Speaker 2 (00:08.984)
Hello and welcome to the management under construction podcast. I'm Brad Wyand.
And I'm Dee Davis.
And today our topic is mental health in the construction industry. Unfortunately, mental health is a huge concern. I'll let Dee introduce our topic. Dee, do want to kick us off with some statistics and some facts?
absolutely will. My background, I've been in construction for almost 30 years and mental health has been an escalating issue in the industry. At one point in my career, I went back to school for psychology and because we work with people and that's it's a weird combination of engineering and psychology that I have in my background, but working with people is really, really important.
particularly when it comes to recognizing the signs of stress and distress in people. The suicide rates in our industry are disproportionately high. And I was alarmed when I looked the statistics up on the CDC website. They are the highest of all industries. That didn't used to be true. 53.2 suicides per 100,000 workers, which is four times the national average and five times the rate of
Speaker 1 (01:27.582)
all other construction fatalities combined.
some pretty awful, pretty damning statistics and facts there, unfortunately. My place I come to this subject from is having seen people working under extremely stressful conditions for my entire career, shorter than these, obviously by a lot. I've only been in this business for eight years, but living and working in that kind of environment where people are constantly at that fever pitch of energy. You know, I've had my own bouts with anxiety attacks related to do stress that had to do with work.
But since coming to get my MBA, I've had a respite from that pace of life in some ways. And I've been really trying to get mental health awareness about what's going on in construction out there. do a charity fundraiser every year where I do the men's mental health awareness, Movember thing, where you grow out your facial hair. What little I can grow out, very, very little. And I do volunteer work for people to hang portraits or paint walls or whatever they need done around the house, fixed bicycles, that kind of thing.
have those conversations about what it means to be somebody working one of those industries where unfortunately the craft people that deserve the most accolade and the most respect for getting the work done in the field because they're putting their bodies in harm's way either by constant stress injuries where after 30 years bones and backs give out or joints or the kind of immediate harm of falling off a ladder and hurting yourself seriously. It's those stresses but also
the emotional stress of having to live up to these scheduled pressures of these toxic environments in some circumstances, difficult ways of communicating with people tend to develop in the construction business. It's a really fraught environment. can be a hard place to work and it doesn't have to be. So I think today we're trying to talk about why the construction industry is where it is, what's impacting the culture, the way that it's gotten to this point and what it takes.
Speaker 2 (03:30.37)
to be here, what kinds of people end up being in the construction industry, what kind of intellects are attracted to this kind of work, and then what people are doing about it to try to solve that problem. And some tips that we've got, how we can implement practices in our lives to make the construction industry better for everybody who works in it, not just a place mentally, but also better in terms of the relationships we hold with our coworkers, in terms of the professional conduct that we've engaged in.
It is a high stress environment and it's nonstop. According to the CDC, drug and alcohol abuse is far more prevalent in this industry than it is in a lot of other industries. And I can tell you when I first started in the industry, if you didn't have at least three DUIs under your belt, it was like, was normal. That was normal when I started in the industry. It was like, how many DUIs do you have? Eventually those people stop.
drinking. actually had a colleague that at a certain point his drinking got so bad that the doctor sat him down and told him, if you want to see your son grow up, you must stop drinking. He detox went through the whole thing and dried out and started living his life in a different way. But opioids, cocaine and marijuana are huge in our industry. And this industry was not untouched by the opioid epidemic that continues to this day.
people die.
of overdoses like a plane full of people a day die of opioid overdose.
Speaker 2 (05:07.072)
It's just a tragic thing. have a buddy who works in the attorney general's office for the opioid settlement fund disbursement and just the stories he hears from that business. It's tough. It's so tough. I was going to say, what are all those drugs? Those drugs are depressants or things that mellow you out, things that bring you down. People are self-medicating to get back down to a normal level from that highest stress of whatever they're carrying home from work because they don't know how to handle it because it's so hard.
to come down from the anxiety and the energy of that job site. mean, it's an exciting place to be on its best day. It can be thrilling when, you know, a pressure test goes right or when you're up to the wire on something and something really exciting happens and you feel that rush of excitement, but it can also be, my gosh, everything's going wrong all at once every day. And you just need to come down from the level of stress and overworked sense that that feels.
Yeah, we don't do a great job of celebrating our successes in the industry. We have a hundred successes and a hundred failures every day and we fail to celebrate our successes very well. They're so momentary because it's like, yeah, we hit that milestone. That's great. The next thing is right behind it. And there's, we don't get an opportunity for downtime or for gaps or for a breath.
in between these things that happen. And unfortunately, opioids and marijuana and alcohol, some of those things happen because people are dealing with physical injuries and it starts off as a back injury or a knee or a hip injury or something like that. Then next thing you know, that's the norm. They're using that in a different way. And it's a double threat in our industry because if you come to work with that stuff in your system,
you can have another accident, you can make a mistake. I've been in buildings where somebody accidentally cut a gas line. They were young and experienced, who knows? I don't know what the deal was. All I know is I was evacuating an occupied building. I've run out of more than one building in my career because something went wrong. It's dangerous. What we do is dangerous. And if you're in the field,
Speaker 1 (07:31.8)
physically working in a trade, it's even more dangerous. And being impaired in that scenario is a huge concern.
A lot of action movie climaxes happen on construction sites for a reason, because there are lots of things that explode, lots of things that are cinematically fun to
Yes, my husband actually ran out of a building that exploded at one point in his career. Yeah, yeah, that was that was frightening. I've run out of a few different buildings at different times for different reasons because something was going wrong. I feel like considering I've spent only a small percentage of my career actually working with tools in the field and most of it doing project engineer, project management kind of stuff, I've had an
lot of close calls in my career. It's dangerous what we do and you can't afford to be impaired and you can't afford to put any more stress on people than they're already going on because there's all the work stress. And then by the way, these people have lives outside of work that can be stressful. Yeah. There's the normal human stress level.
And the statistics are showing that people earlier in their careers have higher rates of suicide than people later in their career. But by no means is that become a low percentage later in your career. It's less, but it's still very, very high. Opioids and alcohol have been linked to 20 % of suicides in the United States. That's a lot.
Speaker 2 (09:10.382)
Wow.
It's unacceptably high in our industry. We just recorded the speed to market episode where we talked about demanding schedules at length. That's a significant contributing factor in our industry is the demanding schedules, which turn into lots and lots of overtime, lots of long work hours, study after study.
have been done to show how unproductive doing overtime and extended work hours are for any length of time. Your productivity starts dropping, your return on your dollar spent starts dropping dramatically after a fairly short period of time. But trying to convince people sometimes that doing more than an occasional Saturday or people want to do these speed to market projects, these crazy schedules.
You have to work every Saturday. They want you to work Sunday. They want you to work tens or 12. It's a lot combined with long commutes, whether you live a long distance from the job site that you're working at, or you're sitting in traffic. Maybe the space isn't really that long, but you're sitting in traffic for long periods of time. That's stressful too. Construction people like to be early. They don't like to be late.
You
Speaker 1 (10:29.486)
Every job I've ever had, there's always that handful of, and I'm just going to say guys, cause it's mostly men, right? And there's handful of guys that are there an hour early every day because they're up. They just want to get to work. don't, they want to get started. They want to get going. We're, we're natural pushers in this industry. For those of us that travel for work, I travel extensively. And many of my colleagues do too. Separation from family. If you're a traveler.
You're away from your kids, you're away from your spouse, you're away from your life, your home. That is fun to an extent. And then after a while, it can be an added stressor. It can be a stress on a marriage. It can be a stress on relationships with your family. So there's all of that, but wait, there's more. How about it's never enough?
You
Speaker 1 (11:24.908)
No matter how fast we go, no matter how hard we work, there's always somebody that's asking for more.
The GC is asking for more because the owner's asking for more because their bosses are asking for more faster, faster, faster. It's never enough. We're so used to the constantly changing environment and construction. I don't think we think about it that much. In fact, we crave it to some extent. I know my personal limit on a job site is about 18 months. After 18 months, I'm sick of y'all. I'm sick of the job. I just want to be done. I want to move on to the next thing.
I'm sick of this and I'm sick of you!
I love you, but I gotta go. everybody's threshold is different. My career has been long, big jobs, 18 months to five years on a project. Other people have different backgrounds where they might be a few months or less than a year on a job. And so everybody's threshold is different, but that means our environment is constantly changing. The people we're working with are different all the time.
Looking at the bigger picture, in the industry, new technology is emerging constantly, constantly, and we're expected to learn it.
Speaker 2 (12:53.006)
I think that's a very apt observation that construction people are the kind of people that seek out that change. One of the privileges of business school has been I've been able to surround myself with people who have different backgrounds. And one of the first classes that anybody in a business program takes is introduction to microeconomics. And one of the rules in microeconomics is that you get diminishing marginal returns on marginal efforts. Like we were talking earlier, that 11th, 12th, 13th hour you're asking someone to work.
They're not going to be as productive as they were in that first, second, third hour. It was the funniest thing. Somebody in class was like, well, why is that a law? You know, if I sit at my desk at Deloitte as a consultant and just keep banging out this slide deck, I could probably get the same amount done in that hour as the next. I just jumped out of my chair. was like, come on, are you kidding? It's just, that's such a controlled environment. You're sitting in your glass tower and your air conditioned space and your gorgeous suit. This is not the same as most people's.
definition of labor, what it comes to mean to put marginal efforts in the day. And we wouldn't have any other way. We wouldn't want it to be the same thing every day. don't, we have not sought out that career of being in a glass tower behind a desk for 12, 15 hours a day, because we want an environment that's constantly changing. And it's exciting that that material store over there, well, we used all that. And now we're going to put landscaping in there. You that you could walk in and out of this part of the building yesterday, but
Today we're putting up the wall there and you can't do it. It's all of sudden drywall. sure, we're going to make this more secure this router on the job site. But the job's getting done. I can see it every day. That's an engaging thing. too much change, too much to the point where you're pushing people to their red line every day, it's just not productive after a while. The way you can burn people out in this business, it's astronomical.
always sad when drywall goes up because there's something about walking through walls. It's like who else gets to do that? I just I don't know why but I love the phase where all the framing is up and I can just go from point A to point B walk through the walls to get to where I want to go when the drywall starts going up I'm like now I got to figure out how the building actually works. What is it gonna function later? I don't know it makes me feel magical. I also really really like
Speaker 1 (15:15.404)
motion sensor lights. I just feel powerful when I walk in a room that's dark and boom, the lights are on. Makes me feel like a rock star or something.
I have arrived, herald my arrival with the turn of my rear lights as I deserve for my importance in the world.
So all this new technology that has emerged over the years, Bluebeam, mean, that has changed the industry in ways that I can't even describe. I got in the industry when everything was in paper. There were just oceans of paper in your trailer, in your office, in wherever you're working, just oceans of paper.
And I can review specifications, plans, details, everything post RFIs. I had to take the red pencil and physically post RFIs with tape and a red pencil. That's how old I am. And it's okay. I don't really miss having to do that, but it forced you to pay attention. When people are physically coming in your trailer and looking for the posted RFIs and flipping through paper, it changed the way that we
touch and feel the industry and it left a lot of people behind. I worked with a project manager at one point. This was probably 15 years ago. And I'd say he was maybe 65, 70, very seasoned project manager. I just loved Uncle Dick. Everybody called him Uncle Dick. He was just the nicest, funniest man. I love sitting next to him in the PM meetings because he would just crack little jokes the whole time. I just love this man.
Speaker 2 (16:37.688)
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:57.336)
but he could not do the technology part. And I shouldn't say he couldn't, he didn't, he just said, I'm not doing that. And so in order to keep his expertise and his skills and keep him working, we had to assign a junior project manager or project engineer to him that could do all the computer things. So some of the technology leaps for people who are either unwilling or unable to do it, it leaves them behind.
But I am immersed in technology all day and I still am like, wow, there's an app for that? We can do that now? That is amazing. And my kids, of course, you're like, mom, you're so behind. And I'm like, am I? How could I be behind when I'm this immersed in technology all day, every day?
It's not just the change, it's the rate of change. If you go for paradigm shifts as a defining trait of what's happening with things like Bluebeam, you might say that the paradigm shift before that was the fax machine, the ability to get a 2D drawing from one place to the other instantaneously. I remember a good mentor of mine talking about we were waiting at the big fax machine for the drawings to come in and then we would give everybody around a 10 person table, know, one tenth of the document.
and they go through it and make their red lines and call these people. And that's the way that bidding worked. And now it's like, what are you talking about? That's not the way it works anymore. But in two years, it could be that we're all working on 3D designs and that somebody opens a computer at a drywall company and the design document, the Revit model or whatever it is, tells them, OK, it's this many feet of drywall, it's this many sheets, and it's this many linear feet of studs.
you need to figure out how much labor to put to this, but we think it's probably within this many hours or that many hours. The pace of the change is increasing and the pace that the work is expected to occur at is increasing, but we're seeing the opposite happen. We're seeing that productivity and construction has remained flat while productivity and manufacturing and other kinds of industrialized professions has
Speaker 2 (19:10.944)
increased commensurately with that technological adaptation. We haven't figured out in the construction business how to take those paradigm shifts in technology and turn them into huge production gains for a lot of reasons. But I think one of them is that we're just not dealing with the problem that's happening as we're asking people to do this work that much faster. Like we said in the last podcast, going too fast to go slow later. And then people are
driving themselves crazy over it. mean, truly out of their minds, trying to meet these deadlines that are unrealistic, trying to use this technology that they weren't trained on because there was no time to train. You don't have time to learn the next thing if you don't make time to learn how to deal with these mental health challenges we're seeing. If you don't make time to learn how to communicate with people and tell them, that's an unrealistic expectation for this, that, and the other reason, to make a compelling argument to say, we need to do this this way.
then we're going to get to the same problems we have. How many of us listening to this podcast have heard the groans of everyone in the trailer when they say, well, we got a training thing coming up next week. Training. We don't want to do training. sounds. Learn. What are you talking about? didn't get into this business to learn. learned we came here to do. Give me a hammer. Let me go out there. It's a, it's its own little, self inflicting wound.
Learn anything new.
Speaker 1 (20:37.28)
not just the new technology, but even in the years that I've been in the industry, I've seen the burden that gets put on the field that was not present 20 years ago for safety, training, documentation, meetings, reports that have to be written and filed and filled out. It's timekeeping. And then if there's an incident of any kind.
everything stops, you're going to focus over on this and then we got to do this investigation. Demands for management on financial reporting and forecasting and explaining why I've spent an incredible amount of time on projects explaining why something didn't happen the way we expected. Why did we not finish that activity the way we projected we were going to? Why did we not?
finish on schedule? Why did we not finish this on budget? Why did this go over? Why, why, why, why? Everybody wants to know why. So we have to stop what we're doing. There's all those management demands. And then regulations. mean, the OSHA regulations alone, and that's like the one that pops to the top of my head, have changed substantially in the last 20 years. Not that that's a bad thing. It's just things that put one more burden on us, one more thing that we got to think about, one more additional stress.
one more box to check, one more task to complete. And no one's going to say that we don't want a safe job site. We absolutely want people to go home safely. We want to make sure that we're doing the job of keeping people safe while we're doing their jobs. But the onus of proving that you did that safely can be pretty high in terms of the time demand. I think of it this way. I'd love to ask you this question, How has
the advent of technology changed the way that we communicate in the construction business. Because I can imagine a world where you have an OAC meeting and then everybody goes out and walks the job site afterwards because that's the only way to see what's going on in real time. But we're talking pre-digital cameras, pre-facts. And then I say, OK, so this is going on here, that's going on there. I get it. OK. And now we're in this world of, well, I should be able to just pick up the phone and make somebody go take a picture.
Speaker 2 (22:56.108)
of what's going on out there for me right now. I don't want to drive a half hour from my office to the job site because I've got a million emails to respond to. Has there been a big shift in the quality of the communication over your career, do you think, as a result of the speed at which we hope to communicate using technology?
Yes, there absolutely has been a shift and not for the better. We have more ways of communicating now than we've ever had before and we communicate less.
Speaker 1 (23:30.518)
can't even begin to tell you how frustrating it is for somebody who's done it the old way to see the new ways be so ineffective with communication. We've taught our younger generations that you don't have to talk to people anymore. I have had a project engineer that I'm training, that I'm working with, sitting with me and I'll say, hey, what's going on with da da da.
And they say, well, I sent an email to so and so, but I haven't heard back yet. And I can see so and so from here. They're sitting right there. And I said, did you go over there and talk to them? no. OK. Get up out of your desk and go talk to the person. They're sitting right there. I'm not saying that I've never sent an email to somebody across the room or a text message or an instant message or whatever we're doing.
I absolutely have done that many times. It's fine if it works, if the person's responsive. I really love using instant messaging with my team and anybody else who's on teams whose company allows me to do that with them.
Because a lot of times I can get answers really fast. can get stuff done really quickly that way. Instead of picking up the phone and making the phone call, hoping the answer, they can be in a meeting and be like, boom, boom, and answer my question real quick. But if you send the message and then you check it off your mental list to get it into somebody else's court so that it's now in their court, and then you're waiting and you're waiting.
And they may or may not be checking their email regularly. Maybe they're distracted. Maybe you're not a priority. Maybe they're one of those people that never answers emails or instant messages or whatever it is, because those people exist.
Speaker 2 (25:23.658)
What are you talking about? are no people in construction I know that don't like email. That's crazy. There aren't any superintendents out there who only pick up the phone and don't respond to email. That's crazy.
I have worked for owners that refuse to respond to emails. They have told me that they will just go in and delete them all. And if it's really important, the person will come and talk to me. I've had people say that to me and I'm like, wow, okay. What do you do with that? Having the availability of face-to-face is a benefit when you have it, you don't always have it. So back in the day, before we had all this technology available to us,
Often architects, engineers, whoever, everybody would come and we'd all be in a room together. And you're right. That's exactly what we do. We would finish the meeting. We go walk the job center. Maybe we'd walk the job and then we'd have the meeting, something like that. That's great if you're local. And if you can drive 20 or 30 minutes to the job site or whatever, sometimes they'd call in. I worked with designers that I never met back in the day. It was rare, but it happened.
They would be out of town, out of state. Maybe they'd only have two or three trips to the job site in their budget. And maybe I would, maybe I would never meet them. But I've had fantastic communication with remote teams back then and now. The fastest response I've ever had to an RFI. I loved working with this engineer. I was working down in San Diego. He was up in LA.
Distance-wise, not that far, but traffic-wise, pretty far. Takes a long time to get to the job site. So he would stay remote most of the time, and this was way before all the teams and all that. I would get an RFI, I'd send it to him, and he would respond to it via email. I got one back in 38 seconds.
Speaker 2 (27:15.054)
Yeah! my gosh, that's a record, come on!
That's a record. That's my record. I talked to him on the phone. He knew it was coming. He knew what the question was. OK, OK. He was prepped. If you can work it so that you're getting turnarounds in very short periods of time, that stuff is fantastic. So the pace of construction has gotten faster. Our technology has gotten more extreme. But it's constantly changing.
No two projects are the same. I have quite literally built the same building for the same owner multiple times. It's still not the same. It's not the same because the site's not the same. It's not the same because the team's not the same. It's not the same because some ideas of how we wanted to do some things were different. If I have one more owner that wants to cut and paste or copy paste another project, I think I'm going to scream because I've done it several times and I'm here to tell you it's not faster.
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (28:17.07)
There's an expectation that if you do the same building more than once, it's going to be faster. It's really not. But we never get downtime in this industry. I think that's one of the big issues and something I've been able to manage better as a consultant than as an employee of a contracting company. I remember going to my boss, one of the last contracting companies that I worked for, I said, you know what?
I've done like three of these huge high stress, high pressure jobs in a row and I need to break. I want to take four to six weeks off. And the answer was, you can't do that.
Right, haha, very funny. Okay, here's the next high stress project. Go back to it.
You can't do that. Yes, I can. First of all, and I will. And if you don't let me, then I'll quit, which is what ultimately ended up happening. We don't get any downtime as we're finishing up one job. We, our resumes are out on 10 other jobs, which we might get some, none, or all of those. We don't know. Right. And we're being pulled into the next job as we're finishing up this job, the hardest part of a job.
is the first 10 % and the last 10%. So you're finishing up this last 10 % and you're working on the first 10 % of another job.
Speaker 2 (29:43.084)
the two hardest parts.
Good luck with that. Very rarely do we get any kind of a break, and if it is, it is so tiny because we are job costed. That's how it works in this industry. All of your time, project manager, project engineer, field laborer, you're either out of work if you're a field laborer, they'll send you back to the hall or lay you off or whatever. If you're a PMPE, your job costed, they're not going to carry you on overhead. That's not going to happen.
So we don't get that downtime. And if you're on a small job, it's kind of gets even worse because you're working out of your truck. I remember when my husband would be on small jobs, he'd take a can opener to work because he'd be eating stuff out of a can. Cause there's nowhere to heat up your food. You know, it's either you eat off the truck if there is a truck, which is terrible food. You're kind of adding insult to injury on top of everything else.
You have no way to heat up your food. You're eating disgusting, awful food off of a food truck or whatever you can get out of a can. It's cold. It's, ugh.
It's all stressful in its own way. And it's mental stress, it's emotional stress. And this is just work. This has got nothing to do with your kid being sick. Maybe you're having difficulties in your relationships. Maybe you have family stress with sick family members, aging parents, like whatever you got going on in your life. Johnny's getting in trouble at school. What all those stressors outside of.
Speaker 1 (31:22.39)
If you're a single parent, which so many people are these days, you're trying to manage a construction career, having to be at work at five or six o'clock in the morning and juggle kids by yourself. That was super fun. Part of my life. I'm trying to find somebody to come and take care of your kids at five o'clock in the morning is a real treat. So it's a high stress life.
It's day after day, month after month, year after year with very few breaks. So prolonged stress contributes alcohol and drug abuse and increased overall health risks. Heart attacks. Did you know that most heart attacks happen between eight and nine o'clock on Monday morning when people start work?
you know, before coming to the construction, I would have been surprised by that. now seeing, thinking about the anxiety attacks I've had on that time on a Monday morning, yeah, that sounds pretty fair.
Second most common, Sunday night.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:26.156)
between eight and 10 PM because people start thinking about work. You start getting in work mode and unfortunately the suicide statistics support all of this. People commit suicide at work a lot of times. It happened at a company I was working for. It wasn't my job site. It was a different branch of the company that I was working for. But one of the project managers drove to work.
in his company truck and ended his life at the job site. That was devastating to me as a young project manager. I was probably my early thirties when that happened. And this gentleman was maybe in his late forties. I don't know the story. I don't know how much of that was work related, how much of that was personal related. was probably some combination thereof, but that person was making a statement about what it is to be in this industry.
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (33:25.814)
And how hard see look at that. I'm in my 50s. This thing happened 20 years ago and this is still how I feel about it.
I get you. I totally get you.
It was devastating and it caused a lot of us to step back and say, this really what I want to do for a living?
And ultimately I chose to stay. even after all the near misses and all the things, I still chose to stay and I don't regret it. But I work with a lot of people who after a death, a suicide, a accident on a job site have chosen another path.
And I think that's maybe why some of these statistics are tilted towards the people that are in the first 10 or 15 years of their career. Because you have to make a lot of decisions and you have to adapt to this high stress environment and decide whether or not it's for you.
Speaker 2 (34:26.542)
I think of the people that I know who I started my career in construction with, at least half of them are no longer in the business. People have decided to go back and study something else and go do something else for a living, or I'm going to go have a family, or I'm going to go do something that takes me away from the job site, even if they stay in the construction industry, because it can be a very, very taxing place to be. Like you're talking about DUIs at the beginning, know, when I was still coming onto the
field like if somebody wasn't twice divorced, it's like how they're just on their wings around there. It's taxing in all forms and people describe people who are married to their jobs, know, that they were married to the job they didn't have room in their life for everything else that life entails. That's such a shame, but it can be so all-enveloping and it's only becoming more so. Going back to the conversation we were having earlier about all these different methods of communication that
quality of communication going down and the time for training not being available. Let's start talking about some of solutions because I think that's an important thing to start to be able to do with all these challenges. One of the things that I was exposed to in college that I was really thankful for was the idea of learning to use different communication styles and mediums for different tasks. Like email is for things that aren't urgent, not urgent, not complicated.
types of things like, do you want this color to be blue or green on these walls to your architect? That's the emails to respond to. That's the kind of thing you should be communicating email. When you call somebody on the phone, what kind of conversation are you trying to have with them there? What's the level of urgency? What's the level of detail that you're going to convey over the phone? That's probably more high on urgency, but maybe not as high on detail because it's a, you know, audio only.
You can't attach a photo, you can't do those kinds of things. What about the on-site conversation where you're like, hey, you just gotta come out and look at this with me and we gotta sit here and be in person and solve it. That's when there's high emotions involved, because you want to read the emotional expressions on somebody else's face. You want them to read the emotions on your face, and there's an emotional component to it. That's a very good way to contextualize what it means to have either an in-person face-to-face conversation with somebody or a video call, which is
Speaker 2 (36:50.158)
as a poor substitute, but still better. And that's the kind of thing we can get into really complex things and nuances that you can't get into an email. Just approaching those different reasons to communicate with somebody over different mediums that way was a big jump for me. What lessons have you learned about different ways of communicating positively in the construction business?
Well, developing a lot of good rapport and good relationships don't just have the business conversations. You're going to eventually have hard conversations on every job. There's no way you're going to avoid that. There's no sunshines and rainbows. You'll have those moments, but you're also going to have the hard moments where somebody's made a mistake. They screwed up. You misinterpreted something. You missed something.
You're going to have to give somebody bad news. You're not going to be ready. Something's going to happen. So having those relationships with people developed and in a lot of it is this communication style that you're talking about. Appropriate communications. Trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. It's hard sometimes because we humans we like to jump to conclusion sometimes and that's not the best thing, but asking people.
So what did you do this weekend? A lot of people are like, I don't really care what you did this weekend. Okay, but you need to communicate with people on a level that isn't just straight business. You need to get to know people on a personal level. You need to joke around a little bit. You need to develop a relationship. You don't have to be best friends. You don't have to spend time together on the weekends. You don't have to develop it.
to that extent unless that's what you want to do. When I have to give bad news to a client, having developed that trust, I know something about their personal life. They know something about my personal life. We've talked about these different things. I guess for lack of a better term, it humanizes the conversation and gets people to take the emotion.
Speaker 1 (39:08.128)
and the assumptions out. I wanted to talk a little bit about the personality types that we have in the industry, because this plays into this conversation and how do you communicate with people? If anybody's taken disc tests or any of those kinds of personality tests, and if you haven't, I highly recommend it. They're fascinating little tools. It's extraordinary how
You can answer a few questions and the stuff is so accurate, but not only does it tell you about who you are and what kind of communicator you are, but it tells you how to communicate better with other people. So I'm a type A. I'm a big fat type A personality, which in a distest is a high D. I am very to the point, very direct, very business oriented, get to the point.
Is how I conduct business and the more pressure I'm under the higher that D goes. And I know this about myself. The I part is the people part. And I have to constantly work on that. I have to constantly be aware of it. I have to constantly step back and say.
Okay, I need to give this person the benefit of the doubt. Did they do this on purpose? Are they acting this way because they're under pressure? Is it personal? Are they doing this just to me? Are they doing it because I'm a woman? There's all these things that run through your head and decide how we react to other people and how we act and interact with other people and
Giving people the benefit, the doubt is not something that comes naturally to people like me. Type A's, high D's, we have to work at that. And this industry is filled with high D's, type A's, whatever you want to call it. We are self-motivated. We are pushers. We're high energy. We're high performers.
Speaker 2 (40:56.696)
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:18.936)
We expect everybody else to be on the same level as us all the time. Not necessarily a good thing. We're sometimes a little too direct for some people's taste. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and we reflect that out to everybody around us.
Brad, have you ever taken a distest?
I've never taken a distest. What would I learned from a distest? How could I take that? That sounds awesome.
I can tell you right now, you're an SC. You are conscientious. You probably have a higher I than I do, which is the people skills. You're much more diplomatic than I am, which is a good thing. I have to work very hard at being diplomatic sometimes. And you are a conscientious, thoughtful person. You're much more like my husband. He's a big old SC as well.
just very thoughtful, very conscientious, very detail oriented, which I am, I have that is high on my profile as well, but I can make decisions like this. Not every personality style can do that.
Speaker 2 (42:32.94)
And that is how you can handle that. Somebody's like, you just made that decision. God, there's so many things to consider. What do you? Well, you can't make that unilateral. That's crazy. You've got to talk through this and talk through that. And what about this?
So if you are an SC or maybe not a high D, maybe more like a high I, anything other than a high D in this industry, it can be really hard to work with all the high Ds in the industry. It can be tough. It makes you feel less valued, unheard. We'll run over you. We don't mean to, but we will.
It can make you feel neglected. It may make you not feel safe communicating.
Speaker 1 (43:22.326)
It can be hard to fit in.
And so the advice that you draw from that is that no matter which of those personality types you are, you have to know what your personality type is and how your way of communicating impacts others. If you are one of those high D people, you have to temper that and realize that somebody who is an SC, who is a high I, who has a different way of hearing what you're saying than you meant for it to be heard, that you have to
temper you have to consider the way that you communicate. can't just throw it out there the way that you think it should be said all the time. It also means that when you're with somebody who's on the same playing field as you, that they're like totally the same in terms of their thought process. You can do things faster. But no matter what kind of communicating you're doing with who, you have to acknowledge the differences between the two of you and how to accommodate those in your communication language.
And if they aren't doing that with you, you need to tell them, hey, this isn't working for me. I'm not getting the full message that you're trying to convey because I can't hear it because of the things that you're doing that are making it impossible for me to hear you. Like it or not, we need to find a better way to communicate as a team or we're not going to be as productive as we can be. And that kind of argument to a D-type person can be like, OK.
Well, productivity is my number one, so let's go. I need to check boxes. That's my number one focus. And by saying something like that, you're putting it in terms they can understand. You're kind of using this mental jujitsu to come back around to get what you need out of the conversation by understanding what they need. So if you can find these healthier ways of communicating, you can bring stress out of a conversation. You can bring your emotions out of the conversation and bring logic into the conversation in a way
Speaker 2 (45:19.758)
that makes it a better place to work, that makes it a more efficient place to work, and makes it a happier place to work, hopefully.
There's a hundred directions that stress comes from in the industry. So you have all the stress coming from the owner, coming from the schedule, coming from your own management. And then you add in the stress of having different personality styles and different communication methods on a job site where people in our industry are some of the smartest people I've ever met. I mean, very high intellect, very imaginative, creative.
very much into accountability and responsibility for themselves and for each other. A lot of attention to detail is required for what we do. The broad brushstrokes often don't cut it in our industry. Those people don't tend to do well. So you take all of that stuff and you stick it in an office trailer on a job site and sometimes explosions happen.
The Hydes get frustrated with the people who are not Hydes or get frustrated with the other Hydes that don't agree with them.
two high D personalities that disagree with each other fundamentally on something. Boy, you want to see some fireworks. Get ready.
Speaker 1 (46:47.63)
So yeah, I think that's why they call people like me, oh, she's a little firecracker. Yes, she is. And her fuse could be lit at any time. No, I feel like I've gotten better about that as I've aged and I've matured. But it's not to say that I don't still get mad sometimes because I do. But when I was younger, I had to be told pretty regularly to chill and to just pick your battles and don't yell at people. I came from the military.
where I was in the Navy for eight years. And so when I say that I need something done by eight o'clock on Tuesday, I expect it to be done by eight o'clock on Tuesday. And when the person on the other end of this conversation, it's nine o'clock on Wednesday and they haven't even started it yet. I would get pretty fired up. And it took me a long time to work that out.
I think that's something we all deal with. have friends who are the opposite way, where they'll say something so gently and so politely and so tepidly that then when you find out months later that they took it personally, something is like, hold on, you didn't even tell me that that was that important to you. What are you talking about? It's on all sides. It's not just the people who are at 11 all the time who have something to learn. I'll tell a story briefly about the trying to separate
communication style from somebody who really just is not the right person to work around. I had a boss for a while who was, like we've been talking about, one of these type D people, very intelligent, very detail oriented, very hardworking, very achievement oriented, wanted to live out the reality of their self vision, the way that they view themselves through their achievements, through that external gratification. But.
Their communication style was one of, don't care about you or how this impacts you. I just want it done. And I constantly got the feedback from that person's managers that that's just that person's style. They grew up in a different culture than you did. They're a little bit more blunt than you expect them to be. You're a West Coast kid. You don't get it. It's okay. He doesn't actually feel that way about you. It's just, this is how he communicates. But as I went on working for that manager, I figured, no, no, no, that person actually just does only care about.
Speaker 2 (49:14.222)
themselves and they do not care about who they run over to get where they want to go. And it's in the moments when you have conversations with people where it's more real and you're saying, like, how was your weekend? What's going on with you? The kind of person who never, I'm not going to say who can't, because sometimes people take longer to open up, but the kind of person who never opens up in that concern, who never has that kind of a conversation. That's the kind of person to watch out for if they're also the kind of person who just
runs rickshod over people, talks about them behind their back, puts themselves and their needs above everybody else's. If somebody is a high D person and they're driving you nuts, but it's clear that they're putting somebody else's needs before their own, a lot of the time, or every now and then they open up and they're able to have these conversations about their life and your life and you have those moments, that's relationship worth trying to continue to invest in, to try to say, these are the things that are not working for me.
and I want this to work because I know that it can. Let's get into it. Let's solve this. But when you don't have that, when you don't have that kind of a sense that that person would put their needs behind somebody else's, that's a moment when you're like, OK, I really need to rethink. Is this the
There are people to watch out for in the industry for sure. When it comes circling back to mental health and all the pressures and stresses that are put on us from all these different angles and the relationships and everything. Let's talk about what we can do about this. Communication and looking at all the communication styles and stuff is absolutely something we can do to help alleviate some of that stress. But I think the number one thing we need to do is recognize this for the threat.
that it is to us as human beings, to this industry. This is the single biggest safety threat facing our industry. The statistics say that. Suicide is a greater percentage than all safety accidents and deaths combined. This is the single biggest threat that we have to deal with folks and we need to be talking about it bald face.
Speaker 2 (51:07.118)
Thank
Speaker 1 (51:26.988)
what it is. These are people and people's lives that we're talking about and their families and we can never forget that we are dealing with people. There is the business of getting the job done. There's the business of schedules and budgets and and drivers and relationships but these are human beings. We need to start standing up and saying it's enough that we've had enough. So if you are a contractor
general contractor, trade contractor, and you are being asked to do unrealistic things in crazy timeframes and work crazy amounts of overtime. You need to stand up for your people and you need to say no. You need to say, I need to protect my people better than this. I have been asked to work around the clock.
Yeah.
for months at a time. I've been on those jobs. I've been in those shutdowns. And I've had people come this close, so close to a nervous breakdown. That's not okay. I had to find a way to give people time off just because I can handle it. And I could do it without having a nervous breakdown. I'm not saying I didn't go sit and cry in the parking lot.
I was close too. And just because you can handle it doesn't mean that everybody can handle it. Everybody's a little bit different. So we got to push back on unrealistic requests. We have to say no to prolonged overtime and unrealistic schedule durations. We need to approach conversations from a safety and mental health standpoint. Where is your safety guy in these conversations?
Speaker 2 (53:13.912)
Yeah.
If I was an installing contractor right now, that's where I'd go. I'd go to my safety guy and I go, look, I'm being pressured to do this by this contractor, by this owner, by this project, whatever. And it's not okay to treat our people like this and demand this, that they do this. And we need to say the words, mental health. Say it.
It's okay to say that I'm afraid that this is going to cause my people some mental health stressors that are unacceptable.
I just think about how much money we spend in the construction industry on safety training and on safety equipment and on keeping people physically safe and how anytime you bring up that kind of safety in the conversation about project budget or about project time, I was like, oh yeah, of course, of course. But then when we talk about mental health, it's like, well, people should just rub some dirt in it. People should just get on my level and be able to handle it the way that I do. No, that's not.
how it works. You can't just say abjectly that your ability to tolerate stress is what everyone else should live up to and that anybody who doesn't meet that standard is not good enough. That's not the world that we live in and people handle stresses in different ways. It's a very narrow worldview and it's going to limit you as a business owner, as a business person, as a person, flat out. I totally agree and I think
Speaker 2 (54:50.51)
calling attention to that, that the mental health crisis is our number one thing that we're working on in this industry, it's our number one challenge. How much of your project resources are dedicated towards that? How much of your company's resources are dedicated towards making sure that your people are meeting the challenge of dealing with the stresses of your work? And if your answer is anything like the experiences Dee and I have had, then you gotta do some real self-reflection and say, okay, what can I do?
How can I get my safety guy training to deal with these problems? How can I bring in people that can make sure we don't have this building up for people where they're not being supported in the way they need to be supported? It goes back to a great story I heard from somebody who was the Navy SEALs about the way that they look at training. And because their job is so high stress, because it's so demanding, they spend 80 % of their careers training, preparing, drilling, rehearsing, whatever they're going to do.
and 20 % of their job executing, being overseas in the guts, in the worst of it. I can count on my one hand the number of times I've been to a formal training for my job as a construction management staffer, as a project engineer, as a project manager. That's crazy. That's crazy that we don't spend as much time as we need to training on these kinds of things. It's a very tough thing not to invest in something that's so crucial.
Well, and the combined stresses of personal life, in addition to all the crazy stuff that we undergo professionally, you don't know what's going on in somebody's personal life, or you may not know what's going on in their personal life that might aggravate that. One of my husband's apprentices committed suicide on one of his projects, and he was devastated, absolutely devastated that he didn't see it coming as a leader.
It just was like a stab in the heart. mean, he didn't even tell me about it for two or three days. He just was acting really strange and really cranky. And, you know, it's very unlike my husband. He's a very easy going guy. And I finally said, what is going on with you? And he told me that one of his apprentices committed suicide and it was heartbreaking. Could I have done something? How did I not know? Well, guess what?
Speaker 1 (57:17.198)
It could be happening anywhere around you at any given time. This was years ago. We still don't know the story exactly what all led to this. everybody's stuff is different. But the point is, is that they're human beings with, with stuff outside of work in addition to stuff inside of the workspace owners. When contractors are telling you that it's too much, you need to listen. You need to listen.
You need to prioritize your contractor's wellbeing. They are people and it matters. It's more than just budget and schedule. And by the way, owners, don't forget your own people. I have been on some of these big projects, large projects especially are very taxing on your staff because it's extra. It's an addition to their day job. It can be very stressful. I have a colleague that works for an owner that just quit because she's like, I need a break.
I have done two of these projects in a row. I'm so tired. I'm so stressed. need a little time and they wouldn't give it to her. So she quit. Really?
train people on how to communicate, train people on how to deal with stress, on how to interact with each other. And then also, if you need to make the economic argument to somebody, which you shouldn't, but you do, I guess, in some circumstances for some super tight deep business people, the economic argument makes itself. There are companies that are known for being design change heavy companies like Google, for instance, in the Silicon Valley, everybody in the whole of the Bay Area knew.
that Google was gonna change their mind five times during the project. So when they were pricing a Google project, they would price with that in mind. And Google may have even known that that was the way that everybody priced their jobs, that they weren't getting best quote unquote value, that they weren't getting things as cheap as they might otherwise. But they did anyway, because that was their way of doing business and they wanna make those changes, they wanna have that fluidity, that's fine. How do you think contractors and anyone else you hire,
Speaker 2 (59:25.844)
outside of the construction world deals with you and your company if you're known to be a pain to work for, stressful, that you burn people out, that you are jerks to them. It's going to be priced in. If you're great to work with, if you're kind, if you're empathetic, if you do work in a way that makes people want to continue to work with you, they're going to work for less. A perfect example of this comes from a class I'm taking right now about incentivizing productivity.
The example the professor gave was that people that go to Broadway to do eight shows a week, to live that life on that stage, will wait tables until they're 70 for the chance to be on that stage and perform because that's what they're intrinsically motivated to do. And because it means so much to be able to be on that stage that they'll work for pennies, for nothing to do something that is incredible.
incredibly difficult. It takes years of professional training to jump and leap and dance and sing in way those people can. To entertain thousands and thousands of people. They'll do it for nothing because they're just so intrinsically motivated to do it. How could you as an employer, as a manager, as an owner, motivate the people that work for you to feel that way about their jobs, regardless of the stresses that are inherent to it, regardless of the pressures? How could you find ways
to be that Broadway star chance for somebody. I think that's a great economic argument to anybody who's like, well, I get all this, but I can't make a dollars and cents argument for this. It's there. You need to have the guts to go do the math and say, this is the pricing we're getting. This is the pricing the rest of the market's getting. What can we do?
Yeah, that's an excellent point. And having been a contractor for so many years in my life, I can tell you that that is an absolutely true statement. You know how big of a pain in the neck you are is 100 % priced into the bids that you're getting. If you make changes constantly, if you're a total pain, if you're not nice, that is all absolutely priced in or people will no bid your work. I've seen that too. So the elephant in the room.
Speaker 2 (01:01:35.512)
Mm-hmm.
is that human beings die when we get it wrong. Too much stress and pressure is applied. People die. And you want to make a dollar and cents argument for that? What is a lawsuit going to cost you?
I hate to put it like that, but if you can't get somebody's attention in any other way to prioritize this and to take it seriously, I make the same argument when I'm talking about general job site safety. I've been on jobs where somebody has died. Do you want to know how many lawsuits there were? How do you put a value and a price on that and the impact that that has on every person on that job and every day?
that that project goes on after that. It's incalculable. You cannot put a dollar value on this kind of stuff. We're responsible for people's livelihoods and their lives, and by extension, their families.
There's an awful lot of sentiment out there. Companies need to stop saying that we're a family. don't treat us like family. Okay. Well, it's the same, but it's different. And you get incredibly close to people when you're working in these high stress environments. Some of the best friends that I have, most of my best friends really are all from the industry. They're all people that I have been through the trenches with on these jobs that have.
Speaker 1 (01:03:09.524)
seen the best and worst sides of me under these stressful situations. We have to be willing together to stand up and say it's enough and that people matter more than the bottom line. That's all there is to it. People matter more than the bottom line. They matter more than the schedule. They matter more than the budget. They just do.
And if you take care of great people, if you do a great job fostering talent, fostering a great place to work, fostering something that people want to be a part of, you're going to be great. People are going to want to work with you. People are going to line up to be involved with what you're doing and you're going to live a great life. The short term, my people are a towel that I need to wring as much out of as I can argument. That's all you're to get that last drop. And then it's going to be over.
and somebody is going to kill themselves on your job or your project or whatever it is. If you foster your people's infinite returns on that, infinite returns on that person saying, this is the best company I ever worked for. What kind of advertising does that do for your firm? that there's something we haven't talked about at all in this conversation, which is compensation. We haven't talked at all about giving people raises to solve these problems. Anybody out there who wants to
run a profitable business that continues to make returns for a long time. And they're losing staff. People are going somewhere else to make a couple more bucks. That means that your job site, your work environment sucked to the point that another $1.50 an hour made the difference in that person deciding to leave that 10 or 15 year career with you. What does that say about what's going on in your doors at your job site in your trailer?
That's an excellent point because study after study has shown that the reason that people leave jobs is not money. It can be. mean, I'm not saying that there aren't people out there that are motivated by the dollar and will leave for that dollar 50 no matter what kind of environment you provide, but those people are relatively few and far between the overall majority of the people want to feel supported. They want to feel valued. They want to.
Speaker 1 (01:05:29.784)
feel like they matter, like they're making a difference of some kind. They are heard, they have some kind of say in what's going on. People don't want to be dictated to. They want to be included and feel like they're part of something. And that's where the whole idea of a business place can feel like a family. And it absolutely can. It can be that way. But if you have people walking out the door on a regular basis, if your turnover is high,
And I write articles about this kind of stuff all the time. You need to pull out your mirror and look in it and find out what are you doing wrong as a leader, as a business owner? How do you create a culture where people want to stay? Because that is key. And when people feel all these things, their mental health is better. Their stress levels are lower. They're not
constantly feeling like their job is threatened. And part of that ties back into communication. I know when I had a crew on a job site, so if the job ended and they didn't know they had another job to go to, towards the end of a job, their stress levels would start going up because they're going, ooh, the job's coming to an end. What's going to happen? Am I going to have a job? Am I going to get laid off? That's always a stressor.
with field crews, I made it a point to make sure that I found a home for every single one of my guys as they left the job site. I would work with the foreman to find out what this labor curve is going to look like. When are people going to start dropping off? How many people do we have homes for those people? And if my foreman couldn't make it happen, I would go to the labor superintendent myself. I'd call a hall if I had to, because I wanted my guys to know that they had a job when this one was over.
I didn't want them spending their energy and their time and their mental health worrying about getting laid off.
Speaker 1 (01:07:33.27)
And those guys come back to me to this day more than a decade later and still thank me for that. Didn't take that much effort.
No, that's the kind of showing that you care about your workers that we talk about when we talk about demonstrating that they are your number one asset treating people like family. That's the kind of thing that is going to return infinitely for you when you make that kind of investment.
It's good leadership, but at least you made every effort and you're communicating. And that was really the thing was that I was telling them, look guys, here's what's going on. I'm not going to leave you to guess. I'm not going to leave you to wonder. Here's what the labor curve looks like. Here's what we're doing to make sure that you have a job to go to when you leave here.
Speaker 2 (01:08:24.129)
I think that wraps it very well. I think that's a great point end on. It's all about training your people to communicate with each other better, to use these different communication tools, to not let them be a stressor, to learn how different people communicate and to use those tools to communicate with those different people so that you're not caught off guard. And it's about listening. It's about understanding your people's challenges and meeting them where they are and trying to help them live a better life and be able to have that life outside of work without
jeopardizing their career and without jeopardizing their life at home through their career. Balance, all that stuff.
Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time.
at managementunderconstruction.com.
