Sundt’s Blueprint to Building the Most Skilled Workforce in America

Scott Seltz:

Hello and welcome to this webinar, Sundt’s Blueprint to Building the Most Skilled workforce in America. This event is brought to you by Engineering News-Record and sponsored by InEight.

Hi, I am Scott Seltz, publisher of ENR, and your moderator for today’s webinar. And thank you for joining us. Sundt Construction, a leader in the industry since 1890, is at the forefront of developing America’s most skilled workforce. By integrating people, processes, and technology, Sundt ensures high quality performance and fosters a culture of excellence and innovation. Today we’ll highlight the critical role of workforce development, process standardization and construction technology and building elite teams, and preparing future generations for industry success. We’ll hear from Brad Barth, Chief Product Officer at InEight, Curtis Smith and Ryan Drummond, both Project Control Managers at Sundt Construction, and Sean Ray, Sundt’s Vice President of Craft Workforce Development. We’ll learn more about our presenters shortly.

I’ll be rejoining our presenters at the end of the discussion to field your questions that come throughout the webinar. So, hey, don’t forget to enter them in the Q&A section of the webinar console during the presentation. And now I’ll hand things over to Brad Barth to kick off today’s conversation. Brad?

Brad Barth:

Well, thank you, Scott. Good to see you again and certainly appreciate all the great work you guys do at ENR for our industry and making these webinars possible. And oh man, I’m so looking forward to this one. We’re going to get to hear from a company that is truly one of the great American success stories, I think, and dig into what’s made them so successful. Before I introduce our speakers from Sundt, let’s get out of the way a 60-second overview of InEight. So as Scott said, I’m Brad Barth, Chief Product Officer for InEight. I’ve been at this for, let’s just say a few decades. We’ll leave it at that. I’ve stopped counting in years, but I’ve been working on this vision that InEight is realizing for our customers in the construction industry that you see depicted on the screen there. So what InEight is most known for is our cloud-based platform and software that really connects and drives predictability, certainty, across scope, cost, and schedule for our customers that are involved typically in complex projects, multidiscipline projects. And we do that for owners, for contractors, for construction managers around the world.

And the main way we do that is by bringing together 16 different business processes. So think about the most critical things of project controls, things like estimating, scheduling, work planning, document control, and others. So that’s really what InEight is all about and that’s how I got to meet the folks that we’re going to hear from today. Just before we get to their introductions, I’ll ask them to introduce themselves here in just a minute. But just a little bit of a personal perspective. I grew up in the Southwest and I spent most of my life in Arizona and Texas. And so you could not not know who Sundt is. You see their trucks everywhere, and I’ve been in the construction industry for a long time, so got to know from afar about Sundt and what they’re up to and watched their growth.

But like I said, over the past few years, I’ve had more of a front-row seat to the folks at Sundt and how they approach their work and how they approach their relationships, and so my already very high impression of this company has only gone further through the roof, so that’s the main reason why I’m so excited to hear from our guests here today. This is a company that is founded in 1890. Been around for a long time, done some iconic, iconic projects. Los Alamos. These guys transplanted the London Bridge to Arizona and reconstructed it there. The Reunion Tower in Dallas. Just everywhere you go, there’s projects that you’ve seen and recognized, and that’s Sundt’s work. And what I like most about the company, what I’ve really been most impressed about, is their focus on workforce development. And you see it front and center in the way they position the company as America’s most skilled workforce. And you see that just top to bottom in the organization.

So a perfect company and perfect guests that we’ve got here today to talk about how they’re achieving that, and that’s resulted in some numerous, numerous awards. One that jumps out to me for Sundt is they’ve won the Nation’s Safest Contractor award, which if you’re in the construction business, it’s exclusive company. You would love to win that award. Sundt’s won it twice, so they’re doing something right over there at Sundt.

So Ryan, Curtis, Sean, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate your time and commitment to this effort, to what you’re doing at Sundt with your workforce, but also how that benefits the industry in general. So let’s let our audience get to know you guys a little bit, so a little bit of your background and role for each of you. Sean, why don’t we start with you?

Sean Ray:

Yeah, good morning. My name’s Sean Ray. I’m the Vice President, Director of Craft Workforce Development. I’ve been with Sundt for 10 years, been in the industry, Brad, like you were saying, a few decades. We’ll say 34 years. Started my career as a pipe fitter helper and worked my way up through journeyman to management and then started workforce development about 12 years ago.

Brad Barth:

Excellent. So glad you could join us here. How about you, Curtis?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah, good morning, or good afternoon for those of you on the East Coast. Curtis Smith, Project Controls Manager. Been in the industry, I don’t want to say decades, but over 20 years. Been at Sundt for about nine of those. My background’s pretty diverse. I had 20 years in the military doing heavy construction, earth work, dirt work, but have worn multiple hats here at Sundt from pre-construction through operations, and now I’m at the controls level. So I’m excited to be here and excited for the conversation.

Brad Barth:

Thank you, Curtis. And Ryan, last but not least.

Ryan Drummond:

Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Ryan Drummond, also a Project Controls Manager with Sundt. I’ve had about 18 years in the construction industry, the last 10 of which have been with Sundt and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Most of my experience has been with project cost accounting, project controls, and the last several years have been construction software implementation, mainly InEight. So my small but mighty project support team in IT has been responsible for the implementation and ongoing support and training and enhancements and so on associated with our project management platform, which is InEight. But we’re also involved in all sorts of various enterprise initiatives and working with cross-functional teams. We get to talk to just about everyone in the company and learn how everyone does business and support however we can in terms of continuous improvements and technology, so I’m very happy to be here.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. And yeah, I certainly echo that. Enjoy working with everybody at Sundt so far. You guys do a great job in rolling out technology. So let’s start with we’ve got a nice representation here, Sean, on the craft side, Curtis and Ryan on more of the staff and project control side. Why don’t we start with you, Sean? I know, like I said, one of the things that really stood out to me as I got to know more and more about how you know guys approach your work and the emphasis on the workforce development was just very impressive from top to bottom, sideways, all the way through the organization. Like I said, really that focus is creating the best, most skilled workforce in America, which is a lofty goal, but you guys are doing it. Tell us how you’re doing that. What are some of the initiatives that you’ve got going on on your side of the business, Sean, that really supports that goal of America’s most skilled workforce?

Sean Ray:

Well, I think you nailed it right off the bat. I think the top-down commitment is a critical component. Our executives, our senior management, our management teams, we all know that people are the most critical resource that we have, so workforce development is always at the forefront of conversations. And I’m lucky enough to deal with the craft side of that. Some of our initiatives, I think I’ll start with, Brad, is apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is something that Sundt is really focused on. We currently have four Department of Labor-approved apprenticeship programs inside Sundt in Arizona. We’ll have a fifth starting up in April. We have three apprenticeship programs in Oregon. We have one in Florida and we’re about to start another one up in Nashville. So we know that that is a good entry-level way into the industry. It also meets government compliance recommendations or requirements, depending on whichever one they have, so apprenticeship has been really good to us.

I would say another one is we’re very much partnered with the NCCER, National Center for Construction Education and Research, and we’re an accredited assessment center through them, so we are able to give the journeyman assessments. And those are really beneficial in the fact that it’s a snapshot of someone’s skills at that particular time. And it’s a two-part test. There’s the knowledge side, which is computer-based, and then there’s the hands-on side of it. If one of our employees passes both of those, they get an uplift in their pay. But I think the critical part of that is it gives out a prescribed training as well, so now we know what we need to work on with certain individuals as they take these tests. And for every trade that we self-perform, we can give an assessment test, so that’s another critical component for us.

I think one that’s come on real strong, at least on the craft side, in the last couple of years is our supervisory development programs. So right now we have one called Fundamentals of Crew Leadership. That’s really focused, Brad, on our foremen, general foremen, and even some leads. As we all know who are listening on this call or in construction, the way people typically become a foreman is because they were really, really good in their trade. You were a great pipe fitter, then you must be a good foreman. But we don’t spend a lot of time teaching people how to manage other people. So through our Fundamentals of Crew Leadership class, we go through your standard project planning, those kinds of things, but we take a different spin on it as well. We go through mental wellness, which we know is a critical component that doesn’t get talked about a lot in our industry.

Financial wellness. I was that pipe fitter, Brad, that had to get the new truck every year and was wondering why I never had any money. So we go through that. We also go through leadership. We go through communication. And probably one of the most critical ones of that, we have a course called Ethical Supervision, and that’s really trying to get our foremen and general foremen to understand that the laws in every state aren’t the same. The lunch breaks requirement in Arizona is different than the lunch breaks in Oregon because we do have a traveling workforce. So we try to get them to understand how they can be ethical in their dealings with their people. Even if it’s not malicious, we could still do people wrong without even knowing it.

The last one is we have a more defined training called Field Development. This is more for each group, so let’s give you transportation as an example. We’ll bring people in for one week a quarter and really drill down into the work that they’re doing in the field, whether it be field layout, soil testing, underground work, rigging. And that is more to help hone their skills with their people, but also for themselves. So we’ve got one class that’s for dealing with people. We got another one that deals more with skills. And we feel like it’s a good mesh. We also do after-hour training and we have other programs like that, but those are the four big programs from a craft perspective that we’re really focused on right now. Curtis, Ryan, you want to talk about the admin workforce development side?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah, sure, Sean. That was a great explanation of the craft side, but we also invest heavily in our admin staff and we spend a lot of energy and time ensuring that our teams are proficient as they head out into their new role or getting hired on at Sundt. We’ve got programs called the Sundt Systems Training. It’s a three-day course if you’re new to Sundt that you go through, that really spends and dives into the different systems we operate in as a business. And as you can imagine, anybody coming into any new construction company, that’s a big piece to being proficient in your job as you roll out as a field engineer, project engineer, project manager. And it can be overwhelming when you first come to a new company or you’re moving into Sundt, and so we really found a lot of value and we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from this training. And it’s really giving those folks the tools so when they show up to work, they’re not a fish out of water.

They really understand what’s needed to complete certain tasks, and then of course on-the-job training. They’ll get more mentorship and guidance through the team and through other support assets within Sundt. We also invest in two other workshops that we do for those that are advancing in their career that have been with Sundt for a while. So we’ve got two different workshops currently. The Field Engineer Boot Camp is what we call it, and it really gives the field engineers a deep dive into really the technical components of being a field engineer. Surveying, reading plans, understanding how to look at a submittal. And then we further that when they move on to that project engineer role where they could go through a workshop again and it dives more into the administrative side of what a project engineer is and gives them those tools.

And it’s a great resource because the environment is peers, so they come in and actually train. So while our talent development group manages and offers the course, it’s homegrown and it’s people that are in those positions or have been through those positions in the business, which of course gets a lot of attraction from those that are moving up. So those are some of the things we’re doing on the admin side to further our workforce and provide those opportunities. There’s endless things that we do here in Sundt for our admin staff, but those are some of the technical ones that help people get up to speed and more knowledgeable in their role.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. I appreciate both of those answers, Sean and Curtis. And Curtis, just staying on the staff side of it or admin side of it, technology I would assume plays a key role. You touched on it a little bit with some of the education that you do. And by the way, what a great commitment to workforce development and education and career development for your folks when you have that, like I said, top-down commitment to pull people out of actual work and pull people out of the field to do these things. But it’s good for them, good for the company, but you got to stick to it and make it work, so it looks like you guys are doing that. But the role of technology, Curtis, how much of a focus would you say that is in terms of getting people up to speed on your systems and how you use them? Is that the most important thing, one of many things, or how would you rank that?

Curtis Smith:

I would say it’s integral to the development of our employee owners. At Sundt, as you can tell, we continue to push the boundaries on developing the most skilled builder workforce in the industry. For example, our talent development team, they’ve created these really fantastic, we call TDPs, talent development plans, for each of the roles within the business. Those TDPs are tied to different training that an employee owner can go through to leverage different resources, i.e. LinkedIn Learning, different video technology that we’ve developed where they can get training on P6, which is our scheduling software, all the way down to our estimators where they’re using different softwares to estimate work.

We’re reinventing how we look at our how-tos and how we develop those different documentations so that people can self-navigate themselves through a process within the business using the technology. And one of those tools we’re leveraging currently is Scribe, and it’s a fantastic tool. What it’s really allowed us to do is eliminate the staleness that you get from let’s say a Word document or a PDF or an Excel where they have to be continually versioned and updated, and you run into that challenge where people are downloading it and putting it on their desk at their job site or at their office. By using Scribe, it’s a web-based system that allows us to constantly reinvent and update those how-tos so that the end users are constantly having the most up-to-date information on what they’re doing. So I would say the technology’s up there, but talking from Sean’s perspective, and he can chime in, there’s a lot of hands-on training as well, using the mentorship of those that have been in those roles to really help develop our people as well. That’s a critical component within the business as well.

Brad Barth:

That’s great.

Sean Ray:

To Curtis’s point, I don’t know that we can replace that on-the-job training. We do have a lot of programs like Curtis is talking about, but the key is still the folks in the field who are willing to spend the time mentoring others. That’s where I think Sundt excels.

Brad Barth:

Makes perfect sense. I appreciate that. Staying on the workforce development theme and technology sub-theme, if you will, maybe over to you, Ryan. A lot of times we see when you’re rolling out a platform like InEight or new software that you’re implementing in the organization, it puts a focus and a spotlight on business process and standardization. It’s an opportunity. Maybe we’re doing the same thing three different ways in different groups. Let’s do it the same way. And all of you touched on that, that it helps people fit in and get up to speed through that standardization makes people productive faster. Was that something that you guys went through or is it something you regularly look at in terms of your business process and standardizing that? Is that something you guys feel is very important? How much emphasis do you put on that standardization? Ryan, question for you.

Ryan Drummond:

Yeah, I’d say process standardization is crucial wherever you can do it. The more platforms, the more processes you have, different ways of doing things, the more complexity you add to your system, into your training, into your data and all sorts of things. Sundt performs work in various markets all across the US. We’ve got different types of clients, different delivery methods, design and trade partners, regulatory requirements, local practices and so on. So any time we have an opportunity to consolidate processes into a single system or one way of doing things, where it makes sense, we’re going to take it. It’s a high focus. Actually, our IT director, my boss, Dan Howard, he has a list of all the different applications that we’ve got running. And one of our ongoing initiatives is just continually go through that list and say, “What do all these things do? And does this one over here do the same thing? And if so, why are we using two different tools to do the same thing?”

Now, there are use cases for it sometimes, but it prompts the question. The point is that we’re always looking at it, looking for ways to improve, consolidate, get rid of unnecessary additional tools that are adding complexity or processes for that matter. So we have something called SMS, which is Sundt Management System, and that’s where we catalog all of our non-negotiables. So it’s our policies. It’s our standard operating procedures. It’s the way that we expect everyone in the company to do business in whatever category it is. If it’s change management, if it’s document management, this is how you’re going to do it.

That said, on the other hand, we recognize while there are many common traits from one job to the next, every construction project is unique. It’s not like manufacturing where you can take a widget and copy paste thousands of times over. One job, it’s different set of plans and specs, different requirements every time. So wherever it makes sense, especially at a high level like a policy SOP level, we’re going to standardize it as best we can. But then we also need to allow for individual projects to customize processes or tools to the specific needs of their job. So I’ll give you one example. Every construction project we use RFIs. The general process of an RFI is basically the same from one job to the next. There’s a question. There’s uncertainty in the plans and specs. You ask a question. The engineer or the designer responds. You incorporate it into the plans and specs.

But some jobs have a different workflow, for example. InEight Document is our latest tool that we use for this. In the prior tool, it was very regimented. Everybody had to do it exactly the same way. There was no ability for customization. That’s good in some respects as it makes the data easy to clean and aggregate. But when it comes to what the team needs, if a client or an engineer says, “Hey, I want that RFI to come to me first and then it needs to go to our client rep over here so they can have one more look at it before it comes back to you and you close it out,” that’s something that we can do now and that’s an advantage to being able to customize something. So I guess to sum it up, yes, standardization is really important and it’s critical for efficiency, quality, and consistency, but you also have got to allow for the uniqueness of individual jobs and have the flexibility for the teams and partners to be able to customize things the way they need it, within reason.

Brad Barth:

That makes great sense. Yeah, appreciate that, Ryan. And I would think that there’s some art to that in terms of finding the right balance of how much do we standardize versus how much do we leave open for some customization or tailoring on a project-by-project basis. I would assume that’s super important for you guys. You do work in all different kind of geographies, all different verticals, from vertical buildings to bridges to you guys are working on the SunZia. I think it’s the largest alternative energy project in the history of the country, and transmission lines and so forth. So a vast array of work that you guys do and love your point about standardization is a goal, but it shouldn’t be a mandate where you need to allow some flexibility in there. That’s great.

Let’s turn back to the craft side a little bit. Back to you, Sean. This is a question you probably get asked a lot, but as long as I’ve been in the industry or been around it, there’s been this ongoing struggle to track people into the industry to get new people into the industry, young people into the industry, and ultimately how do we build up enough capacity to keep up with the demand for the work, which never seems to slow down. So on the craft side of it, what would you say are some key ways that Sundt is out there attracting new skilled workers? And maybe even specifically if you could touch on, you mentioned your years in the industry, have you seen things change much in terms of what folks are expecting now as they come into the industry versus maybe what they were expecting 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

Sean Ray:

Yeah. And if I had the right answer to this, I’d be a triple millionaire. But I think Sundt is doing some great things. One of the things that we’re doing is we start with the construction awareness. So we spend a lot of time, and this is Sundt in general, we’ve got people across the United States that are going to talk at high schools or go to career events. And it’s just trying to get young adults to see the opportunities for a career in construction. Too many people see it as a job or a dead-end job, and we’re trying to get them to see the amazing careers that are available to the young people out there. And then the next phase of it is we really work closely with developing partnerships with community colleges and high schools. There are so many great schools out there that are looking for an amazing industry partner.

And as we know, in the early 2000s, a lot of our trade programs in the high schools went away and were replaced by computer programs, which at the time was needed. Now it’s shifting back. We’re seeing a lot more community colleges, we’re seeing a lot more high schools, getting back into having a construction program. But Brad, they struggle at the same time, because think about a high school who’s trying to find a educator to teach welding, and we know that welders make an amazing living in the industry. So you’re asking somebody to come in for 50 to $60,000 a year when they could double that easily being in the industry. So it really is critical for us in the construction industry to support these programs because we’re the end users, so it’s really critical. We can’t sit and complain about there’s no good programs coming out of the community colleges or the high schools, but we’re not supporting them. So I’m very proud of the partnerships that Sundt has set up and the fruits that we’re starting to get out of those.

Another thing that we’re focusing on to bring in the young talent is we’re a hundred percent employee-owned company, so these individuals after a year will start getting stock in the company. But I’ll be honest with you, and Curtis, Ryan, I don’t know where you guys were at when you were 23 and 24, but I really wasn’t thinking about what I’d be doing when I was 62 or older. So it’s a great, great thing to have a hundred percent employee ownership, but we know that we had to take it farther in that. So we’ve gone in and we’ve increased our PTO, we have the paid holidays back with us, and we just added a bonus program for our craft. So we’re trying to do honestly what’s ethical and what’s right by our craft, but also it does help us attract new talent.

Now, as far as the change in expectations, I’m not one of those, Brad, who believes that this generation or that generation’s lazy. I’ve never bought into that. These new generations, Gen Z, millennials, they have a different set of values than baby boomers, than Gen X, and it’s up to us to identify what those are and work with them. A couple of things that we’ve seen. The younger generation isn’t as open to traveling as when I was coming up, it’s just what you did. So we’ve had to focus more on getting more of these partnerships in the different states where we self-perform versus having an amazing program in Arizona and then hiring out of it and telling them, “Hey, you’re going to Kentucky,” or, “You’re going to South Carolina,” or, “You’re going to Portland.” We have to get more of these programs established so we can get more of those local kids into the programs and then build them, and then they may want to travel with us once they’ve been there for a while.

The other piece that I will tell you is I think with the younger generation, I think there’s more of a focus on a career path versus, “I’m going to go into construction and my ultimate goal is to be a electrician journeyman.” They want to know, “Hey, what comes after that?” And I think that’s where our partnerships, especially with the community colleges where we can get them college credits at the same that they’re learning a trade, helps them figure out what they want to do. Do they want to go be a project controls manager like the other two gentlemen on the call? Or do they want to go become a field engineer? So that’s a real big piece these days is what is my path besides becoming a journeyman.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. That makes perfect sense. And I’ve got a follow-up question for you, so let’s hold onto that thought for just a second. We are going to do a couple polls. So let’s launch our first poll. And while that’s coming up, everybody out there in the audience, please answer that poll as you see that come up on the screen. We’ll share the results here in terms of what is the most effective method for attracting new skilled workers. It’s the topic that we are currently talking about. But Sean, just a follow-up question for you. Who do you see as your competition as you’re trying to attract workers to come into the industry? Is it other contractors and you’re focused on why you’re better or provide a better career path than maybe other contractors? Or is it other industries that you’re trying to get people into construction versus going into something else? Or is it both?

Sean Ray:

I think it’s an all the above, and a lot of it depends on our own pay structures. So if Curtis is looking for some entry-level new people to come into the company and he’s willing to pay $17 an hour, and McDonald’s is paying $17 an hour, it might be a tough sell to tell these young folks, “Hey, I’m going to put you on a shovel for the next couple of months while you’re learning, or you could be in an air-conditioned McDonald’s at the same time.” So all our industry is looking for good people. It’s across the board. What I will tell you, Brad, is every time that we go in and set up a partnership with a community college, we don’t set it up just for Sundt. And I think that’s a critical component. We look at it as an industry as a whole.

I’ll use Central Arizona College as an example. We set up a partnership with Central Arizona College and we right off the bat told the college that we are not going to be able to hire all the students all the time. So if we keep it just as Sundt program and let’s say we have a year where we don’t need to hire 300 people out of it, well, then those students are scrambling to go find work. So we did the opposite and we went out to our competition and said, “You know what? You guys should really recruit from this amazing program.” That’s given us a hundred percent job placement through that program for the last seven years.

Now people hear about it, now they’re engaged, now they want to come do it, and it still benefits us because they see the red and black trucks every day at the college. We have adjunct instructors there who are helping teach, but we might get somebody two or three years later that went through the program. But as an industry, we can’t keep holding everything like this and thinking that we have the secret sauce. We as an industry have to come together. I let our operations side fight for the work. And in workforce development, we all got to get together to figure this issue out. And so we do our best to partner with our “competition” to support the whole industry, because if you have a good company and you’re doing things right and you’re doing things ethical, people will come to work for you. That shouldn’t be something I have to stress.

Brad Barth:

That’s a great way to look at it. And that’s that rising tide lifts all boats sort of mentality. We’re seeing more and more of that I think over the years where we’re all in this together and, again, to keep up with the demand, we can build up that capacity. It’s good for everybody to do that. So attracting workers into the industry is obviously critical to the overall industry success. Great to hear about what you’re doing there.

Let’s go to the poll results. It looks like, probably no surprise there, this is exactly the kind of things you guys have been talking about. Extensive training and development programs right up at the top there is the key things for attracting new skilled workers. That’s what our audience is saying. And then followed by technology and then diverse inclusive work environment. So yeah, great. Looks like there’s alignment there from our audience to the things that you guys at Sundt are really focused on, so that’s great to see. All right. Well, let’s keep going here and maybe come back to you, Curtis, on the technology side of it. You guys have done a lot of new technologies in over the last few years. Maybe just talk broadly about how has some of that technology, whether it’s InEight or other things, transformed your approach to the work. And have you noticed an impact on your productivity from those technology rollouts? Any thoughts on that?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah, so Sundt’s pretty diverse. We’ve been talking about craft and our field folks, but the technology’s transforming all spectrums of Sundt. Just to go through some examples here, from our equipment services and warehouse, we have a department that supports our frontline teams and they’ve started to utilize more technology as it relates to battery power tools, equipment telematics, having an automated equipment inspection application so that in the field they’re getting real-time data on how the equipment’s operating and functioning for the project. Our pre-construction teams, they continue to develop how they do their job as well. We’ve leveraged some technology there that’s helping us better communicate to our clients when we go to propose a bid to them. For example, there’s a product called CM Builder. It’s a really unique platform that allows us to visualize logistically how we’re going to build their projects in a very simplistic way that doesn’t require a lot of time from our pre-con folks to develop. They’re using AI take-off technology also to support their take-off abilities within the pre-con department.

Some of the stuff that we’re doing on the operations side, I could go on quite a bit for that, but we continue to develop tools that are enhancing the productivity of our people in the field. We do a lot of data center work here at Sundt. One of the things, if any of you have done data centers, is the commissioning piece is very intense. And so our frontline technologies team, with the support of some of our real critical MEP folks, have developed a tool called Griffin. It’s what we would call passive transparency. So what it allows the owner, Sundt, the subcontractor, is to see through the actions taken on commissioning where things are at. Rather than there having to be constant communication and emails, this does passive transparency to those teams. We’ve implemented automated inspection requests, so the project superintendent isn’t getting tons of emails and phone calls. Rather, they simply scan a QR code and then they request their inspection they need on the job.

And that allows us to track and trend where we’re at with inspections rather than it coming through an email or phone call, really giving us critical information there. We also leverage other technology for checking people in and off the site, providing them with safety briefings that they need so that teams can be ready to go when they show up to the job site. Our transportation folks are critical pieces ensuring that concrete comes out with the right mix based on the specifications, so they’ve got a stone breaker, stone tracker, whatever they call it tool, where they can track how the concrete’s coming out to the job. We utilize Open Space, which is a 360 software, which is passive in a sense where an engineer can go do their job site walk at the end of the day and have a camera on their hard hat that allows them to capture 360 photos, so multitasking there.

Utilizing AI again with some meeting minutes assistance. One of the things that’s really tough in an owner-architect-contractor meeting is ensuring you capture everything, and so leveraging AI to really transcribe and capture those conversations so we ensure we catch everything in those minutes. Our safety department’s really been innovative, and this is the use of the InEight software platform, InEight Compliance, where we’ve created this system called STCKY, Stuff That Can Kill You. I’ll spare the bad word there, but it’s really a game changer for us in the industry. It’s been recognized across the country as a key game-changer to how safety is looked at, but we leverage technology to really capture those STCKY items on our job sites and looking at things where we implemented proper procedures that it was success or it was not properly set up for it to be a success and really be able to dive into the root cause of what caused those safety incidents on our job.

And then from a bigger global business perspective, Ryan talked about this a little bit, standardization, but we as a business operate out of InEight. So the entire company works out of one platform for our construction management software, so we’re not utilizing multiple tools for change management, contracts, forecasting, et cetera. It’s one centralized place for all of that information. And then lastly on that front is I talked about a lot of data points. Well, how do you actually capture that data and then leverage it so that you can create those key performance indicators and really understand health trend information? We’ve spent an enormous amount of effort within the business to improve and develop a data warehouse structure that will allow us to collect the information and then also mesh the data between multiple systems, that then we can see how things are reacting against the schedule and change and our safety incidents. And being able to really see that globally from a project perspective rather than drilling into each individual system, it’s allowing us to see everything in one place.

So those are some of the things, Brad. I’m barely touching the surface, but we really have seen a massive improvement in the productivity of our teams. And Ryan touched on this I think a little bit is when we look at a new technology or a new process that we want to put in place, it’s what is this eliminating from someone’s current duty or responsibilities and is improving their ability to do their job so that they have what I like to call the ability where they have more free time to either focus on other things, development of themselves, mentorship. Or even better yet in the field, our teams are constantly working 12, 14-hour days. And if we can make our teams more productive where a couple of days a week they’re able to leave after a 10-hour shift, we want to do that.

And so these technologies are really improving the productivity, they’re giving us more critical information that’s allowing us to make better business decisions. And ultimately, it’s helping people that are out in the field or in an administrative position or in the warehouse really have the ability to manage their time more effectively.

Brad Barth:

That’s perfect, and music to my ears, certainly. We really, from InEight’s perspective, when we talk about the InEight solution, and I think this is similar to other softwares out there that are using construction, but the goals are really twofold. It’s how do you help people work faster and get more done and done waste less time and all about efficiency and that sort of thing. But the other part of it I think, and you touched on it, is to work smarter and have that data that you mentioned. You’re bringing that data together, making it accessible. And I would suspect that that’s a big part of your workforce development as well in terms of onboarding. And maybe Sean, you can talk to that. Let me ask you a specific question, but maybe let’s go ahead and tee up our second poll because I think it touches on that same topic for our audience. If you would answer that question, how does technology significantly benefit workforce development in construction?

So while our audience is thinking about that, Sean, just a quick question for you. So as you think about bringing people on, and you touched a little bit on older generation, younger generation, but having a standardized approach and standardized technologies, do you see that as a way to get new people up to speed quicker inside of Sundt, whether it’s on the craft side or the staff side? But is that something that you really focus on in terms of if we standardize our process, if we standardize our technology, obviously in addition to the education stuff, but does that help you get new workers up to speed quicker and productive quicker?

Sean Ray:

Yeah, Brad, I think, for lack of a better term, at times it’s a forced compliance. With the way our industry’s moving, technology was slow for many, many years, and it feels like in the last five years, technology has really taken off and our craft in the field have to keep up with that as well. So the days of us lugging around a big old roll of prints to the print shack don’t really get seen a lot anymore. In our job sites, you’ll see the foreman walking around with a tablet and he’ll have screenshots at a BIM or he’ll have specs loaded up on his tablet. So we have had to change our mentality a lot with do some of these folks even know how to use the technology? And what we’re finding is, with some of the older generation, they’re not real familiar still with computers or tablets so we have to invest a little bit more time. This younger generation, I honestly haven’t found many at all who don’t know how to run a tablet at a minimum because we all have the cell phones.

Technology has helped us out a lot from the safety perspective in the field as well. The BIM alone, the VDC, it paints a clear picture for a lot of us that we didn’t have before where you had to conceptualize in your mind looking at these 2D drawings of going, “Okay, I got to see what this looks like.” Now Curtis can come in and say, “Well, here, let me show you what the finished product’s supposed to look like.” And that really is a big deal to a lot of our craft. But there is some insecurity, Brad, still with the technology piece of it, especially when you start talking about our craft professionals who are English as a second language or really don’t speak English. And there still is that struggle. But through technology, with Google Translate and stuff, you’d be surprised how much more our folks know now than they knew before because they have the technology to go translate something at the drop of a hat. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but we’ve seen a change big time.

Brad Barth:

Yeah, and I know from our prior discussions you guys have observed the changing in expectations or the younger folks just take it for granted. You touched on it. I can do things on my phone, my tablet, whereas maybe 10 years ago that was a new thing for a lot of folks, so it sounds like you guys are embracing that trend. Let’s look at our poll results. So again, probably no surprise here, but all of the above was the most frequently chosen answer there. And no surprise, I think, that all of those things are pretty equally across those bottom three there. And then all of the above. You guys have touched, I think, today on really all of those when we think about standardization and we talked about the productivity gains and then that skill development and career development, all of those things are fantastic, and then of course the onboarding part that you covered.

I think we’ve got time for maybe one more that I will pose and then we’ll open up questions to the audience. I see some questions, people have been putting some questions into the Q&A chat, but we’ll save about 10 minutes to go through those. So I would encourage you out in the audience if you haven’t already, and you have a question, go ahead and put it in the chat there in the Q&A chat and when we turn it back over to Scott, he’ll pick some questions out of there to pose back to our panelists.

So with that, let me do one more, and maybe over to you, Ryan. This is one that certainly I’m always intrigued about and that’s how do you measure success? You guys obviously at Sundt are very committed to workforce development and there’s a cost to that. So how do you measure that? So the things that we’ve been talking about, that integration of people, process, and technology, there’s the obvious… And certainly you can touch on this part too, if you’ve seen improvement there, but the obvious, we’re getting our projects done on time and under budget. Those are key ways, I’m sure, that you measure success. But thinking beyond that, how do you measure success of these initiatives or ROI or however you guys look at it?

Ryan Drummond:

Yeah. Well, there’s several ways you can do that. I think it’s a little more difficult to come up with some of the hard metrics to measure this. How does throwing a new technology at it improve your bottom line? When it comes to something like project management software or design review type stuff, it’s harder to understand what that is. The first one that comes to mind is engaging employee engagement and satisfaction and adoption rates. We track engagement through several ways. One is surveys. So Curtis and his counterpart in California, Jessica, they send out some surveys to their folks and say, “Hey, what’s working for you? What’s not?” And we take that feedback and we respond to it. A lot of us get hit up with emails directly, Teams messages all day long.

But I think a lot of where the rubber meets the road is doing where the SMEs and various people do site visits and they’re on the job watching them use these technologies and these tools, and they’re able to see how they’re using it correctly or incorrectly or able to get direct feedback to say, “Hey, this is working for me,” or, “This isn’t.” So high adoption rates and positive feedback can indicate that whatever tools we’ve deployed are user-friendly and they’re adding value to some degree. If the feedback’s negative, then our job is to figure out why, so that’s always the first question. It’s like, “Okay, what’s the problem? What don’t you like about it? Why isn’t it working for you?” And there’s probably more, but I’d say there’s at least three categories of things that tell us what to do with that.

Number one, it’s a training issue, so they don’t know how to do it properly. And there could be several reasons for that. It could be either the training materials that we provided are insufficient, they don’t know how to get there, or maybe they skipped the systems training or the initial indoctrination set up. So training’s one. That’s actually a big initiative we’re working on right now is continuing to build out our library. Curtis mentioned some of the tools we’re using to do that, but things that are more Sense-specific, so it’s improving that. Another reason that it might be negative, it could be a bug, and then we’ve got our tools for that. It’s either going to be reported through Sense IT if it’s integration-related or it’ll be reported to whatever the product manufacturer is, if it’s something they need to resolve. And then there could be an enhancement request or continuous improvement, like I mentioned earlier. That’s a really big focus for us.

So no matter what the technology is, there’s always a way to do it better. There’s always room for improvement. And one thing I’ve appreciated about working with you guys is that you’ve taken our feedback very seriously, and we’ve seen several changes made as a result and our teams have definitely appreciated that. So those are the three main buckets to gauge that. The adoption rate is tricky. There’s not really numbers that we can go into with these systems and say, “Hey, these guys are all using this job.” We can see somebody logged in, but it doesn’t tell us what they’re doing, so that’s why we have to rely on that direct feedback to really understand how well a technology is being utilized.

A couple of other things. Quality and safety metrics. For example, if we see a reduction in rework defects or safety incidents, that’s a good indication that a new tool or process is working. There’s other variables obviously, but Curtis mentioned our STCKY program. I’d say that that success is primarily a result of a culture and a process change, but having a single tool and technology to use that everybody is familiar with and makes the training easy certainly facilitates that. And that’s helped a lot. And then taking that data on the backend and being able to report it in one place in real time where people can see the results on a daily basis. Like, “Hey, are you guys doing your daily job walks? How many incidents you’re having in this job?” And then trending stuff over time. So that really helps measure success of those tools.

Brad Barth:

And it takes data to do that, right?

Ryan Drummond:

What’s that?

Brad Barth:

And it takes the data to do that, to track those kind of metrics and KPIs, and it’s great that you guys are doing that.

Ryan Drummond:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brad Barth:

If I can, Ryan, so I want to save just a little bit of time for a couple of audience questions, but love everything about what you just said there, Ryan, and particular the thing that really stood out for me was the engagement part, the employee engagement. And that’s something that you go back 10, 20 years in construction, you may not see that as a prominent part of measuring success, but that employee engagement is a great way to tell because it’s an indicator of retention, it’s an indicator of morale, obviously, so great that you guys are doing that.

All right. Well, I appreciate you guys taking my questions. Great answers and great insights there. Let’s throw it back to Scott over at ENR. And Scott, did you see any questions in the chat there that we want to throw at our panelists here?

Scott Seltz:

Before we address them, I want to remind our viewers that we’d love their feedback. If they haven’t taken our attendee survey, please do. It’s on the screen now or it’ll be served to you as you exit the event. So let’s get to the questions, gentlemen. Here’s a good one. The viewer’s asking, “Of all the measures and initiatives mentioned by the Sundt team in the presentation,” which by the way they gave you kudos, “what one has had the biggest impact on your workforce retention statistics?”

Sean Ray:

I’ll start on the craft side. I definitely feel our apprenticeship programs have definitely helped with our retention. Our craft want to feel like we’re investing in them and apprenticeship is a great way to do that. I saw one of the other questions was do we work with pre-apprenticeships? And the answer to that is absolutely. And I think those all start to tie in together. If we’re working with a pre-apprenticeship program and then we end up bringing on apprentices from that apprenticeship program, we’re investing in them because we run our apprenticeship programs a little different than a lot of other companies. We don’t do them on weekends or after hours. We bring our apprentices in for one week a quarter. So during that one week a quarter, they’re getting paid still their project wages, they’re still getting their per diem. So they’re getting paid while they’re going through training and they feel that investment, they feel that the company is investing in them. And it’s really shown a good retention rate to the point of our loss on our apprenticeship programs is really low.

Scott Seltz:

That’s tremendous. Another viewer is asking, they’re interested in how you are addressing the challenge of getting more women into the trades.

Sean Ray:

So there again, we’ve got a couple of things that we’re doing. One, we started up last year, an ERG for Women in construction, Employee Resource Group. And it’s a group that meets monthly and it’s made up of women in the company, but also there are men who join in to help support it. And it’s just answering those same questions of what can we do better? How can we encourage more women to come into construction? We’re already seeing it. Curtis or Ryan May have numbers on the admin side, but our numbers on the craft side have continually gone up every year. Five years ago we had zero women in our apprenticeship and we’re now sitting at 15% of our apprentices are women. They also are killing it there, I will have to mention. Women make great welders. They tend to outperform the men in the first couple of years of the welding, and it’s an ongoing process.

But there again, it’s the pre-apprenticeships.? There’s a great pre-apprenticeship in Oregon called Oregon Tradeswomen. It has a fantastic program. There’s other programs across the U.S. that focus on different areas. We try to focus on low-income areas as well. If we can come in and change someone’s life through construction and change the trajectory, we’ll be set.

Scott Seltz:

Wonderful.

Curtis Smith:

I would say that it’s similar to what Sean is saying. The industry is growing more and more in the women’s space within the construction industry. And just to give you an example to everybody on this call, my boss, the building group president, is a female, and she came up from the very field engineer level and worked her way all the way up to president. And so she’s been a force to be reckoned with, quite honestly, with helping that movement within the business and Sundt to elevate women in construction, to provide them their opportunities, and show them that their opportunities are limitless. There is no limit because you’re a woman in the construction industry. So it is evident in the admin side as well that what we’re doing as a business is having an effect on women coming into construction.

Scott Seltz:

Wonderful. Final question. A viewer’s asking, “What type of mentorship model is Sundt using?”

Sean Ray:

So from the craft perspective, most of our mentorship is a journeyman to helper ratio or journeyman to apprentice ratio. Our full-time instructors also serve as mentors to our apprentices. But Ryan and Curtis, correct me if I’m wrong, we don’t have an official mentorship program. We try to focus on more of a holistic approach. And I think ways to go about that, they have PM groups that meet together, they have PE groups that meet together, and it’s a mentorship process through that. But as far as a official program, we don’t have one.

Curtis Smith:

No, you nailed it on the head, Sean. That’s really where we’ve seen a lot of success with our people is that when you try to force a mentorship program, it hasn’t been very successful. I’ve been here nine years and they’ve talked that every year I’ve been here. And what we’ve seen the most success with is more of this homegrown, these unique groups, project managers, project engineers, project superintendents, field engineers, where they meet regularly and they have conversations and they have certain people within the business come in and speak to them and just continue to feed their career and feed their knowledge that they want to have. And so that’s been very, very successful for us.

Ryan Drummond:

I should mention though that while there’s not a formal mentorship per se, we do have continuous performance development, which functions in a similar capacity where they focus on performance, career development goals, and recognition. So that’s where the supervisor meets on a regular basis with their people and they provide that feedback and ask how they want, what goals they have and so on. So there’s that in addition to the peer groups and the SMBs and whatnot.

Scott Seltz:

Great conversation, gentlemen. Please join me in thanking, once again, Brad Barth, Curtis Smith, Ryan Drummond, and Sean Ray, as well as our sponsor, InEight. If you have additional questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to click the email us button on your console and we’ll share them with our presenters, so they can respond directly to you. If you didn’t have a chance to fill it out earlier, you will be redirected shortly to the post-event survey. We look forward to hearing from you about how we can make our programs work better for you. Please visit enr.com for the archive of this presentation to share with your colleagues, as well as information on our upcoming events. We trust that you found our presentation today to be a good investment of your time. Thanks again for joining us and have a great day. Bye.