Amidst the scarcity of talent in the construction industry, the true measure of success lies in our ability to retain and empower our workforce. By cultivating a supportive environment and embracing effective strategies, we pave the path to building a thriving future. Today, we dive deep into the pressing issue of talent retention in the construction industry with Matt DiBara of DiBara Masonry and The Contractor Consultants. Matt sheds light on the persistent labor shortage that plagues the construction sector. He discusses why talent retention is paramount for companies in this industry, emphasizing the need for effective strategies in the face of fierce competition. He also explores the keys to creating a supportive and fulfilling work environment that attracts and retains top talent. Matt offers practical advice and real-life examples to guide construction professionals on their path to securing and retaining their most valuable asset—their skilled workforce. Don’t miss this ultimate guide to retaining top talent in the construction industry. Tune in now and learn how to navigate the challenges posed by the labor shortage.
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The Ultimate Guide To Retaining Top Talent In The Construction Industry With Matt DiBara
Retaining employees is tremendously important in construction. That’s why I have my guest, Matt DiBara, back on the show. He’s a fourth-generation mason. Matt knows what he’s talking about because he’s lived it. We dive into the importance of regular check-ins with your new employees to make sure that they’re on the right track. We talk about how you can go through process improvement conversations with your employees so that when issues arise, you’re not necessarily making it personal right away, but you’re focusing on the process.
If you can improve the process and the person can buy into the process, then that helps with their activity, their performance, and then the retention of that person. We also have a very interesting conversation, and I want you to pay particular attention to this. It’s later in the interview when we talk about how to handle toxic high performers. You know those guys and gals in your company that make you a lot of money but have a negative impact on people in your organization. Matt has a realistic answer to that question. It’s a non-consultant type of answer. You will find it tremendously helpful. Make sure you read that portion of the interview that is later on in our discussion.
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Matt, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Eric.
It’s great to have you back on the show. We’re going to talk about one of the major issues in construction. We all know that there’s a shortage of labor and talent. That’s never going to go away. It’s critical that construction companies are able to retain the talent that they have. What are the biggest challenges construction companies have with retaining talent?
With retention, we’re talking about the clear end goal. There’s the retention factor. First, we have to find them and keep them. We have to find the people, grow our teams, fill our empty slots, and then retain them. We want them to stay for a long period, not just keep them today and tomorrow. What we’re after is the maximization of each of the team members because the output is varying. If I have somebody who’s not super motivated, they might output at 50%. If they love the role and what they’re doing, and they’re in a great culture, they might do 2, 3, or even 4 times output.
That’s what we’re after. The benchmark before that is I have to keep my team first. That’s what we’re saying here. Construction as a whole needs to catch up with a lot of the other industries in terms of building culture, making job sites fun, and having a culture. If you ask a lot of construction companies what their culture is or pull their team members, it’s interesting to find those answers. We have done it.
It’s interesting because what you’re saying then is that to retain people, one of the keys to that is having a strong culture that attracts the right people and repels the wrong people.
Retention is broken down into many areas. One is communication, defining your culture and benchmarks clearly, and having measurable goals. If you’re an A player, one of the biggest things is you have to know how to get an A. It’s interesting. The inability to retain A player talent is merely the inability to clearly measure because A players love getting A’s.
What I mean by that is if I’m great, I’m used to getting pats on the back, “You’re amazing.” If I don’t have benchmarks in place where I can be judged, hang my hat, and say, “I did this,” it creates difficulty in the workplace, especially for those great people. You create a breeding ground for mediocrity within your company, or you have the potential to do that.
One of the challenges that construction companies have is that from their perspective, there aren’t enough A players out there. Unfortunately, from their perspective, they’ve got B and C players. They need them because they need a warm body on the job site at least even though it may not be the ideal scenario. They are impacting their profitability in that way.
I can speak from experience and second that with my family business. We had that issue for a while, but it comes down to doubling and tripling the amount of effort to bring those people in because they do exist. They are there. It comes in a couple of different forms. It comes in training and motivating your C and B players. Typically, the most important thing is defining your culture and having good communication.
I’m a simple person. If you were to boil down culture into its essence, culture is the unspoken rule. I know a company has good culture when I can shadow somebody being trained. Let’s use my family construction company as an example. I can hear them say, “We don’t do it this way. We do it this way instead. This is how we do things.” It’s these unspoken norms or promises that are made among the team. It’s almost like an unspoken and not oftentimes spoken promise of what you’re going to get when you work here.
The culture is defined. I want to explore this with you. It’s training and motivating C and B players. I’ll buy that B players can be trained and motivated. Can C players be trained and motivated?
You need to try. What we found are benchmarks. If I can’t get a C player to a B player in a certain amount of time, then I need to make some hard decisions, but the problem is this whole thing doesn’t operate in a vacuum. What I mean by this is this concept of retention and culture doesn’t operate in a vacuum. The most important thing, and I can speak from experience, is the ability to find candidates. You cannot operate and build a great culture in scarcity.
If your mindset is, “I don’t have enough people. John is late, but I can’t enforce the culture because I know that if I write John up, John is going to quit. If John quits, I can’t get the job done,” you’ve already folded the deck of cards. The most important thing is your ability to find and vet candidates. That builds your confidence to then do the things over here that need to be done.
You struck on a very important word there. It touches on what I call the Short and Curlies syndrome. I don’t let someone go because they have me by the short and curlies. They have leverage in the relationship because they know that I won’t fire them because they see that I need them on that job even if I’m performing at a low level. You hit it there. If I have a funnel full of candidates, then I have the confidence to look at my C players and say, “Either you upgrade your game, or we’re going to have to make another decision.”
It’s five simple steps. When we built the contractor hiring course, everything we do with outsourced hiring, which is actively doing this for contractors, is built around five steps. First, I need a clear understanding. What are the rules? What are the job functions? I have to find my candidates, vet them, hire, and retain them. There’s culture communication. We have a process with check-ins that works well. We have another one called process improvement meetings. It’s interesting how that’s gone with modern construction and the ability to critique without critiquing.
It’s a concept of blaming the process, not the person always, and taking it from the perspective of process breakdown, but you have to nail it in sequence. You have to have that big candidate pool because if you don’t, you won’t feel confident. You will operate in scarcity. We can’t go and fix the fourth and fifth steps if we don’t have the first three down. I’m presupposing at this point that we’ve got a nice long list of candidates. We have the ability to let somebody go if they’re not meeting our standards. That’s when this game gets fun.
That’s interesting. I want to hit the check-in one. There’s a quote I love from Hemingway. He said, “How do you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” Sometimes I’m talking to my executive coaching clients, and they’re saying, “I had a blow-up with one of my PMs. He’s having a real issue with X, Y, or Z.” I’ll ask them, “How often do you have a one-on-one meeting with them?” They will say, “Once every six months or never.” Tell me what this check-in process is all about. Does that relate to what I’m talking about?
Think of a plane. The two most dangerous times are when you’re taking off and you’re landing. When you get up to cruising altitude, things are usually smooth unless there’s some turbulence unexpected. It’s the same concept with team members. When someone is leaving or you’re off-boarding somebody, things can get messy. It’s the same thing when they’re coming in. When a new team member comes in, have clear expectations and a clear scorecard of how you get an A here.
If you don’t have these things, these are huge opportunities. We have found the check-in process a great success. With our clients, there’s a 2-week check-in, 4-week check-in, and 90-day check-in. You can do revolving for 3 or 6 months, but what this does is it creates an environment where there are so many benefits. Number one is if you have somebody who’s doing phenomenal, we highly emphasize all of these check-ins. It’s four times in the first roughly four and a half months.
There’s a 2-week check-in, 4-week check-in, and 90-day check-in. That’s three. What’s the fourth one?
It’s revolving, either 3 months or 6 months. That’s for the entire tenure of the team member at your company. It facilitates many things. We have had people two weeks in who get a raise. They get another raise at the 1-month check-in and the 90-day check-in. They’re on fire. They’re loving this. For other people, it creates a conversation early and often about improvement, “Being on time is important. You’ve only been here two weeks. We get it. We understand. We’re going to work through this. A month later, we’re still having this issue. What do we need to do? How can we support you?”
One of the biggest things in our industry is to communicate early and often and to have a culture that allows communication and good conversations. That comes down to managers being trained on how to handle issues. Somebody makes a mistake in front of five people. Let’s say you’re a site super. You’re the PM. You walk on the job and you’re like, “What’s this? What’s that?” You’re berating them in front of everybody else. It’s not the way to do it. All these important factors have to be respected and taken into account as well.
How can a construction leader who’s having one of these check-ins get into the space of being a coach and going side by side with the person that they’re working with to make sure that they’re up-leveling their game as much as possible?
It comes out in a mindset. I don’t work with, “I work for anybody that works for me.” I won’t go into it that way. I go into it like, “I work for you.” My measure is, “Are you making more money? Are you growing?” I look at it like this. My number one thing is I either want you to grow in any of the companies I have and become a better human and all of those things, or I want to know that for whatever reason you do leave, you leave and you’re more valuable in the workplace.
One of the biggest ways we lose people in my construction company, and I’ll speak to the family business here, is they start their companies or move. That’s a testament to what we have done because we have mentored and grown them. I don’t have any ill will against that. We developed them not just in the work sense, but you need to look at them holistically.
What are your life goals? What are you trying to achieve on this big rock we call Earth? You look at that and couple that with the mindset of, “I work for you.” That’s my mindset in the meetings, “I’m here to work for you. How can I work for you to get this goal achieved? How do we get you growing? What is it that you want to do? How do we get there?”
How do you balance that I-work-for-you perspective with the fact that I do want something from you in your production? It’s going back to that short and curlies thing because if I’m saying I work for you, then maybe with the wrong type of person, they can use that as leverage or think they can use it as leverage.
That’s why you have to clearly define the goals and the outcomes first. This is where we’re both going. I work for you to get there. I take that metaphorical hat off when we leave the meeting, but it’s important. We lack empathy in the construction industry. I grew up in the industry where the louder I got yelled at, the bigger mistake I made. Throwing stuff and job site fights were the culture. That was what I saw in construction years ago. Now, things are changing.
When you can approach something from a genuine place of empathy, I’ve personally been amazed at what we have been able to achieve for that. The measurable outcome prevents what you’re talking about because when you have goals and timelines, it’s impossible for somebody to pull them over on you. It’s like, “We said that in a month, we would be here. We’re a little short. We can work with that. We’re halfway to the goalpost in full-time. What happened here? We can’t have this happen.”
When you can approach something from a genuine place of empathy, you'd be amazed at what you’ll be able to achieve for that. Click To TweetThat’s that clear understanding part. When you define how to get an A and you both know that, it’s the best thing in the world because they’re walking into the meeting. They already know, “I made a mistake. I’m not hitting the goals.” They’re telling you why they’re not hitting it before you even ask. You have to take the time to define where we’re going. That’s what’s leadership’s most important responsibility. What are we going after? What does it look like? Most importantly, is it measurable and manageable?
Going back to these check-ins, you got your 2-week, 4-week, and 90-day check-in. Is there a major difference between the content of the conversation in those different check-ins?
It’s the tone. It’s two weeks of, “How are things going? What do you think? What can we help you with?” Usually, you’re getting some kinks from their direct report. You’re trying to isolate things that stand out. In management, in essence, there’s the middle line. There’s exceptional and extremely poor. You’re trying to emphasize where are these two things happening, The tone of the two-week check-in is very much like, “How are you doing?” After a month, it’s like, “We’re on the racetrack. We’re a couple of laps in here. I’m excited for this 90-day.” The 90-day is like, “This is how this is going to look moving forward.” The tone changes, but the conversation is the same.
Let’s go to the senior levels of the company. Maybe we’re not talking about someone who’s a laborer in the field, an apprentice, or something. Let’s say you’ve hired a project manager or a project executive, and they have multiple people reporting to them or they’re running multiple projects. Would your check-in frequency with them change in any way?
I would keep it the same. It’s extremely important because the higher up you go in the org chart, especially in construction, the more critical it is that you’re catching things early and often because if they’re not a good fit and if they’re not doing things right, the damage is so impactful. The downside is so high because either they’re upsetting many of your team members lower in the org chart or they’re upsetting many clients. The potential downstream effect of a laborer versus a senior estimator, a project executive, or an operations manager is much higher.
What you’re saying then is you feel that after that 90-day check-in, a check-in every 3 months or 6 months is sufficient? You don’t need to check in more than that.
These are formal documented procedural check-ins that are different. It’s different. That’s a big distinction. What are your short-term and long-term goals? What do you find you enjoy the most? This is very much a procedural check-in. It’s meant to create space because you should have lots of semi-formal and what I call informal check-ins. Those are extremely important, but those are based on the person, their type, and how they operate.
Especially if you want to scale a company, you want a standard that is blanketed across the board and is as foolproof as possible. This method allows something like that. You can adjust. We have some people on the managerial side that are checking in a lot. They want daily. It’s their communication style and other people’s, but this is the mandatory baseline. If every construction company had something like this, they would find a better result.
Here’s one of the frustrations that a lot of construction companies have, particularly if they’re folks my age in their 40s and 50s. You’re bringing in folks who are in their twenties, and they’re talented, but they have different communication styles. They have sometimes different expectations about what it means to be in the construction industry. What have you found are some effective ways to bridge those gaps between the older folks and the younger folks?
The check-ins that we talked about. Think of a car. Imagine you have a car and you got a lump in your tire. If you’re driving that car at 10 or 15 miles an hour, you might not notice it. There might be a little bit of a rattle. Get up to 45. The steering wheel starts to shake. At 65 or 70, you’re like, “This whole car is junk.” We found that if you follow a process like this, at the two-week mark, little things should start coming up, “You didn’t get back to my text. I called you three times. You didn’t answer.” “I was busy working.” “Moving forward, it would be important. Sometimes these calls might be emergencies.”
There has to be a way to do two things. 1.) Direct communication early and often. 2.) Indirect communication. We have a thing called an honest employee audit. We do this with all of our clients. The frequency varies typically quarterly. There’s a special 1 to 10 scale. We isolate all the key areas of a construction company. There are different ones for a managerial hire in the org chart, and then there’s the main bulk of the company. It’s a 1 to 10 scale.
What it does is it allows executives and owners specifically to see. How many times have you sat with a senior estimator or a senior executive, and they’re like, “Everyone is happy. Everyone is good. Jobs are on schedule.” You get these honest employee audits back, “How valued do I feel my hard work is at this company on a scale from 1 to 10? Two. How well does management take my ideas and feedback on how we can improve? Two.” You also need to balance direct face-to-face communication with some indirect communication that allows you to get a good pulse on where the company is.
When you have these two frameworks, you can add whatever you want in the middle. That’s your secret recipe. All companies do it differently. Everyone does it differently based on the role they hire and how that person likes to communicate, but the goal is to establish some framework, bumpers, or safety nets. Those two things expose a lot. Even in the first six weeks twice if it is that younger person versus older dynamic, things are coming up. That’s very common.
It’s interesting because you’re alluding there to the fact that you ask a leader, “How are things going?” The leader says, “Everything is awesome.” That’s based on the fact that’s what people are telling me, or they’re at least telling me it doesn’t suck, but then you do one of these audits, and issues come up. Where are those gaps typically seen in those audits? Are there repeating patterns where the leader is blind to certain things?
You have certain leadership styles and cultures where it’s a little bit old school. That’s what I grew up in, “We don’t tolerate complaining. We will figure it out and get it done.” Sometimes that culture becomes embedded. That’s what I grew up around. That was what construction was. It was like, “It’s raining.” “Do you have a rain jacket?” When you give them an anonymous voice, you tend to find that there are things. Pay-related is one. The biggest overarching theme is feeling heard and empathy in construction.
There are ways it shows up, “Does my management value my feedback and ways to improve? Is my hard work appreciated?” There are different ways we package it, but at the end of the day, it’s like, “I’m struggling. A) I don’t feel that I can go to somebody and they will listen, or B) I’ve been going to them and they’re not listening.” You as the owner or executive want to see this. It’s sobering advice.
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I hope you are enjoying my discussion with Matt. I know that I am. This is a quick reminder to go out and purchase Construction Genius, my book that will give you effective hands-on practical, simple, and no-BS leadership strategy and sales and marketing advice. It’s exclusively for construction companies. I’m getting tremendous feedback on this book. You can go out to Amazon and look at all the five-star reviews that we’re getting. Get a copy of the book for you and your leaders.
Read it together one chapter at a time. Maybe discuss a chapter or two every 30 days and ask yourselves, “How can we use and apply the information in the book to help us to be better leaders?” If you simply ask that question, you will make incremental changes over time, and it will have a tremendous positive impact on your organization. The best news is the book is only $20 on Amazon. You can get copies for you and your entire leadership team. That will be a great investment of your time and money. Let’s get back to the conversation with Matt.
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How do you advise the older generation folks? In communication and construction, nothing beats going out to the job site and talking to someone or going to the customer’s office, but a lot of the younger people are comfortable with texts, instant messages, or whatever the case is. They don’t seem to understand that this is a people business, and it’s requiring that you either pick up a phone or go out to a job site. How do you help the younger generations understand that, grasp that, and embrace it?
That’s a tough one because from my family in four generations, I learned the other way. I was shaking hands and kissing babies. That’s what I was doing. It comes down to culture and how to get an A. We evaluate and implore companies. Whenever there’s a position that doesn’t work out for whatever reason, we employ them to write down every single thing they struggle with, “Get it out. What are all the things you didn’t like?” We formulate that into standards, goals, and KPIs so that you’re explaining.
You’re front loading and preemptively saying, “It’s part of the onboarding.” Sometimes it’s easier to shoot a text. Our company is a fourth-generation family business. What our clients love is shaking hands. If a client has an issue, you call them up and say, “We will take care of it. No problem.” If it’s a big issue in our company, we would love it if you could go out there and show your face.
I know it’s a silly pointless thing. You waste an hour, but for our clients, that’s a big thing. It’s communication and standards. I call it the North Star approach. You can be wherever you are in the world. I can be wherever. You and I can both look and point at the North Star. We have to be able to look and point at something. That’s what the formal reviews do because your document is, “What are some areas where there may be improvements?”
There’s a process that piggybacks off this. You touched on it. Let’s imagine I did all these things. I established the culture. They knew it. They were onboarded well. I did my two-week check-in, but I got this younger person. They’re nineteen years old. They’re not listening. We have what’s called a process improvement meeting. We sit them down. It’s not a write-up. It’s documented. We advise them. You sit down and say, “The process is broken down. We want our processes. If a client has a big issue, we go out there. That didn’t happen. How can we improve this process? What needs to happen?”
The employee signs it. The supervisor signs it. It’s a written description of what that person thinks and what the other person thinks. If there’s any friction, then we get a senior leader involved to pick it apart with them and say, “Let’s chew this up.” If there are any opposing views, it’s always good to have that tiebreaker. What that does is it gives you a reason to sit down.
It’s non-threatening. It’s a process improvement meeting. We have a process of going out and seeing clients when they’re upset. It forces communication. You can go back, “John, we have had three process improvement meetings on handling big issues in person. This is the third one. What are we going to do? People, person, or profit. You see the crossover there.” It creates that communication.
In construction, my dad was notorious for this. He would hold it in and be like, “Don’t do that again.” I would be like, “No problem.” He would hold it in and then explode. He would be like, “You did it again.” This creates that pressure release valve. It gives us the ability to be like, “Can I have you in at 8:00 AM or 7:30 for a process improvement meeting? I would like to see this moving forward.”
There’s no way around it. If you’re high up in the org chart or an executive, here’s the nice part. This is what I do with my team. I come in and audit once a month, “Is everyone doing well? Are all the jobs on schedule? Can I see the process improvement meetings?” “We didn’t have any.” “That’s interesting, but I thought we missed the punch list on this job here. I thought this one went over by a month.”
I have a way to keep my senior leaders accountable, “Did you see in the field my PMs, my site supers, and my foreman?” “So-and-so laborer didn’t bring the laser level.” “I would love to see the sheet of the process improvement meeting you had.” “We were busy.” “I can’t go in a meeting now if I’m talking to my foreman. How do we go in a meeting and stick up for you if we didn’t have a meeting about the process on how we can improve it?” It creates that conversation where it’s the ultimate accountability all the way through and optics.
This process improvement procedure that you’re referring to sounds like a euphemism for people improvement. I understand your logic in terms of not wanting to make it personal to the person, but when you say process improvement, what if I have a process in place that I know works, and I don’t want it improved, but this person is not adhering to the process?
That comes up in these meetings. I find that it’s best. They say innocent until proven guilty. That’s the legal jargon. Process until proven person. I’m saying the number of times that I’ve looked at a situation, sat with senior leaders, and gone in my head, “We’re going to fire this person.” I see the sheet. It’s like, “They were supposed to drop this off. The truck broke down. This happened. That happened. Look at these tree roots that no one talked about. Look at the axis. The material was delayed.” It’s at least 50% or 60% of the time that the opinion I have going into it is not the opinion I have coming out of it when I see their story. I’m not saying, “Don’t blame the person.” I’m saying, “The person becomes much clearer when you first assume it’s the process.” It creates a communication style process until person.
I like that because what you hit on there is that we do jump to conclusions rather rapidly. One of the reasons we do that is because we have built our business based on being decisive and being in many cases instinctive. Our intuitions have served us well, but sometimes with people, our intuitions do not serve us well. It sounds like what you are describing helps me to get more information before I make a judgment.
I can look at a process improvement meeting or a sheet and see, “What did my site super say? What did my foreman say?” I can say, “Do I have all the information to make a decision here now, yes or no?” If I don’t, I can elaborate or put a sub-process in place that would alleviate this altogether. It’s far too many times, especially if you take an overarching theme, that in construction, typically communication isn’t the best.
It’s either because of some of the things that I mentioned, which is you say things. You’re perceived as a whiner, and maybe you are. Maybe three-quarters of the team whine. With the one-quarter that’s legitimate, you’re like, “You’re whining too.” There are all these nuances. Blaming the process first is taking the assumption as a leader and saying, “Where did our goal break down?” There are plenty of times when it’s the person.
Here’s the beautiful part. Most of the time we have seen this. When it’s the person, they admit it and go, “I forgot.” “How do we not forget next time? How do we make sure we don’t forget?” It’s documented now for managerial or any type of terminations. It’s workers’ comp stuff. We let them go and a week later, there’s a worker’s comp claim. It’s like, “This is interesting. I had six of these meetings in the past six weeks, and then all of a sudden this happened.” It protects the company in so many different ways.
What do you do with toxic employees? Let me explain the toxic employee I’m referring to because this impacts retention. I have someone who’s a foreman who’s super talented. They kick ass and bring in projects profitably, but because of the way they show up, they have a tendency to drive other people away. On the one hand as a business owner, I’m like, “This guy makes me money,” but on the other hand, I look and say, “I lost three good guys because of the way he acts.” That’s a common occurrence in construction. How would you advise a contractor or a company owner to deal with that particular situation?
There are a couple of things. Number one is analyzing the behavior. I would want to understand first what the toxic elements are. I would try and understand, “Is it what I call a blind spot in business?” meaning is this person doing things and they don’t necessarily see how impactful they are? First, I’m going to try and get a clear understanding. I’m going to try and present this person with data and numbers. I try and steer away from the ethereal.
I want to be like, “In the last two months I’ve put you with six different crews, and all six don’t want to work. What’s going on?” “They’re all stupid. They’re all dumb. They suck. They’re not good. I’m the best.” “How do you suppose we’re going to get these jobs done if it’s just you?” “Nobody wants to work hard like me. I bust my butt. These guys are all idiots. You’re putting me with idiots.”
Typically if those types of people are profitable, it means they are bringing in jobs at or under budget. They’re working hard, typically. They’re not usually lazy. They’re toxic. I would try and find a younger crew that wants to work with them and say, “Here’s the deal.” We have had this in my company in particular. I have a few people that are like this. We bring in a younger team and say, “This person here is great. They’ve got a lot of great talents, but they’re a little rough around the edges.”
I would try and bridge the gap between finding people that are going to listen well and do what they’re told because typically, that toxicity is like, “Grab this. Do this. You’re not listening. What do you mean?” I would bridge that with them and say, “These guys or gals are a little younger. They’re learning. You like to be rough, but can we be a little bit more forgiving for the fact that they want to learn and mentor under you because you’re the best?”
Sometimes great talents can be a little rough around the edges. Try and bridge the gap between finding people that are really going to listen well and do what they're told. Click To TweetI’m trying to create a bridge between this person seeing empathy for the fact that they’re young and learning, and also these younger people seeing that they get an opportunity to learn. That strategy can work well. Sometimes you have to hit the nail on the head and say here’s the deal, “This is the stuff I don’t like. It’s documented. It can’t happen.”
If they go, “I’ll find a job somewhere else before I go home,” you’re tasked with a tough decision. I try and take those people and build a team. I call it a unique team or a special team. We have those in my company. It works. I try and do smaller teams. I have one person they work with. That’s it because I eliminate the risk of multiple people, multiple opinions, and things like that.
How does that affect my culture? On the one hand, if I say, “My culture is X, Y, and Z,” but then I build a special team over here for my high performer who makes me money, doesn’t the rest of the employees look at that and say, “He talks about this, but then he does that.”
Are they working together? That’s the first question. What is culture? I’m presupposing they’re on separate job sites. The only time they’re seeing each other is at team events. If you do anything together and if you do breakfasts, outings, or things like that, other than that, who’s picking up the truck? Who’s going to the job site? The whole purpose is you have to quarantine that. You can’t be mixing teams and people with somebody who’s toxic. It cannot happen. You will lose. The downside risk is far greater.
I look at it as quarantine. Can I have a situation where this person can work on job sites with a small crew by themselves? They have their way of operating like an island. They got things that they do. It works for them. They’re happy. I try and establish that if it’s a true A-player, but sometimes you have to hit the nail on the head and say, “You did this. It’s not acceptable.” You can do a process improvement meeting. It comes up during your check-ins. These things can happen. I’m very empathetic to the fact that it’s hard to find people that can run jobs profitably or do that level of talent. We try and find ways that are imperfect but allow the productivity that we need because that’s important too.
It’s interesting because what you’re saying here is not something that would be necessarily put into a business book. What the business book would say is, “Establish your culture, insist on your culture, attract people who are fit for the culture, and repel people that are not. What you’re looking for is a monoculture throughout your business,” but what you’re saying is, “Let’s say 80% or 90% of my business has this culture, but because of the nature of construction, if I can do that quarantine process successfully, then I’m willing to do that.”
We have to live in the real world in our industry because, at the end of the day, the downside is, “I fire this person. I’m going to lose $300,000. I’m going to ruin a relationship that’s worth $5 million a year.” Mike over here is a new laborer. I’ve got three new people. I’ve sat them all down and said, “I’m going to put you with so-and-so.” This presupposition is one very important factor. There has to be incredible value embedded with some of these thorns.
It’s the rose thorn analogy because if this person is a little bit harder and a little rough around the edges, I can soften them a little bit by saying, “This is a young team,” and at the same time take a younger team and say, “I’m giving you a golden opportunity. If you do listen, get along, and find your rhythm, you will be an expert at this in 2 to 3 years. I don’t have any other crew that can train you this well but has to like you, and he’s picky.”
I’m trying to find what I call creative solutions because, at the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all in construction. We’re a different breed of people. We’re trying to mix all personalities, styles, unions, non-unions, backgrounds, East Coast, and West Coast. You are trying to meld all these different things. I’m in masonry. You got union people that are like, “Joints have to be struck. There’s your 45-degree brush.” You have to live in the real world.
At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all in construction. Click To TweetI appreciate that. That was an excellent insight there. I want to make a bookmark there for all the audiences. It’s tremendously important as you’re thinking about working with people in your organization. What stops a contractor from addressing the retention issues even if they know they exist?
With retention, it’s accountability. Years ago, I would be like, “It’s their loss. I’ll replace them.” Now, if somebody leaves, I ask myself unless it’s clear that they left. If I look at the last few people that have left my company, one’s wife got an unbelievable job at Amazon. They were relocating. He’s like, “Sorry.” I was like, “I support you.” We had a nice party. If they’re not leaving for some type of ascension, they’re starting their business. There’s something out there that I can’t offer here. You can create a mini business within my business, but you can’t have your business.
If it doesn’t meet that criteria, then I take accountability because they’re on my payroll. There’s some level of saying, “I wanted them here.” I have to analyze this holistically. Sometimes it comes to a couple of conclusions. One is they weren’t that great altogether, and I didn’t have a better way of replacing them. What I usually find is we dropped the ball. There were some areas where we can improve.
I always wear the hat of accountability first and say, “Me before them.” If I’m going to assume blame, where could I assume blame? I would look at it and be like, “We do our check-ins. Did we do all the important communications? Where are the honest employee audits coming in?” If all that looks good, then there’s not much you can do. It’s the accountability and it’s also measuring retention.
How many companies measure how many team members they have, how long they have been working there, and how many raises or growth milestones they have gotten? Not all of them are financial. When you do that, you start to see it. We have had companies where we look at it and go, “Your average tenure at this company is nine months. Is that what we’re going for?” The owner will go, “Of course not.” It’s that blind spot off in the corner. When it becomes measured, it becomes managed.
Tell us a little bit more about your company, what you do, and how people can get in touch with you.
The company is The Contractor Consultants. We created the first-ever contractor hiring course, teaching a lot of what we talked about in partnership with ZipRecruiter and Indeed. We have what’s called outsourced hiring. We take all of the headaches off your plate. You show up for final vetted approved interviews. We’ve got a couple of unique services in the industry, but if you’re looking to hire, we can help you out.
How can people get in touch with you?
The website is TheContractorConsultants.com.
What you do is you help to fill the funnel of qualified candidates so people don’t have to hassle with that and they can focus on building projects. Is that what I’m hearing?
We do the job postings and the screening. We contact all the candidates that come in within a few minutes because we have a dedicated team. We pre-screen based on your criteria. We design skills assessments so that you can validate their skillset before hiring and do the background checks. All you do is show up for that final vetted approved interview, the one that should be on your calendar.
Tell me. As you’re looking at the industry, what is your view of what the construction industry will look like in 5 to 10 years in terms of workforce participation?
We’re at a turning point. We’re in talks with some of them. If bigger companies start to get involved with sponsoring not individually but holistically a movement around the next generation of skilled trades, we can revive this, but it’s a plane that’s crashing. We’re a couple of hundred feet from the ground here. We’re working with SkillsUSA, for example, and trade school organizations. If we work together and get the massive corporations involved with these trade organizations, we will do all right, but it’s going to be an interesting bumpy ride.
That’s interesting to hear that. There is a level of uncertainty there because there need to be fundamental changes in the educational system, particularly in terms of how vocational work is viewed and promoted at the elementary and high school levels.
I couldn’t agree more.
It’s also interesting because, in construction, there are associations and the banding together of companies, but because we’re so competitive, it is tough for companies to band together on these types of initiatives.
We need to take it top-down and bottom-up. We need it at the congressional level, the state level, the city level, and the town level. We need it with small, medium, and large corporations. We need to understand how important it is to have people who can do this type of work. We take it for granted. We’re saying it’s bad and the numbers are trending that way, but it’s like, “I still get my water heater replaced. I can still build commercial projects.” Let’s say I’m a car dealer. I’m like, “I still get my projects done, but there are stress fractures in the beam. This is going to be a sudden rupture.”
You’re down in Southern California.
Los Angeles.
If I’m in LA, what’s the one restaurant I have to hit in LA?
I don’t remember what I said last time.
Give me a new one.
There’s an Italian restaurant called Ca’ Del Sole. That’s good. I like that one.
We’re going to find that on the internet. If you’re in LA, that’s the best place to go. What food do they have there?
They got everything. It’s an Italian restaurant though. There are all your common Italian eats.
If I’m there for dinner, what am I going to order?
That’s tough because I’m Italian.
What do you like to order?
It depends on my mood. I’m pretty simple.
I’m looking at the menu here. There’s this Gnocchi Al Pesto, the homemade potato dumplings with basil pesto. That sounds good right there.
That’s a good one.
We appreciate you coming on, Matt. I do appreciate the perspective that you gave on the quarantine outlook. That’s something for people to consider. That’s tremendously valuable. Thank you very much for joining us.
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Thank you for reading. Here’s a quick shout-out for Matt’s website, TheContractorConsultants.com. If you’re looking to fill your pipeline with talented candidates for your company, Matt is a good resource for you to check out. Thanks again for reading. I hope you found this episode helpful as far as enabling you to retain your employees. Please share it with other people that you think would benefit from reading. We will catch you on the next episode.
Important Links
- Construction Genius
- TheContractorConsultants.com
- Ca’ Del Sole
- https://10Minutes.YouCanBook.Me/
- www.DiBaraMasonry.com
- www.LinkedIn.com/MatthewDiBara
About Matt DiBara
I come from four generations of proud Masons. My father supported our family as a Mason, and I brought the family tradition out here to LA when I started my first company, DiBara Masonry, several years ago. I learned a lot as I grew that business. I started to understand why it seemed like my dad could never get away from work. There’s too much to do! Everything’s important and urgent. And even if you can afford to hire all the help you need, good luck finding qualified, reliable people for every role.
So I started researching, studying, testing and learning. I developed a lot of strategies and processes and skills that really helped me manage my business and my time a lot better. And I found some great partners who have extensive knowledge in the areas where I needed it most, and started working with them.
As I became more successful, people started asking me how I was pulling it off and if I could help them with their business. And that’s how my new company, The Contractor Consultants, was born.
