Dive Brief:
- Employers facing skilled labor shortages can expand their workforce by recruiting from underrepresented communities, but hiring efforts need to be accompanied by workplaces where employees feel safe and respected, hiring specialists say.
- Practical barriers can prevent employers from reaching otherwise available workers. Early start times can conflict with public transportation or childcare schedules, while language barriers can make training and safety information difficult to understand, panelists said at a recent Construction Dive virtual event.
- Employers can improve recruitment and retention by training managers and supervisors to work with employees from different backgrounds, providing multilingual training and safety information, improving access to properly fitting personal protective equipment and developing relationships with schools, mentoring programs and local communities, panelists said.
Dive Insight:
Expanding the pool of skilled workers requires employers to look beyond recruitment and examine whether their workplaces inadvertently make it difficult for some employees to succeed, panelists said during the event.
“We need more people. We need to cast a wider net,” said Lyn Hewitt, vice president of human resources at Clark Construction Company. “And to do this successfully, we need inclusion and we need workplaces and environments where people have safety, belonging and dignity.”
Construction continues to have a significant demographic imbalance. Women account for about 11% of the industry's workforce, while 86% of construction workers are classified as white, Construction Dive Senior Editor Zachary Phillips said, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The workforce challenges discussed by the panel can also affect facilities departments and the contractors they rely on for building operations, maintenance, renovations and capital projects. Expanding recruitment therefore may require these employers to examine everyday workplace practices that unnecessarily narrow the available labor pool.
Hewitt pointed to scheduling as one example. Traditional construction schedules can make employment difficult for workers with family responsibilities, she said. Finding childcare that allows a parent to drop off a child early enough to report to a jobsite at 6 a.m. can be difficult.
During the panel, Wendell Stemley, president of the National Association of Minority Contractors, cited a similar problem involving transportation. On a large project at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, he said, the project's start time did not align with bus schedules serving an underserved community, preventing potential workers who relied on public transportation from arriving on time.
“We have to start looking at the real world,” Stemley said. “If we want to grow the industry, how do we get those people included in the process?”
Employers should also consider whether equipment and workplace conditions meet the needs of a broader workforce, the panelists said. Hewitt cited increased availability of properly fitting PPE as one area where construction has improved. Diana Eidenshink, president of the ACE Mentor Program, pointed to something even more basic: women citing concerns about porta-potties and clean restroom facilities. Employers sometimes don't recognize such barriers until workers tell them about their experiences, she said.
Language access is another consideration as employers seek workers from a broader range of backgrounds.
Clark uses translation services during safety events that allow workers to hear information in their own languages through headsets, Hewitt said. The company also provides voiceovers in multiple languages for safety orientation videos.
Providing those resources can improve safety and prevent employers from relying on multilingual employees to serve informally as translators for their co-workers, adding responsibilities to their existing jobs, Hewitt said. English-as-a-second-language programs can also help with retention and employees' professional and personal acclimation.
Recruiting efforts can begin well before workers enter the labor force.
Eidenshink said mentoring middle and high school students can expose young people to construction and related careers they may never have considered. Seeing successful workers who share their backgrounds can make those career possibilities more tangible.
Employers should also look locally for workers, Stemley said. Construction jobs are tied to particular locations, and businesses may be overlooking potential employees in nearby communities with high unemployment.
For facilities leaders, the same principle can apply when building internal maintenance and operations teams or evaluating the workforce capabilities of contractors bidding on work: employers can broaden the labor pipeline by looking for available workers in the communities surrounding the facilities they operate.
Once those workers arrive, supervisors play an important role in whether they stay.
Eidenshink recommended training managers, supervisors and executives to work effectively with people from different backgrounds and understand cultural differences. Hewitt said active listening can help managers identify workplace problems that might otherwise cause an employee to leave.
“Genuinely taking the time to get to know people, understand their perspective [and] understand the things that are being said” can help employers identify solutions and create a workplace where employees remain respected, Hewitt said.
Those improvements can ultimately benefit more than the particular groups they were initially designed to help, she said. Changes to scheduling, workplace facilities, training and management practices can make the workplace better for all of the workforce as employers compete for a limited supply of skilled labor.
