker 3:No, no.
Speaker 2:These things that you can do to talk to your people. I recently made a post on LinkedIn and we talk about, you know, the five love languages. Yep, five love languages. That happens in relationships. We have, like, all these different love languages that people but your people have love languages. Right, there's going to be the people that you are just going to have to pay more. That's all that's going to matter to them. Right, you're just going to pay more. But there's the people that just need to be told they're doing a good job. Affirmation that affirmation. There's that. You know you look at physical touch. Well, you can't do physical touch. Hr will have a nightmare. But you know the pat on the back, you're doing a great job. That communication checking in. You know throwing a gift card down on somebody's table and say, hey, like, why don't you take your wife out for dinner tonight, like you?
Speaker 2:know, just those little things can go a long way. And understanding your people's love language, yeah.
Speaker 3:So with larger organization. But then you have managers. You have people understand your people understand the need intent first, impact. And I think what we do see and this is something that we've come across a few times is when an organization does get bigger, if, if that leader is still like the original founder, is still there. They want the best for the organization and, like I call them the lion hearts, right, they come with like the passion and they're just like oh, I want my people to like be part of the process, I want them to have ownership, I want succession planning.
Speaker 3:But then you know you've now got this brigade of managers right underneath them, whether that's upper management, mid management and sometimes the way in which they are communicating the leadership vision down, the way in which they are communicating the leadership vision down, it doesn't translate and we call it a dirty filter. So you have the lion hurt who's trying to get all their information, all their passion and the growth and the vision they're trying to get it to the workforce. But then the mid management isn't really resonating or there's a disconnect there in terms of how that is being communicated down. So we call that the like. That's a dirty filter and we need to clean up the filter so that the leadership, who is really in trying to engage with the workforce um can can actually have their voice communicated down.
Speaker 1:Okay, the um. One thing that I have realized over time leading organizations is, you know, now my company, I've got three levels now and what I think that some people that work for us might not understand is some of the I'm not going to say it's the word anxiety, but there's definitely a nervousness of expectation of me and I have to have my life and my act together because it's kind of like a show all the time. Yeah, you're on and you see this from rock stars out there. They're, you know, they come on stage and they, you know, they do their thing and they're doing their great performance. They do the songs we all love, and backstage they're doing drugs and they've got alcohol problems, you know. So some of the expectation. I think it's very hard to be a leader and, and you know, people who are looking up to leadership might be like, oh boohoo, I know it's not so bad for you showing up when you're aston martin, but at the same time it doesn't. There's there's mental things going on there.
Speaker 2:It's yeah it's sometimes there's crazy silos there.
Speaker 1:And there's some psychosis that goes on there and what people expect. And I will say that you know, when we talk about the difference between general contractors and sub-trades I have seen this and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to make a mass generalization here but often the proprietors of sub-trade companies stay on longer as the owners and with general contracting firms you see them being sold off a lot more because it's more of a different kind of a business and those people weren't necessarily natural-born leaders. They were just great at a craft and they've become very, very good at something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and their people respect them.
Speaker 1:I know, because they can show the video of 25 years ago, when they had like project number one, so anyway. So that leads us to this next point. It always deltas, yeah, um is the delusion of laziness oh, this is.
Speaker 1:We've talked about this once yeah, so this is this generational perspective gap. So we have the older generation that thinks I'm just going to say that millennials are lazy and they don't do anything and they're wah-wah about everything and there's some kind of like a snowflake situation. There's all these different labels. You know, everyone puts on different types of people. They might say that you know the older generation and they're all misogynist, they're all blah, blah, blah. Everyone has a label for everyone.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So talk about the delusion of laziness.
Speaker 3:I can. So I've actually thought about this quite a bit. Only because I am a millennial and I have been called lazy and I don't think that is an accurate description for me. Her birthday is a week before mine, so you are technically a millennial FYI and she's not lazy. So what is that perception? Where does it come from? I think again we go right back to communication. We have a generation who has grown up vastly different than another generation, who has more, does more, sees more, and it's going to be the next, for the next generation. I could put it back onto the older generation and say are you lazy and not trying to understand what the next generation?
Speaker 3:wants Like I'm just trying to be a little confrontational right now, but as someone who's been called lazy and stereotypically for many, many years now, I would never say that of the next generation. I would just sit there and say what do I not understand about them? What do I not understand about the way they perceive work, the way that they perceive what they want from work, and how can I close the gap, be transformational in my business but have a transactional bottom line? As a business owner, I very much understand that dollars come in, dollars pay salaries. That's how things work. I need money coming in to run the business, but I need my people to do the work and I need my people engaged and motivated. I need them to stay to continue the work.
Speaker 3:So as being the generation above the next generation that I need to hire, sitting there and I mean that from an age gap perspective how am I going to better understand my next workforce that I have to hire? I have no other choice. I have to hire these people. So I kind of need to get over the fact that I'm throwing out whatever language I want to throw out to label them. I need to learn more about them, and so that's what I think it's a perception of laziness that has just been stamped, stereotyped, on these individuals and again, I would throw it back on to the generations that are saying that to be, you know, what could you do, what could you do to step up to the plate and close that gap generation's perspective up?
Speaker 3:Uh, you know, I, I think we are missing a big step uh, within that, within younger generations, and to me it's, it really comes down to resiliency.
Speaker 3:Um, I don't, I Like the lack of, or the lack of resiliency, um Like, on the younger generation, on the younger generation, um, you know, life is life is not easy, life is hard's great parts, there's bad parts, there's okay parts. Um, it's it's really getting them, uh to understand that, uh, they're going to be entering a uh area and industry where they might not have full control over the good, the bad and the ugly. Um, but how do we give them the tools, the mentality and the skill set so they can succeed through those? Because I just don't believe and this is a very personal opinion I just don't believe they're getting that skill set. But, as an employer, you could give them that skill set, you could give them the coaching, the mentorship, you could give them the wisdom that they need to see that a bad situation isn't a reason to quit. A bad situation is a reason to feel challenged and to succeed on the other end of it Right, and to grow that skill set.
Speaker 1:Well, that's Sorry.
Speaker 1:I think that so let me just put this in there and, leslie maybe chat to this. Do you think? I think there is an apathy to things that aren't interesting, interesting, so there's maybe laziness when I'm not engaged. That's more in the millennial generation. When they're engaged, they're probably even more motivated. So I think that that's what it is.
Speaker 1:If somebody's from that generation is not really doing really what they wanted to do and they're doing a job and they've fallen into something and it might be plan b or c, that's where you see this possible laziness, because it's not really what they wanted to do. Right, and there's a lot of those in construction. That's the thing is it's like we're in an industry where you can show up on a job saying, hey, can I sweep up? I don't have a job. So this bottom strata this is these aren't the people that have strata. This is. These aren't the people that have gone to technical school. These aren't the people who've gone to project management school, who. That was a desired, targeted path. Outcome this is the. I got problems, I gotta get a job and I ended up becoming good at something because I learned something and now I'm kind of ascending my way through something. It was a plan B, but now it's become my reality.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:So, like Leslie, what do you? What do you think about?
Speaker 2:like the delusion of laziness from that context, so for me, like I mean, I have a 15 year old son, so he um, I don't necessarily think again. Like I echo Agnes here and we probably are business partners for a reason. But you know the things that I say is trying to understand when you look at, like the new workforce that we have now, it's a different kind of workforce. That's reality is like that is here, that's what we're working with, and if you don't choose to empower them and bring them into your organizations, the reality is they're just going to start their own businesses. You look at social media, you look at influencers all they need is a screen, like it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:So if you don't want to include them, that's fine, but one day they're going to be your competition in some sort, like that's going to happen. And I don't necessarily think it's a laziness, I actually just think that they're more educated in like what we can do and what we can't do. Right, like you know, when I started in the industry, it was kind of like, you know, go to work, shut up and don't ask any questions, right, like that's how it was and I think that's the perception of what it should be now. But people are now going like, well, no, like that's not how this is. Like, what are you doing for me? What, what, how am I going to grow in the company?
Speaker 2:And we don't necessarily. We have, like this dangle the carrot mentality where you know, like you look at like a PM, for example, we want to be a PM, you're hired, okay, well, we'll hire them as a project coordinator, okay, so what are we going to do now? We're going to make them a junior, like a senior project quarter, and then we're going to make them a junior assistant PM, and then they're going to be a PM. And it's's like we keep dangling this carrot. But then when people are like, well, what do I need to do to get there? And they're like, well, you're just not there yet, like we hear that all the time and there's no parameters.
Speaker 2:But there's no, yeah, there's no goals and there's no parameters. So, like this issue with like they're lazy I don't think they're lazy, I just think that they're smarter and they're more than like what they should be doing, like the expectation. You know, I worked for a firm where you know they said, like we're going to pay you for 55 hours a week and I said, okay, as a site superintendent I'm like, yeah, that's not even going to happen. I mean 55 hours like in construction in the summer. Like no, that's not going to happen. So I said, okay, well, what happens to those other hours like that I do, if I'm doing 80, 90 hours a week? And they're like, well, I mean that's part of the role, but no, no, that's not part of the role.
Speaker 2:You ask questions and then it's kind of like, okay, so, okay, well, then what can we do to make an agreement? Then, if I work, okay, over 70 hours and I document and I keep track of that and I show you, can we look at like reevaluating the role? So does the role actually take 55 hours a week or does it take 80 hours a week? Cause, like, what are we advertising, right? So I think it comes back down to like understanding your business, understanding what you're hiring for, making sure that things are accurate. Um, and they're not lazy. I think they're just like they're educated.
Speaker 3:And I want to jump in on that because that's a really great prime example. So Leslie mentioned she has a 15 year old son and he's a very bright young boy who wants to be in the construction industry.
Speaker 1:I think, just just a caveat. I think that generation is different, they're just different. No, the new one the new one, like my daughter's 16. It's a homely level. Yeah, you go to their school. All the stuff going on at school, they're not buying in any but it's different, right, like, like, get a the tools that they're.
Speaker 2:You know they're used. My son is an english class. There's no substitute teacher. He gets a substitute screen. That's like they're teaching through the screen. It's.
Speaker 2:It's not something that we've ever gone through and we're there so, like the expectation to understand how they learn differently. You look at the construction industry 86 to 92 percent of construction people that are in the industry are neurodivergent. They learn differently. They are different. They are in construction for a reason, whether they're tactical learners, they they're just different, right, and they have to be in a space where they can't be on a screen and they don't. They learn differently, right, so they need instructions. What is their love language?
Speaker 2:And I think it's really not necessarily laziness, I think they just work differently, like for me. People say, oh well, you're not like on your computer, yeah, but I don't get on my computer right away in the morning, but I'll work till 11 o'clock at night, so I have different hours. Emily that works for us, she's a night owl and she's, you know, 22, 23 years old and she likes to stay up Like I'm in bed at nine o'clock, like that's my thing, right, and that's the generation she's like well, I like to work at that hour. Well, like then, who are we to say what time you just get the work done, right, like? I think for us it's like focus on the work and not necessarily who's doing it right.
Speaker 3:Like, just happy necessarily who's doing it right like just yeah, happy with it, and I just wanted to quickly go back to that. So in in leslie having, because I think this this is a great capture of that point she was making. So leslie has a son who's 15 and she had mentioned to him the long hours that she was working and his retort back at 15 years old was well, that's against, like ontario work legislation. Yeah at 15.
Speaker 2:He knew that her contract was bogus yeah, he was saying like I you know I worked in uh, civil infrastructure, worked on paving, and we do long shifts and I you know you'd work 16, 17 hours. If it's late, like then you're on the highway, you're paving, those trucks are coming, like you're gonna keep working, you're not gonna go. Hey, like I put in this time, like it's overtime and it's time and a half, or if you're a salaried employee, like you're not going to leave and and I'd say, buddy, like I got to get back up, I got to be back on site for 5, 30 and he's like but that's illegal yeah, do that.
Speaker 3:So like and that's what I'm saying so they're educated. They're educated like it's just a different workforce that is not really willing to put up with what is the traditional construction standards. They're just not willing to put up with it. So you, as the employer, need to find the gap or need to bridge the gap. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got three generations trying to level set this whole thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, it's pretty difficult to do. So this is the last point, because we're coming up to 45 minutes. I'm going to be here shortly. The one question is that I have for you guys is how do you and here's the term level set again expectations when cost of living is so high, like people are just it's like a hamster wheel that don't feel like they're going to get anywhere. And this is the part that I have, I mean, been talking about this on the podcast. You guys get a chance to listen to the site visit.
Speaker 1:We talk about this quite a lot is that every single program that goes into making construction better increases the amount of dollars everything costs per square foot. Yeah, every time. So we might suddenly have flushing toilets everywhere, but then somebody couldn't afford to rent that place. Yeah, and it sounds terrible because we want work life to be better and construction safety has gotten better, as you, as you said you know, leslie, super important thing for you, and it's how do we do things? I've asked many guests this how do we do free things to make things better that don't cost anything? It's's an attitude change and I think that's what you're doing with your organization. And if anybody is listening to this podcast AMC services. You guys should at least give you guys a call. But how do you?
Speaker 1:think that we can attack that gap of cost of living so high and that just keeps doing this. When wages go up, it just becomes more expensive.
Speaker 3:Well, I think one of the areas that we target is obviously retention and the ability to hold on to your people.
Speaker 3:And there are mathematical HR equations.
Speaker 3:They're quite basic and we have a workshop and then I've got another presentation where we're going to be going over a real life scenario where we had a turnover rate of 33% within our labor force and we did the math on that and for that specific client, with 250 people in their labor force and 33% loss per year on average, we were like well, you're losing $7.1 million, and that was a conservative estimate because when we got to site and spoke with the field staff it was actually closer to about 50 to 60% turnover, which is massive.
Speaker 3:So if you double that number 33 to 60, we were closer actually to about $14 million that we were losing just in the turnover cost, and that's more of like an approximate, targeted number. I can guarantee you, for engagement of your staff, a learning and development program, a comprehensive onboarding program, a couple of culture building, team building, some leadership building, will not cost you $14 million. Like it's just, no one is putting the turnover cost, not that no one, and I'm saying that generally speaking. What I don't see is no one is calculating the turnover cost within their organization and putting that on their pno and saying we need to address that situation.
Speaker 3:They just I don't even know where that money goes. I don't know if it just goes into salaries, but if you're burning through people and that's costing you, you know, like, for this particular person, this, this real life scenario seven to potentially 14 million, which is a huge variance. Um, because we're not able to capture, we're not able to live capture, um the the turnover rate at this time. We're currently putting systems in place to do that um, that that's I mean to put a learning and development program with your current existing hr team will probably cost you I, I don't know $100,000 to $200,000, maybe that's like excessive, excessive, and it obviously depends on the size of your organization To put in a couple of employee spotlight and awards and recognitions. That could be $0 if you get creative with that.
Speaker 3:For sure get creative with that for sure. Um, so I I think that it's just recognizing where the costs in your organization are that you might not be seeing and getting ahead of that, so you don't burn through it so you know, for someone who is running the balance sheet at the company, it's always like when you see leakage like that and you're like, oh my god, how did?
Speaker 1:how do we like, how do we? I didn't realize that storm was coming. And I didn't realize that storm was coming and I didn't realize how much, how we could have been more efficient. Yeah, but typically you don't. You don't have the foresight to be like, okay, well, next year let's put two hundred thousand dollars towards xyz.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it's always just do whatever it takes band-aids yeah, they do band-aids and and, to your point of like, the cost of living and whatnot. We read this book recently. The Case for Good Jobs Highly recommend this book. It was incredible. I could not, for the life of me, pronounce the author's name, but she's a researcher out of the States and now runs the Good Jobs Institute.
Speaker 3:And what they've just determined is if you work on your organization from a holistic perspective in terms of your people strategies, what they were noticing, especially in high turnover roles like they did a lot in retail, they did a lot in the manufacturing sector was the organizations were benchmarking against their competitors. Great, so you're thinking, okay, well, I'm like in line with my competitor's salaries, et cetera, except the salaries across the entire benchmark were below the cost of living. So you're benchmarking mediocre. And I think you have to make the decision if you want to hold on to your people. Do I want to be better than mediocre, or am I just going to continue benchmarking my competitors and we're all going through the same crap? Right, we're all going through this. So you're like I want to be a little bit better, but then that means your retention rates, especially when it comes to salaries and cost of living. My salaries yes, my salaries will increase, but my retention is going to go down, and then you can start doing the math on that. What does that look like? How much can I afford knowing that I'm not going to be spending 14 million on my turnover or whatever? The case is?
Speaker 3:And another area that could be potentially pertinent because they didn't really go into the construction sector, but I do see some overlap between manufacturing is when individuals do not have a stable work in terms of either the cost of living or in terms of the scheduling, or in terms of just like we do layoffs and whatnot in our industry. They have to take on two to three jobs. So you have now an individual that you're calling lazy because they're not showing up for work. What you might not know and once you get to know your staff a little bit better is that person probably isn't lazy at all. They probably have two to three jobs that they're running around and trying to make the decision on what job they're going to go to that day, because they need to make the rent they need to put the food on their table.
Speaker 3:So that's where we seem to have lost in HR and in this industry, and maybe we never had it, I don't know. I've only been around for 14 years. I think we seem to have lost the empathy. Yeah, we have only been around for 14 years. Um, I think we seem to have lost the empathy. Yeah, we haven't. Um, connecting with the people and what they need. Uh, there's there's a lot definite lack of empathy and compassion, um, for what these people are going through and what they need and what support they need. They're not going to get it from and I know we're talking about politics I don't think we're going to get it from government. So what is the industry going to do to help these individuals feel stable in their position, so they feel like they can stay for longer, so they can get the salaries they need, to put a roof over their head and food over the table?
Speaker 1:yeah, I'm totally with you. I mean on the, on the next podcast we have coming up, we're talking about mental health and construction yeah, with john lucani, that's gonna be. If you guys want to come back for that one, that's gonna be a spicy one because we got lots to talk about. Yeah, okay, well, this, we are now at 45 minutes. This has been awesome, agnes. Thank you very much, leslie. Thank you very much everybody around of applause for our guests. Thank you very much thank you okay, that was awesome.
Speaker 1:You guys and uh, so they can get to. You guys are on linkedin, obviously, and then amc services. What's the url?
Speaker 3:um, so it's just amc-servicesca. You can reach us there um. We're very active on linkedin um, so agnes watkinson, leslie dibling um. And then we also have a corporate amc linkedin page as well and everything is just on there. You will get bombarded with resources, information, our workshops, our presentations, we we pretty much open source as much as possible for the industry to start to get educated on some innovative practices well, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for joining. My name is james falcon. I'm the host of the site.
Speaker 3:Visit podcast and, um yeah have a listen to our episodes.
Speaker 1:We got 150 of them on. We talk about all sorts of things, so love it.
Speaker 3:Thank you okay you're welcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have a great show, you guys. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom slash the site visit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the site visit podcast and Sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.