Speaker 2 (00:08.91)
Welcome to Management Under Construction. I'm Dee Davis.
And I'm Brad Wyatt and today we are talking about Into the Fire, the construction industry's culture of the sink or swim.
The construction industry is absolutely famous for this. And I'm sure many other industries do it as well. It happened to me multiple times in my career, as it has happened probably multiple times to many of you. Going from the field to the office, I remember I didn't even know what some of the terms were.
And there was all these logs and things, and I didn't understand what the stuff was. It took me a while to figure it all out. And I felt like an idiot asking. I didn't even know what an RFI was because out in the field and I was literally swinging a hammer. There was no RFIs. And I went to work for a commercial general contractor in the office. And all of a sudden I was supposed to be managing RFIs. I didn't even know what it was. So that's how basic it was for me in the beginning.
Then going from a coordinator to a project engineer, again, I was just expected that I understood a lot of things that I had no training for because when you go to engineering school, they don't teach you a lot of these things. They teach you engineering. They don't teach you how to work on a construction site. I had field experience, so that was good, but there was a lot of the office trailer kind of stuff that I didn't know. And when I went from PE to PM.
Speaker 2 (01:46.198)
Right when I was promoted, my project manager that was my mentor left to go to another job. And I was left on this. I don't even know. can't remember how big the job was, maybe seven or $8 million job, which for me at that time was a big job. And I was just left by myself to figure it out. And I broke out in hives. It was so scary. I was so afraid I was going to mess it up.
How has it happened to you? How have you experienced that, Brad?
I'm in a similar position. When I came out of undergrad engineering, didn't know anything about construction. I didn't know what a submittal log was, didn't know what an RFI was. But the best advice that I got was from people within my program that said, look, you're going to go into industry and you're not going to know how to do anything. The thing that you need to know how to do to be able to learn how to do everything else you will do is to approach
every conversation with somebody who's been in this industry longer than you have, which is everybody when you start out with an idea that you are a beginner who wants to learn from your elders and people who know more than you. So the beginner's mind, openness and willingness to learn and not having this I know it all, I'm confident, I know what I'm doing attitude really serve you well.
Not always, sometimes you do need to walk into the room like you know what you're doing, but when you're younger, when you don't know, it's helpful to have that approach. The explicit story was I came onto a job site in the middle of the demolition phase and my project manager was like, hey, we're in the middle of the heat right now. I'm writing contracts. You can't be in here bothering me. Go take these plans and figure out the bidding of this. These three trades. I think it was special please.
Speaker 1 (03:46.188)
So for those not in the construction industry, that's restroom accessories like toilet stalls and soap dispensers and really interesting stuff like that. And a couple other very minor trades of that level of importance to the job. said, go figure these out now, call these three people and do this.
Holders
Speaker 1 (04:12.59)
And I just sat on the phone with people like, hey, I had these plans. They say these things. What do I really need? And I learned from them. Subcontractors, especially estimators, were some of my best teachers to help me avoid sinking in those early days. So relying on them to learn and learning as you enter the bidding phase from people who give you different amounts of information about different things, who to trust and who not to trust, was a very important way to avoid sinking.
I love that story and something that you said about coming with a, I'm a beginner aspect that I don't know, please teach me. You really dodged a bullet by getting that advice early because I don't think that most people get that advice. What I see a lot is people coming out of school, whether it's construction management school or engineering school. And I think they think that now they know everything. Right.
Or they think that we expect them to know everything. I'm not sure which one it is, maybe a little of both. So they come onto the job site. Like they figured they're going to be the president of the company in a week or two. I had a young engineer right out of school, his very first job out of school. And he comes out to the field and he starts ordering around the foreman and the superintendent. man.
It was bad. I had to sit him down and go, what are you doing? First of all, they don't work for you. And second of all, these guys have 20, 30 years experience. You're not going to teach them anything. They're here to teach you. You got the wrong end of the stick. That was an extreme case, but I see it a lot. And I've even had young engineers tell me, I can't ask any questions because
I'm supposed to know everything because I have an engineering degree. No.
Speaker 1 (06:17.07)
You're able to have to fall into, oh, if I ask questions, that's showing weakness. Therefore I can't do that. I just have to fake it till I make it. There are a lot of industries where that works like sales, where 99 % of the value you provide is by demonstrating your willingness to do whatever it takes to get the sale and relationships, a lot of things. I'm sure salespeople are yelling into their speakers right now saying, it's not all about that, but.
To a certain extent, some sales roles and other unique business roles rely on a person to fake it till they make it, but construction is not one of those industries. There are so many things that you cannot fake that there's almost no room for faking.
Yeah, I'm sure I faked it until I made it on a few things. I remember sitting in meetings and just listening. That's a very important skill when you're first starting out, listen to other people who are more experienced and smarter than you talking and try to figure it out. Try to figure out what's going on. What are they talking about? And I did that well into my PM years of just listening to two more experienced people talk out a problem.
And I would just stand there and listen and they'd look at me and be like, what? I'm like, I'm just listening. I'm just here to learn. I just am listening because you're talking about a problem that I've never faced before. And I want to hear how you're dealing with it because someday I will come up with that problem and I will have something to draw on good, bad, or indifferent, right? Even if it's not the best advice, some kind of advice. love to give the advice to younger folks.
new into the industry, new into their careers. Follow your foreman, your superintendents, your experienced estimators, whoever it is, follow them around like a lovesick puppy dog. Listen to everything they say, ask all the questions because you will get further faster. I promise you will get further faster by asking the questions. No one.
Speaker 2 (08:32.086)
is going to say, my God, I can't believe you're asking that question. If you come from a place of curiosity and of teach me, those people will stop everything they're doing to take you under their wing and teach you. And you will learn so much faster.
Totally agree. The only exception to that rule is if you ask the same question over and over again, if you demonstrate an inability to learn, then people will really be turned off to you. So when I was first starting out, I thought very hard about what I was going to do to try to make sure I don't do that and make sure I don't ask the same question twice or make the same mistake twice, even more importantly. And I just took a ton of notes. I just wrote everything down, reread my notes at the end of the day.
What did I learn? I made a journal of weekly for the first year. What did I learn this week that I can carry forward into the next week? Reflecting on the things that you've learned can really help cement those lessons.
That's a great idea. I'm an extensive note taker too. I'm 30 years into this and I'm still learning new stuff every single day. I go to a new customer site and I'm following them around with a notepad, taking notes, asking questions. It's the best and fastest way to make the most progress. So what does business school tell us about all this, Brad?
So I thought it would be good to contextualize why construction has this culture of sink or swim. How did it become this way? Not every workplace relies on sink or swim as a way of progressing its people and weeding them out. So the economics of incentives in the construction industry for the most part are on promotion. If you're a project engineer or you're a junior architect,
Speaker 1 (10:26.914)
the thing that you're striving for in your career in terms of your own personal advancement, your own financial reward is a promotion to project manager, to senior architect, to whatever it might be, senior engineer. And what that incentivizes you to do from a firm standpoint is to specialize your knowledge to the industry so that you are qualified within that specific skill set that company's looking for on your own.
If you are a self-guided learner, you're going to learn faster than everybody else. Even if the company offers training, which it should, the people who learn the best and the most will be most qualified to be promoted. And that causes the people who are best at learning quickly at swimming when you could sink or swim to advance. Often in our industry, managers find themselves too busy to train their employees. So the people with natural talent for the industry they're in,
and the gumption to stay above water, to learn in the ways that we're talking about. Other people who stay who last and end up getting those promotions. This is not too dissimilar from other big businesses. So the Elon Musk's companies, for example, Tesla and SpaceX come to mind have this attitude of working for us is such a huge resume booster that we don't have to treat you well. If you burn out, if you sink,
You'll have ex-Tesla, ex-SpaceX employee on your resume and people will be impressed by that. And it'll carry you good standing when you go to apply later on in life. And the strongest will survive. They'll figure it out. One of the things that I came across in terms of this sink or swim culture in business school was a slide deck on culture from Netflix. And one of the big slides that stood out to me on that deck was we are not a family.
That was all the slide said. And a lot of companies in the construction industry are talking about being a family. They say, we are all about our people. Our people are our most important asset. We are so about training them. It's all about the people. And then company hits hard times and layoffs come around. You can't fire family. That's not what that means. So are we really a family? Netflix is bold enough to say, no, we're not. This is a
Speaker 1 (12:48.942)
for-profit endeavor. all here to try to figure out how to make the best shows in the world. even people who made the best show in the world yesterday may not be the right person for the shows of tomorrow. So we're gonna fire people who we think aren't the right people for the job. It's gonna be such outstanding pay and benefits that while you're here, it's gonna be great, but we're not gonna pretend that we're gonna keep everybody on board here. We're gonna hire.
the people who we think are best, we're going to fire the losers and we're going to promote the people who are the most talented in the world. A good story from that culture being implemented was the writer and creative producer who put on the Orange is the New Black show was let go from Netflix after that show had run its course, even though by acclaim and by popularity of viewership, that show had been incredibly successful because the company thought this person is not going to be the right
fit for what our viewers want next. And it turned out some young woman in India was the right person. They gave her a ton of resources and she produced a TV show for the billion people in India that made Netflix ton of money. So for certain companies with certain goals and with enough draw, with enough cache that they can play that word Netflix, word SpaceX, whatever it is game, that sink or swim attitude projected outward can work.
But for other strategies that may not align with the right course of action, you may need to have that family approach that says we're not going to fire people in down times, but that means that we're going to save during the good times, which means that there will be companies that make more money than us that pay their people more in the strong times. So the signals that you send to the employment market, to the people that could come work for you are very powerful.
A lot of employers have figured out that just giving people the highest salary in the good times works for them. I'm sure a lot of companies have also figured out that keeping on people who need that family environment and wants to be around for the long term and don't need to see the immediate ultimate return every waking second of their career are people they want to have in their companies. that's the business school perspective on this whole sink or swim environment. How did we get here thing?
Speaker 2 (15:16.15)
You bring up a couple of examples of companies who choose, for lack of a better term, they choose the almighty dollar over everything else. And there's a lot of people who are fine working with companies like that. If you watch the posts and the articles and things on LinkedIn, there's plenty of people that are out there screaming, stop saying we're a family, we're not a family. You can't fire family, even though.
Sometimes we all wish we could fire a family member. Come on, admit it. Everybody has a family member they wish they could fire.
put on temporary leave.
Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Temporary leave of some kind. But there's an awful lot of people out there who also really want and value that relationship in the workplace. We spend most of our waking hours at work. So having environments that are positive, where we feel included, we feel valued, we feel like we are forming relationships that last.
is important to a lot of people. I happen to be one of those people. I love the feeling of a good place to be, of a good company culture. I love it when even as an outside consultant, I go to work for a client that includes me in all the things that they do with their people. you're part of the team. You're one of us. I get invited to all the events. I get invited to participate in the things that they're doing for their employees. That's a feel good.
Speaker 2 (16:48.354)
as a human being, everybody wants to be included and invited, even if you choose not to go, at least you were invited. And some of the best relationships and the closest relationships that I have in my life are relationships that were originally formed in those environments. They're people that I have a lot of close friendships and deep trusting supportive relationships with. So there's going to be people who value that. There's going to be people who are like, look, this is just work.
I'm just here to make money. I'm here to make the most money possible. I'm here to get a company's name on my resume or whatever. I've got a mission and that's it. And I don't want any of rest of that stuff. I just want to come to work, do the thing and go home to my real family. takes both kinds, whichever kind of person you are. It's important to know what that company's brand is. If you're a person like me going to work for Netflix or
SpaceX is probably not in the carts. So as you're out there looking for a place to work, knowing those things are important, I think construction is a little bit different. I'm not saying there's not construction companies out there that maybe don't have a little bit of that sink or swim and we're going to let you go attitude. We definitely take our people and throw them in the deep end in construction. I've never worked for a construction company that doesn't do that. Not saying that they don't exist.
but most construction companies grab you out of school and toss you in the deep end on a job site somewhere and don't help you learn the skills that you need to learn. So a few fun statistics, because you know how much we love our numbers. Companies that have comprehensive training programs make more than 200 % more revenue per employee than companies that don't.
200 % more revenue than companies that don't have comprehensive training programs. And it equates to about 24 % more profit. Would you like to have your business be 24 % more profitable on the bottom line? Anybody? I do.
Speaker 2 (19:06.638)
That's incredible. That statistic alone says everything that I want to hear about why I need to have comprehensive training in my company. 200 % more revenue per employee, 24 % more profit.
Where do I sign up?
Absolutely. think the 200 % more revenue per employee thing is really amazing to me. That's if it were just 200 % more per company, like a larger company is more likely to have a comprehensive training program. No, the statistic is telling us it's 200 % more per employee. So they're being able to leverage their human resources much more efficiently than other firms do that training.
And the comprehensive part of this is really what sparks my imagination too. What would comprehensive mean in the construction environment? Does that mean for a young project engineer, things beyond RFIs and submittals? I think it means how do you communicate with people who don't share your view on something? How do you negotiate? How do you bring people around to your way of understanding the facts of a problem? De-escalation, stress management, these kinds of features of a training program.
would make it comprehensive in my opinion. Dee, what do you think?
Speaker 2 (20:26.134)
Absolutely. We're going to talk some more about the kinds of things that speak to the whole employee, speak to the whole person. it's, yes, a lot of it is around work, but work and life are not separate. They're together. Like I said, we spend most of our waking hours at work, but we have a personal life too. And so we have to speak to the entire employee and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But yes, comprehensive means the whole picture.
And it's not just technical skills. There's some human skills in there too. 51 % of employees say that training gives them more confidence. Okay, attention, attention. 92 % of workers say training increases their engagement at work. We know that engagement means productivity. This is why this works.
Engagement equates to productivity at work. Engagement means I'm not leaving anytime soon. Less turnover.
Speaker 1 (21:34.626)
And I think also people that relish or at least make use of the opportunity to learn in the course of their daily lives are people who are living more fulfilling, more enriched lives. People who think they know everything, kind like we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, are not the people anyone wants to work with. People who learn and people who can make use of that knowledge are the people you want around anyway. So people that get turned off by training.
That's a red flag to me.
To that point, 68 % of employees prefer to train at work versus on their own time. Employees are going to say, well, of course. And employers are going to go, so that's time out of the productive work day. Yes, it is. But go back to that profitability, revenue, engagement. The bang for your buck is absolutely there to have your people train on
your dime on your hour, they're more likely to do it and be engaged with it if you're providing the training versus you're telling them go figure it out on your own.
And I think that especially applies to the sorts of specialized skills that you can't get from watching a YouTube video. If you've got a 30-year veteran superintendent who still doesn't know how to use Excel and just needs to make a spreadsheet to be able to make a check-in sheet, giving that person a training put on by your company is probably not the best use of your company's time and training budget.
Speaker 1 (23:18.902)
that employee could probably watch a YouTube video. But when it's specific to your industry or even specific to the way that your company wants to do their business, that's when you're getting the most bang for your buck where you're doing something that is a least likely for an employee to take their own and a most likely that they're going to benefit from by doing it with other people in the company, by associating it with a benefit of the company and
that you're most likely benefit from because you're have a whole workforce that all think in the same way because of this training. You're gonna create a brand for how your service employees put your company name out into the world. So tons of benefits there.
Did you know that employees learn only 10 % of their skills through formal training and the rest of it is OJT and mentorship, internal mentorship within companies, learning from other people, senior people, stuff like that. So 10 % of their skills are through formal training, which is not enough because there's too much stuff that people assume we just know. It's the osmosis method.
I call it the osmosis method. You're just supposed to know. Employees are 45 % more likely to stay when they receive training, when you provide training as an employer. So I want to make a very important point here though. So we want to reduce turnover. Turnover is expensive. We've already talked about that in previous podcasts. It costs two to three times an employee's salary to replace them. Turnover is not our friend. We have gotten way too far into the turnover market.
People are leaving faster and faster from jobs. We want to keep those people and we want to get them trained up to do those things that we need them to do. But this does not include when we were talking about training this training we're talking about. I'm not talking about OSHA 10 OSHA 30 SOP training, sexual harassment training. OK, that doesn't count guys. That's not the kind of training we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (25:28.204)
That's table stakes. That's compliance. That is a fact of doing business, not real make your employees more profitable for you training.
Exactly. That is, I have to put people in a hole. So I need to do confined space training. need, I have to have this many people that have to have OSHA 30 training or whatever. It's compliance. We are not talking about compliance training here. And that cannot count. That is mandatory trainings that all have to happen within your organization or because there's regulations or whatever. I'm talking about human skills trainings.
technical skills training that will give some specific examples of some of those trainings as we go on here. 59 % of employees report they have never received workplace training and that they are completely autodidactic.
For any of you who don't have a dictionary handy, autodidactic means self-taught.
And I I was going to go with the fancy language, get my MBA.
Speaker 2 (26:38.092)
Had to throw that word in there. don't get to use it very often. Autodidact is somebody who is self-taught. That's an incredible amount of self-training and people will seek out what they find interesting, relevant, needed. And it may or may not be what you need your people to learn.
Speaker 2 (26:59.448)
From an employee perspective, if you the employer are willing to invest in my training, real training, not required training, that signals a company who is willing to invest in the growth and retention of their people.
That's huge. And that is what most employees are looking for right now. And this metric has changed quite a bit in the last couple of generations. 44 % of Gen X, which is my generation, was looking for that. 60 % of millennials are.
I would expect this number to go up even further with Gen Z.
Millennials have a much more developed expectation of growth opportunity than any generation we've seen so far. And they will leave your company in a hot minute if they don't think that you are invested in them as much as they are invested in you.
And I think it's worth it to those young employees to talk about what signal you're trying to send them by investing in their training. I worked at a great company for a lot of years and I had an offer to go work somewhere else for an absurd amount more money. was like, it was so much more money to go work for this other company that was a no brainer. But if I had realized at the time,
Speaker 1 (28:31.096)
how much they had invested, the old company that is, in their staff and their workforce by saying, no, we're gonna send these people to this engaging speaker who's gonna talk about leadership. We're gonna train them on this. We're gonna get them in front of experts on that. The signal that you're sending is, we're gonna keep everybody around in the good times and bad times because if we just paid a bunch of money for all these people to get trained,
and then we can't afford to keep them on because the market turns down, we're not a business anymore. That's a bad business decision. Saying to your employees, we're investing in you because we're here with you for the long haul is well worth saying, especially to the younger generation, I think.
Absolutely. I've heard people say this. What if I pay for all this training and they leave? But what if you don't and they stay?
Speaker 2 (29:28.846)
You have to really think about that for a second. Okay, so I'm not going to invest in their training and they stay. Are they dragging you down at that point?
Speaker 2 (29:45.036)
Yeah, you have to be in it for the long haul.
So there's another company down the street that is willing to train its employees and your company isn't, what signal is that sending your employees? They're gonna seek the thing where they're gonna learn the most and all else equal, they're gonna go work for somebody else. Offering training is a great retention tactic. The economics prove that out. Even though it's scary, even though it feels stressful to spend money and time and pull people off job sites and remove them from the work product,
that's paying the bills, keeping on people with that kind of behavior is what guarantees the future of company.
We know all the things that should be happening. Let's talk about what actually happens in companies. So I had lunch the other day with a friend, longtime colleague. And she was really down that day because she was going to have to let somebody go. I said, let's talk about it. Tell me what's going on. And she's, I hired this senior engineer to.
be like a project manager and be over all these engineers and fill that project management role and she's just not cutting it. And I said, okay, does this person have any project management experience? No. Have they received any project management training? No. And I said, okay, so have you considered?
Speaker 2 (31:27.918)
training this person to be a project manager. And by the way, did you just assume that because this person was senior, that she was just automatically going to be able to move into that role? Because you do know that it's a completely different skill set, right? And she said, yeah, I know that. No, I didn't do that. And I said, okay, I don't know. It's your business. You run it the way you want to run it. I'm just saying that telling senior people that they're responsible for providing training and having no plan.
That is one of the things that I see the most. Two weeks ago, I was in an event talking to somebody about providing training for their company. And they said, we do that internally. That's the number one response I get by the way, when I talk to people about training. And I said, really, what is your training plan? And she just looked at me and I said, how does that happen? And she said, our senior people are responsible providing it to the junior people. And I said, really, again, what is your training plan? And I just get the blank stare.
Assigning it and having no plan or just assuming that it's going to happen. Somehow there's a wish and a hope, something like that. It's more common than we would like to admit. That's our plan is no plan. It's just assuming that somebody is going to take care of it.
having internal trainings provided by people who have not been trained to teach or put together training materials.
I have taken many internal trainings when I've worked at companies and the people who are training, they're another project manager, they're a senior person of some kind. They've never been taught to teach. They have never been taught how to put.
Speaker 2 (33:18.446)
training materials together and they're up there giving a training.
I'm not enough of a nerd to know that lecture is about the holly smoot terrace, which are relevant in today's economic climate. But go ahead, just a sidebar.
Boring. We used to get our safety trainings by the safety guy who really should be taught how to teach and is not clearly taught how to teach the most boring. First of all, it's not a very engaging topic to begin with. And then you have somebody who stands up there and does the monotone teaching and you're just, it's unbearable.
43 % of employees report that the training that they have received is ineffective because we're not having the right people with the right training providing it. Most companies only provide corporate or state required trainings or federal, whatever. I worked for a company once that their approach to training and they had somebody whose job it was like their training was their whole job.
not giving training, but organizing training. She organized all of the OSHA required trainings, all that kind of stuff. Once in a while there would be another training that they would provide, but what they did was they assigned you by role how many training hours you had to have. had to have this many safety training hours, this many other hours. And then they said, it's up to you to figure out the other.
Speaker 2 (34:58.318)
So I had to have, I don't remember what the number 50, 60 hours of training and 30 of it was safety stuff probably. And the rest of it, I was supposed to go figure something out and then submit it to get it approved and then go take the training. And if it costs something, I got reimbursed or whatever. Not a great method.
Mandating trainings that are not of interest or relevant to the person or the position. I've also had that happen to me. I've had in an annual review being assigned training. Go take an advanced Excel class.
Okay, why? I have great Excel skills. Do I know how to do everything that's in the advanced class? Probably not. But do I need to know everything that's in the advanced class? No, not for what I'm Thanks, though. Thanks for assigning me non-relevant training. And then we get too busy doing the business of business, of running a business, and hope that people will swim instead of sink.
Especially in the construction industry, everything's job costed. PM, PE, PC, unless you're an executive or an office worker, everything is job costed. So they want you doing that task that you are supposed to be doing and not spending it training. They don't want to incur overhead cost for people doing training and they don't have it in the construction budgets to spend all this money training.
to drug cost it.
Speaker 2 (36:43.214)
So turnovers at an all time high folks, average 10 years or less than five years in companies now. So we have to find a way to stop the turnover to train the people. I'm posing this question, what if we gave them swimming lessons?
Yeah.
Instead of asking them to sink or swim, what if we gave them swimming lessons and we helped them improve their form, their speed, and their endurance to win the swim meet instead?
And it's just to offer a younger person's perspective, a more junior in their career. It was always crazy to me when project managers would be like, we can't job cost anything. We got to keep the budget down. we've got to not put anything to overhead. We can't bill anything to overhead. That's only for project executives. That kind of attitude towards the company spending money can freak people out. It's, if we can't spend money to make money anywhere.
What are we doing here? If a company comes off to its employees as unwilling to invest in its people, unwilling to spend a little now to save more in the future, that can be a really arduous environment to be in. That's almost like government work, where we get a fixed amount every year, and if we don't spend it, we don't get it next year. And if we spend more than it, we're going to get penalized. We just have this very narrow window that we have to live in that we can't do anything outside that.
Speaker 1 (38:17.166)
People want to be creative. People want to learn. People want to go get better at their jobs. And if they come to you with an opportunity to go learn something that they think is going to improve their productivity, let them make a business case for it. Don't let somebody go on a vacation to learn P6 when they're 22 and are not going to be looking at P6 for five or six more years in their career.
Figure out a way to keep people who want to learn engaged, because those are kind of people that you want around your company, creating the culture of an excellent organization that continuously invests its people.
We've talked about a lot of problems. Let's talk about what we should be doing.
I'm going to propose that you talk to our people and ask them what kind of training they want. When I ask leadership, what kind of training and skills that they wish that their people had, I get a lot of thought and then usually one or two kind of pat answers. If you ask an employee what kind of skills they wish they had or what kind of training they wish they had, they rattle it off right away. They know.
So as a leader, stop guessing. Stop guessing as to what your people need and want. Ask them. If you ask management, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about this, to be honest. We need to go to the people that actually have to do the work. And we need to think about going back to the basics, especially for people who are early in their career, but even for people who are further along in their career, going back to the basics.
Speaker 2 (39:56.788)
Every single job I'm on, every single job without fail. can't think of a single job where this is not true. RFIs and submittals are done wrong.
They're sloppy. They are imprecise. They don't serve the purpose. They're not structured properly. RFIs are not asking questions. Submittals are implementing changes. We have to do these things right from a legal perspective, but it also speeds things up if they're done properly. Submittals done properly will get approved faster.
They'll get approved more often. You're less likely to have a revise and resubmit. RFI is done properly. We'll get you the answers that you need quickly instead of having it age 20, 30 days on your project while everything is waiting for a response.
I'd love to jump in on that one, especially. I was really picky about RFIs when I tried to train junior employees on job sites. And the number of people coming out of college that just didn't have any writing ability, that couldn't put an idea into a succinct message in an RFI astounded me. Forcing those junior employees to rewrite their RFIs and rewrite them until they were really easy to read. A, saved architects time.
which we know is very valuable. And B, spoke well of the project team and the company because it put us out there as a brand of people who were associated with easy to work with, quick to read, not vague, never trying to pull one over on you, just flat, simple, intended to make your life easier. The branding you get out of having all of your employees do certain things really well.
Speaker 1 (41:52.302)
probably speaks very well of you in the rooms that you don't enter where bids are decided and awarded. That's the kind of thing that can really put somebody over the top out.
You're absolutely right. As always, sitting on the owner side of the table. So often I've been a GC, I've been in trade contractor and spend most of my time on the owner side of the table. Now I cannot tell you how many RFIs and submittals that I review and I'm just shaking my head and I'm frustrated and I'm trying to help the design teams get through this information quickly. I read the RFI and I don't know what the question is.
Or I don't know where it is. Tell me, this is a big building. Where exactly are we talking about?
It's very difficult when I'm brought into projects to help speed up these processes and figure out where the problems are. And it's usually with the drafting, the drafting of the RFI, the drafting of the submittal. And then I go talk to the architect or the engineer record and they say, I have to go do a bunch of research because they didn't include any information. That's why I'm 10 days late on this RFI response. Amongst everything else that I'm doing, I have to go.
do all this research. They didn't provide me any options. They didn't provide me specific enough information. So these things are fundamentals and they are not taught in engineering school or construction management school. I certainly wasn't taught in engineering school when I went. I know it's not taught because it's construction specific in engineering school. Now I have not seen a CM student come out of school knowing how to do these things yet, so I'm guessing they're not teaching it there.
Speaker 1 (43:42.712)
I was taught technical writing, but I wasn't taught RFI writing. And they're very different, or at least RFI writing is a very specific subset of technical writing. I can hear a counter argument, a devil's argument that somebody might make to say the plans were so vague that I responded with a vague RFI, tit for tat, aha. And A, two Rollins don't make a right. B, the market positioning of some firms gets them established as the people that
played by the minimum, played by the exact language of the contract. And if that's the position that you want to take on in the market as somebody who adheres very strictly to the contract and is not collaborative, maybe that's a market position that works for you if your market is small enough or if it's some specific niche. in my career experience, that position is not a tenable one.
when there's somebody down the street who is collaborative, who is engaging, who does write better RFIs and is easier to work with.
I will advocate for a contractor who knows their stuff and is easy to work with and has good documentation all day over a contractor that doesn't, whether you're a sub or a GC, you're going to get my vote because I don't have to point you back. You write an RFI, say, what do I do here? And then I point to the plans and the specs where that question's already answered. The information's there. You're just not reading it. That tells me that you're not doing your homework.
You're not familiar with your own contract documents. That's a problem. Those are not contractors from the owner's side that are helpful. You're just causing more work delays that we then have to deal with. Basic things, I do a whole class on running effective meetings. I do a whole workshop. I can do anywhere from a one hour to a half day workshop on running effective meetings. This is something that less than 10 % of people have formal training on. And how many meetings do we sit in every day?
Speaker 2 (45:48.878)
On average, it's 20 % of your calendar. And I would say for many of us, it's far more than that. Somewhere between 20 and 50 % of your eight hour, and that's assuming you have an eight hour workday, of your eight hour workday is spent in meetings, which means the way most of us deal with that is we work 10 or 12 or 14 hours instead to get our work done.
Human skills, people skills. We used to call these soft skills. We're trying to get away from that term because it doesn't have a great connotation. It sounds like we're all gonna hug and sing kumbaya. That's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about with working with people because no matter what we do, no matter where you're located, even if you're working from home all the time, you still have to work with people. You still have to develop relationships. You still have to gain people's cooperation.
to get your job done. None of us works in a silo. Leadership skills. Most people who get put in leadership positions, we're talking single digit percentages here, almost none of them get leadership training of any kind. We just put them in the position and sink or swim. And self-care. my goodness, self-care. It's super important. Our next podcast is gonna be
all about that kind of stuff, all about stress management and self-care is huge. Taking care of yourself and taking care of your people conversely when you're in a leadership position is extremely important to being a good leader and maintaining your company culture and your people.
Frequent trainings are the most important to reinforce learn skills and information, whether we're doing skill training or we're doing self-care training, people skills training, whatever that is, doing it more than just once. To providing it one time is not enough. We have to keep reinforcing that. I have a really good example. When I took Franklin Covey time management training years ago, I've taken it three times total.
Speaker 2 (48:02.54)
The very first time I took it, a project owner provided it for the whole project team. It was great. It was a fantastic class. If you ever get the opportunity, I highly recommend it. And I teach a time management course myself now, and I use some of the elements that I learned in the Franklin Covey training. But I took it once and I learned a lot of great stuff and I practiced putting some of that stuff in use. And then a couple of years later, I took it again and I was just like,
I mastered some of it, but not all of it. And I needed to continue to work on pieces of it. And then I took it a third time, like three or four years later. You're not going to master it all the first time. That's okay. 91 % of employees say they want training that is relevant to their position, to their job. And 90 % say they want it engaging and fun. Of course they do. Nobody wants boring training.
Nobody wants the safety guy sitting up there talking in a monotone voice talking about OSHA this that whatever. It's terrible.
Skill sets are rapidly changing. So ongoing training is more important than ever. Between 2015 and 2027 skill sets are expected to change by 50%.
I know we mentioned in a previous cast how fast everything's changing in the construction industry.
Speaker 1 (49:33.842)
And I think that being able to train your people to keep up with that evolving demand, there's almost a culture of training that I would advise any company to try to build. I listened to a great podcast episode where an ex-Navy SEAL was explaining the way that they view training. And he said, we spend 80 % of our time
either learning new skills, rehearsing for an operation, they use the word rehearsal, or taking on new team members and integrating them through training. And 20 % of our time actually executing on the ground. And that blew me away because then the next thing he said was most police officers around the country spend 95 % of their time on the job and 5 % of their time training. And
think about the different levels of excellence that we've seen with Navy SEALs and with police officers who have made mistakes in the past 10 or 15 years in this country that have really shocked and scared a lot of people. It's not to say anything in general about all police people. It's not saying anything about making political statement, but we can certainly say that we expect a Navy SEAL to have a higher degree of proficiency than any police officer.
And I think a lot of that has to do with this mindset of being constantly adapting, being constantly looking into training and improving themselves in the education.
think there's probably a significant difference in that example that you gave. Both of those people, police officers and Navy SEALs, they're in a very dangerous position. People's lives are at stake. Those things are both true. Although I think the statistic around a police officer having to pull a weapon or use a weapon is most police officers don't ever have to use their weapon or fire their weapon in their career.
Speaker 2 (51:37.72)
thankfully, but most of their interactions are, they're all have the potential of being life and death, but they are mostly benign interactions with the public. So we probably undervalue the training far more than we undervalue the training of a Navy SEAL because a Navy SEAL, first of all, has a very different budget, but also all of their interactions are life or death.
and have the potential for themselves or others to be harmed. I think it's a great example of the training that the police officers undertake is probably mostly mandatory training, just like construction workers, right? Something happens and then they say, okay, everybody has to have this training. And then they do these mandatory trainings and that's probably about it. Should we be doing a lot more training that isn't mandatory? And who needs self-care more than a police officer? My goodness.
The, those are tough jobs and not unlike construction, people can get hurt in the process. The skill sets and construction are changing. We are having to adapt constantly to a changing environment and figure it out. feel like we're inventing the wheel over and over from project to project. And consultants like me try to come in and say, okay, this is what we've done in the last three projects. Was it good? Was it bad? That could use improvement. Maybe we should use a different platform.
and we're still trying to find better ways to do some of this stuff. The answer is clear. You call me, you call Yellowstone Professional Education and you say, D, we need help putting together a training plan. We need help understanding what it is that we need to be doing and how we can provide it for our people. I can help you put together a training plan for your people. Most of those.
content I can provide for you, if I can't provide it for you, I can hook you up with somebody who can. So getting that focus training and taking the time to do it is absolutely the best thing you can do for your company, for your people, and for your long-term profitability. What was that statistic again? 200 % more revenue per employee and 24 % more profitable. You need to have real
Speaker 2 (53:56.302)
people that are trained to provide training and trained to put together educational programs for your people and provide that training on an ongoing basis, make it part of your company culture. Does anybody here want to be 24 % more profitable? I do.
Absolutely.
Hey, shameless plug over. Thanks you guys for joining us. We'll see you next time.
Bye bye.
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at heyd at management under construction, H-E-Y-D-E-E to get me or Brad at managementunderconstruction.com.
