Latest / Daily Influence / 535. Building Safer Growth: Aligning Culture, Compliance, and Clarity on the Job Site

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535. Building Safer Growth: Aligning Culture, Compliance, and Clarity on the Job Site · Daily Influence

• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the daily influence where our mission is to deliver a daily dose of positive influence that can uplift you personally or be shared within your sphere of influence.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: While not every episode may directly apply to your unique circumstances, we strive to provide insights and inspiration relevant to most people's daily, weekly, and monthly lives.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whether you are tuning in during the morning, noon or night, the daily influence is here for you.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Listen, share, and embrace the power of influence in your life.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody Brian Smith here with the i&team series and your daily influence.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, another podcast episode with Brandon Cohen, our amazing associate who is working with us on our smart management initiatives and has been with me this week walking through a number of real life
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: scenarios with clients that we have around the country.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And today we are going to be talking about one of the areas in business that's overlooked, which is operational support and safety.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And how it directly impacts not only growth, compliance, culture and accountability.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: These things touch across the spectrum of our organizations and they're so important.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And oftentimes we take this topic for granted.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for us at IA and in the IN team series, being able to work with a company who is a long standing client in Illinois in the construction business with a very high risk environment.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as a union contractor, they self-performed a wide range of services.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when their expansion started in in that expansion was a scaled expansion, they met more people, more complexity and a growing need for clarity on compliance and safety.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we just dove into this and you'll hear how we applied smart management systems to build a comprehensive
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: safety infrastructure.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it didn't just check boxes.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It trams formed how the entire organization communicated, operated, and held itself accountable.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It was not just rewriting safety programs in multiple language.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It was delivering real time
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  [SPEAKER_01]: on site training and feedback loops that came from the field to the office in real time.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in this episode, you're going to see what it takes to create a safety first culture that scales and provides that support across the entire spectrum of your organization.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I hope you enjoy the discussion with Brandon and we look forward to talking to you again soon.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's discuss operational support and safety.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of our clients is a great example to dig into there.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What triggered the need for operational support, especially around safety with this client?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: This particular client, and actually it's a group of clients are in the trades.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I say the trades, it's a construction company.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in their portfolio or in their area of ownership, they have a number of different trades in the construction industry.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So one of the things that they faced was just understanding how to
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: be better construction managers, how do I control the different aspects of my business?
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because they are not a traditional, general contracting company.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what I mean by that is not only do they manage the projects themselves, but they are also self-performing some of the tactical work that's done to build facilities.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they provide the carpenters, they provide the laborers, and they provide different aspects of it.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were a lot of moving parts in this company when we started doing work with them.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were already a almost twenty year old company.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they were very mature in the market.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were very understanding of what they did.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're very good at it.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So not only did they have a good reputation because they were in the market a long time, but they quite frankly just did a good job.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: However,
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  [SPEAKER_01]: As they were growing and getting larger, things were starting to show cracks.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Information falling through the cracks.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not being able to have good collaboration on the different aspects of the team.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: The transfer of information from management to tactics was getting afraid or wasn't as clear as it could be.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what that led to was
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: A team that wasn't as upskilled as it should be on things like safety, like communication, like collaboration within teams.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we were brought in to try to shore all that up and provide a foundation that they could maintain.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The culture they had built over twenty years, but also get them ready to grow and scale for their future and do it in a way that would get them safer.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: communicate better and create a more inclusive and a more clearly defined team structure for the whole organization.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And was our support focused on compliance, culture, operational clarity, or a combination of all three?
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, as most definitely a combination of all three on the compliance side, we can start with regulatory compliance, you know, OSHA and EPA and unions, and because the ones we're talking about are union companies, and there is a lot of different regulatory issues just in those bodies.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we brought clarity on how
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: what their needs were as authorities having some jurisdiction over our clients' operations and how we can integrate that and not have it interfere with this family culture that had been built.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We also taught them how to integrate things like safety and make safety not a negative thing, not something that's burdensome, but we clearly defined what it was and
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Like frankly, what it is is you go to work and you don't go home or you get to go home.
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't go home with injuries and you can be a asset to your family because you're not getting hurt at work.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we provided that clarity of understanding
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a vehicle to communicate better throughout the whole organization and one that invited collaboration from everybody.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't a dictatorial top-down type of engagement.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: There's one that brought the team together and got them all talking all working together and quite frankly all excited about what
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: we were doing for them, operationally from the safety perspective and how we worked with the age jays or the authorities having jurisdiction over them.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So now let's take a step back to when we first started working with this company.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: How did we assess their current systems and what gaps did we identify with them?
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when we first started with them, which was ten years ago, we did what we always do when we start a engagement
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: with our clients, which is called our smart disvision.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And basically what that does is it has them share with us a tremendous amount of information about them from all aspects of their organization.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That leads us to Q&A sessions, not just with ownership, but with individual stakeholders within the organization, different project managers, the construction workers.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And we write a report and that report identified the gaps.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then from those gaps, we write a remediation or an improvement plan.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And we prioritize that.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: That priority can be very subjective.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: There could be immediate needs.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: For example, safety needs might be immediate because we have regulatory issues.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Others might just be on a wish list just to make things better, things that we can improve, but aren't really required to be successful.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to be more successful.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we took that approach and we wrote that plan and we started integrating early with communication and then we added more tactical systems.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We added more tactical and project structure and all the while maintaining that smart foundation.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as we expanded it out,
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: we brought everybody in together and got everybody included.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So quite literally the entire organization, every person in the organization is now a stakeholder.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what actions did we take to implement a new safety program and how is that safety program received by the organization?
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the first thing we did was identify what safety program they had through the business vision process.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: We identified any gaps we had in it and then
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: What gaps that the team had in it also was the team upskilled enough on current safety protocols.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Did they have the certifications that were beneficial to the organization?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And those were the early low hanging things that we could do.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: We got everybody retrained.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: We put in new safety programs like toolbox talks.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those were all done early on in a very manual way, but it helped lay foundation of a safety culture.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then as we matured and as we brought more technology and more clarity of how smart was supporting them.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And as we got them more involved in the smart management structure, we started adding tools.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: technology-based tools that allowed us to communicate and also collaborate with them in a more engaged way.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's evolved into an electronic toolbox talk delivery system that provides outbound
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: back and forth communication with the teams.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It allows collaboration not only from us to them, but also with them amongst themselves in this environment.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what it's done is lowered their moderate increased their profit margins because we're lowering cost and allowed them to grow way beyond three and a half times when we started with them.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: where they were when we began.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And lastly, looking at where this client is today, how has our support improved their day-to-day operations and team accountability?
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the improvement in team operations, we've allowed them to grow three and a half times in the last ten years.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we've only added revenue generating people to the team.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: We haven't had to add
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: overhead to the team.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we have brought efficiencies to the organization that are really leaning into a scaled mode, which is really hard to do in construction.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, we've brought a level of trust amongst the entire organization from the laborers to the CEO where communication is open.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's continuous.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And the culture is more of a family based culture than a huge organization, what you would expect out of a high eight figure conglomerate that does construction all over really all over the country now.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That wraps up our discussion on operational support and safety.