This past October, I had the opportunity to facilitate some strategic planning at the Del E. Webb School of Construction at Arizona State University at the invitation of my friend and ASU faculty member, Tim Becker. It was a great couple days in Tempe. During my time there, I asked Tim if he could connect me with one of his colleagues, Dr. Kenn Sullivan, a faculty member at the school. I learned about Kenn from a podcast he appeared on a few years back that I found to be very thought provoking.
Kenn was gracious enough to spend more than an hour with me and tell me about some of his current work. We discussed demographics, artificial intelligence, project delivery, and more. During our discussion he made a very simple statement that I hadn’t explicitly considered: “Our human resources and work systems were designed during a time in which we had more workers than jobs. That is not the case today and it won’t be for some time.” A simple and factual reflection.
In this day and age, there’s a difficult equation to balance when growing the team and keeping the team together: being as generous and flexible as possible to attract and keep talent while staying in business. Any amount of generosity and flexibility serves nobody if you can’t keep the train on the tracks during the hard times.
Additionally, all industries will need to maintain or improve productivity with fewer people going forward. We need to be more productive (i.e., produce more per manhour), how ever you calculate it. The construction industry in particular will need to make gains by all means necessary, as its productivity has been declining for at least 50 years.
Kenn was actually in Iowa in December for an engagement he had planned, so we had him out to visit one of our job sites to see our Construction Production 2.0 system and The Story Way. It was great to get his feedback and insights into our approach to bringing joy back to construction work with a focus on the work and the worker. We are working very hard to improve productivity, construction careers, and to help everyone we work with have a good day every day.
People are a limiting resource. We have legacy systems in this industry and in many others that are built on the premise that there are more workers than jobs. That is not the case today, and we are focusing on the Story Way to lead the way for our employee-owners and for those we serve.
Mike Espeset
CEO