How do you change construction’s outdated workplace culture?
For the last few years, Australia’s construction industry has been booming. As one of country’s largest industries, it employs around 1.18 million people and in 2018, brought in $140 billion in GDP.
But for such a bright and prosperous sector, there is a dark side too. For a long time, the culture within the industry has been associated with a dominant or aggressive approach and it’s part of the reason that gender diversity in the sector remains heavily tipped towards men. So how can employers transform a traditionally male-oriented sector into one that embraces all employees, regardless of their gender?
HRD spoke to Kate Evans, group executive for people, brand and communications at commercial fit-out and refurbishment company, SHAPE Australia, who over the last five years, has spearheaded a culture transformation within the business.
During the company’s inception 30 years ago, looking after their people was a key value of the founders. But after the impact of the GFC, a bullish attitude to growth took over and the company lost its direction.
“We had this very big conflict as an organisation. Half of the management team were still more old school, family-oriented in their thinking and the way we treated our people and then we had some very ambitious people coming through who were really about success,” Evans said.
“It’s fair to say that around the 2013 period we were really lost as an organisation. The only thing we knew was that we had to go back to what our roots were and put people back as our number one priority.”
With company culture varying widely from state to state, SHAPE needed to define its overall strategy and think carefully about what sort of leaders it wanted in the business. But introducing cultural initiatives – often stereotyped as ‘soft and fluffy’ – was not going to be an easy process in an industry like construction.
Evans took a data-led approach with the help of Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) surveys which measure different leadership styles. The data identifies 12 different approaches in three categories – aggressive/defensive styles, passive/defensive styles and constructive styles. The idea is to move the dial away from aggressive and passive leadership – which dominated SHAPE’s culture metrics in 2008 - to a more constructive style, embodying a humanistic, encouraging and affiliative approach.
They began by laying the groundwork with a reimagined vision statement pinpointing cultural values and a strategic plan to equip leaders with the tools they needed to encourage a more constructive, positive working environment. Over the next few years, they saw great gains in some states, but in others, aggressive and dominant leadership was harder to shift.
“We formally retested our culture in 2016 and what became very apparent to us in that process was that in the states where we were having challenges at the leadership level, the culture results were identical,” Evans said.
“They still had a very aggressive culture which was at odds with any kind of corporate vision. But all of a sudden, we could also really see that business performance wasn't there either.
“We made some really big changes to our leadership team at that time because of those results and put more constructive leaders in those branches. In just 12 months, we turned the culture measure around but also, we changed the business performance.”
Culture and leadership was no longer a “soft and fluffy” HR initiative. They saw improvements in safety incident rates, employee churn, net promoter scores and ultimately, profit.
“It really was the moment we got complete and utter attention across the whole leadership,” Evans said.
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In 2017, the board voted to put improving company culture as the number one priority. The HR team focused on delivering training and workshops for employees at all levels, but also with SHAPE’s subcontractors. The aim was to improve working relationships and diffuse the idea that an aggressive attitude was the only way to get the work done. It resulted in higher employee engagement and projects being completed in less time than expected – a win for both sides.
By 2020, profit in one of the previously struggling states had risen by 59%, and culture continues to be front and centre for the company. All site managers are given leadership coaching to help change outdated attitudes and foster a more positive, productive approach.
“After about 12 months of coaching, one of our site managers walked past me one day and said: ‘Hey Kate, you can't beat an a**hole by being an a**hole, can you’?” Evans said. “It’s become a little bit of a motto for me. Fundamentally, it’s about treating others as you'd like to be treated. Have a conversation, find out what's important to them and if we can't meet it, we can at least explain why.”
