Retention - A focus for rebuilding capacity

Full employment is upon us, and the pool of talent has well and truly dried up.

Talent scarcity has been a hot topic for many years now but never this tough. And in times of crisis organisations typically go into short-term thinking, which in a talent crisis means doubling down on recruitment. This is unfortunately the wrong focus. Instead, our mindset should be on the longer-term sustainable pipeline of talent, which is only possible through a focus on retention.

In consideration of retention, here are five key focus areas that organisations and industry more broadly should consider.

Employee mental health, wellbeing, and burnout is often thought of as a personal problem. That’s why most companies have responded to symptoms by offering resources focused on individuals, such as wellness programs and EAPs.

Research findings from McKinsey [1] show that burnout is experienced by individuals, but the most powerful drivers of burnout are systemic organisational imbalances across job demands and job resources.

Employers can and should view high rates of burnout as a powerful warning sign that the organisation—not the individuals in the workforce—needs to undergo meaningful systemic change.

The construction industry does have a reputation for toxic workplace behaviours which impose a major cost for employers—they are heavily implicated in burnout, which correlates with intent to leave and ultimately drives attrition.

BIS Oxford Economics [2] identified that in 2017/18, the key economic costs to the construction industry because of the current culture was ~$8 billion annually, through morbidity, productivity, presentism etc.

The culture that exists in any organisation or industry is based on the small daily moments that have accumulated over weeks, months, and years. For any change to occur, positive intentional behaviours must be adopted, all while aligning to the values of the organisation.

Ultimately we should be asking how do we enable our people to thrive rather than how to stop people from leaving. If our only standard is that people don’t leave, then as an industry we have lost our way.

A focus on retention should also consider not just the people currently working in the industry, but also those we are looking to attract.

Considering that 80-90% of the workforce in the construction and engineering sector are male, an in-group bias sets in and reinforces the existing norms and closes off any opportunity to attract new and diverse talent.

Understanding any current barriers and perspectives of women is key to any ongoing strategy to increase participation levels but also for retention.

Recent research by RMIT [3] identified three inter-related themes as barriers for women into the sector that should be addressed by additional support:

• women are outsiders in the construction industry

• consequence-free behaviour is an enabler of inappropriate behaviour

• a culture of silence with a lack of transparent processes for reporting inappropriate behaviour.

The central goal must be to address the culture within construction that tends to exclude and create barriers for women. To date for many organisations, diversity equity and inclusion initiatives represent a purely tokenistic approach with a ticked box being the desired outcome. However, this approach ultimately has the potential for further harm, division, and internal resentment because the initiative is not authentically embraced.

Only the organisational leaders and workers themselves — not policymakers, administrators or diversity experts — can create an environment within their industry that in turn can create the necessary change. And for leaders they must lead with intention across two key areas.

Firstly, they must cultivate supportive, psychologically safe work environments, where undesired behaviours are less likely to spread across the organisation. The industry must address the pervasive fear of failure to encourage leaders and workers to step out of their comfort zones. Transformative change requires an acceptance that not every new initiative will be an immediate success, and encouragement to keep trying.

Secondly, leaders should intentionally lead with inclusion. Leaders must be convicted enough in what they are doing to take great risks in opening adaptive space for others, and humble enough to step back so others can step forward. In short, these types of leaders must be comfortable with tension and willing to engage in it. For organisations to make any paradigm shift, it will require enabling leadership rather than traditional hierarchical leadership.

Finally, to build a sustainable pipeline of talent a collaborative industry approach is required, rather than individual organisations continuing to go alone.

Yes, the industry in in competition against each other for the best talent, but the industry is also in a bigger competition against all other industries. And as such a pie expanding approach should be adopted, one where the industry looks to collaboratively increase the pie rather than individually taking a much smaller slice of the pie.

And this can start by sharing knowledge and data, including successes and lessons learned.

Mikael Heinonen is a CQS and Co-Founder of Collabaloop, a start-up that has built a workforce engagement platform specifically for the construction industry.

1- McKinsey Health Institute (2022) Addressing employee burnout: Are you solving the rightproblem?

2- Crook, D., & Tressler, A. (2021). The Cost of Doing Nothing Report. BIS Oxford Economics

3- Holdsworth et al. (2020) Women in Construction: Exploring the Barriers and Supportive Enablersof Wellbeing in the Workplace. RMIT