by Gabrielle Trainor AO, Chair, Construction Industry Culture Taskforce (CICT)
We should all be proud of the great contribution the construction industry makes to Australia. Our industry creates the quality and pulse of our lives, including for our families, communities, businesses and our national economy.
The houses, roads, rail, schools, cultural buildings, broadband and energy networks, hospitals, commercial, logistic and retail facilities shape our environment and our wellbeing as a nation. The community benefits from extraordinary feats of engineering, design and construction – the landmarks and enablers of productivity and society in our cities and towns.
Construction, correctly classed as an essential industry, provides ten per cent of Australia’s jobs and offers good pay for hard work. Even though there is always more to do, physical safety in an inherently risky environment has improved over many years of focused attention.
Technology, innovation and environmental consciousness are beginning to transform the way the industry works. Yes – there is a lot we should be proud of. And yet, we know our industry could be so much better. Should be so much better.
Needs to be so much better. Ours is an industry which has for too long operated in deeply embedded ways to its own detriment and to the detriment of many of our people. Its very sustainability, especially in infrastructure construction, has been in question.
For many, it’s an industry not even to be considered as an employer of choice. The small number of women who enter construction all too often find a culture that does not welcome them and does not cater for even their most basic amenity needs, much less their wellbeing and work and life balance.
They cannot see a career pathway for themselves. They find a workplace consisting of 88 per cent men – the least diverse of any Australian industry by an increasing margin – with excessively long working hours, intolerably high levels of mental ill health and half its people saying they are suffering burnout.
Men, especially those who wish to share family responsibilities and to ‘have a life’, are increasingly saying a construction industry that asks them to work routinely six days a week is not for them. Poor mental health among construction workers has a strikingly strong correlation. Workplace culture is often singled out as a cause of psychological stress.
If you are a construction worker, you are six times more likely to die from suicide than from a workplace accident. And all this at a time when the infrastructure pipeline has never been bigger and the jobs we can’t fill, never higher. We need 105,000 more construction workers by 2023 to fulfil the infrastructure pipeline that has presently been committed.
Governments are conscious that to boost state and national productivity, especially post COVID-19, we need more women in the workforce.
What can be done to change this picture?
It’s not as though the problems haven’t been identified and there haven’t been many attempts at change. Some great work has been done over many years by governments, industry associations, unions and organisations in trying to identify and address wellbeing and mental health as well as encouraging girls to study STEM subjects and seeking ways to attract and retain women into the industry.
Emerging pilot projects are seeking to address excessive working hours – the enemy of safety, productivity, wellbeing, and the attractiveness of the industry. But the damning industry statistics on diversity, mental and physical health, family conflict among construction workers, and the industry’s ability to attract and retain its talent, particularly women, remain stubbornly stuck.
The Construction Industry Culture Taskforce (CICT) has been working on a way to achieve systemic step change by leveraging the government infrastructure procurement process as a powerful agent to make a lasting difference.
Our academic research has told us that tackling the three interrelated cultural issues of working hours, mental health and wellbeing, and gender diversity, together, in an integrated way, will give us the best chance of securing lasting change.
Where did the culture taskforce come from?
The CICT is a unique collaboration between the construction industry, the NSW and Victorian Governments and leading workplace academics, established in late 2018.
Our genesis is in the Construction Industry Leadership Forum which has been working with state governments to try to change the settings of the industry and how it interacts with its clients in major project delivery.
Its reform priorities are threefold and interdependent – the commerciality of the procurement process, the skills and capability gaps in the industry, and industry culture. The Taskforce was set up to address this third priority – how to reform the culture of the construction industry.
Our work and the research that underpins it makes a compelling case that government clients need to be part of the solution by requiring a methodical focus on culture as part of its evaluation of elements, like value for money, experience and capability, design, timeline and social procurement outcomes.
Increasingly, governments recognise the need to think differently and with greater foresight about their role in contracting with an industry where avoidable harm and problematic culture contribute to its failure to attract a sufficient workforce to meet the growing project pipeline.
This, of course, has cost and productivity implications.
Why is the procurement process the key? Can’t industry change its own culture?
Requiring a focus on project culture will level the playing field for bidding proponents and arrest the typical, and so often counterproductive, race to the bottom on time and cost, without accounting for the costs incurred in productivity and harm caused by the prevailing way that ‘things have always been done’.
The deficiencies in the culture of the industry are deeply entrenched and interrelated in cause and effect. Physical safety has rightly been an intense focus of the industry over many years and that effort must continue and strengthen.
But the same effort must go into addressing the risks posed by other aspects of a damaging workplace health and culture which have, by comparison, been neglected.
Our recently commissioned report showed the cost of doing nothing, as simply letting the excessive hours, the mental health outcomes and the lack of diversity stay the way it is costs around $8 billion per year.
There is increasing focus on regularising working hours to align with other major industries, including 50 – 55 hour individual roster caps and where feasible, Monday to Friday working weeks. The study on the construction of the Concord Hospital in NSW is a case in point, as is recently released research by Timewise out of the UK.
The evidence so far indicates that reducing excessive hours has a significant positive effect on worker wellbeing and the attractiveness of the industry, including to women, and does not negatively affect project timeframes and costs in any material way. Rather, productivity improves.
So, what are the standards?
The Taskforce has proposed a draft set of standards designed to be incorporated into the procurement process, in the same way that Aboriginal Employment Targets and Infrastructure Legacy Skills have been baked into procurement in various jurisdictions.
The standards cover diversity, wellbeing and working hours. Some elements are as simple as identifying gender pay gaps and developing a plan to close them. Others are more complex to implement – for example, the standard which requires that no individual worker on a project works more than 55 hours per week. You can find them in detail at www.cultureinconstruction.com.au.
We have recently concluded a significant exercise to receive feedback from a broad range of stakeholders on the draft standards and have a further iteration based on the feedback. NSW and Victorian Government delivery agencies are working on how the standards will be implemented in practice and several construction firms are preparing to be ‘first movers’.
We have also seen interest from private clients wishing to include the standard as part of their ESG credentials. In our next phase, we have commissioned six pilot projects to strengthen the evidence base for the effectiveness of the standards and to finalise the detailed implementation guidelines, prior to achieving our aim of the adoption of the final standards during 2023.
We hope and expect that in time the standards will become routinely accepted across jurisdictions and among private construction clients and will be regularly independently reviewed. It is in all our interests to act on construction industry culture and to act on it as a national priority.
Gabrielle Trainor will be speaking on a panel exploring how we can change the culture of construction at the Future of Infrastructure Virtual Conference on Friday 8 April 2022, as part of the 2022 Critical Infrastructure Summit. Register for free at www.critical-infrastructure.
