Diversity In Construction

We don’t need a statistic to know that middle-aged white males primarily populate the construction industry.

Diversity is – or should be – a fundamental principle, regardless of the benefits. However, benefits are there and they’re pretty good…

Not only does diversity increase your pool of talent but studies from McKinsey & Company have shown that diversity within the workplace improves performance and increases financial returns. McKinsey’s report, Diversity Matters, reveals that there was an “increase of 3.5 percent in EBIT for every 10 percent increase in gender diversity”.

McKinsey hypothesised that these findings were likely due to stronger customer orientation, employee satisfaction and improved decision making: “Diversity fosters innovation and creativity through a greater variety of problem-solving approaches, perspectives, and ideas”.

With all these benefits, why wouldn’t you be more diverse in your recruitment process?

Recruitment, however, is just the first step.

Analysis by Construction News exposed that the construction industry has the worst gender pay gap in the UK, with women earning “30.3 per cent lower than the average for men”. In their report LGTB + survey: Construction’s slow progress laid bare Construction News additionally revealed that “Just over half (54 per cent) of LGBT+ respondents did not feel comfortable being open about their sexuality or gender on site”.

Are these examples of why diversity is so hard to maintain within the construction industry?

Walk the talk…

Acknowledgements are positive, but only a step in the right direction. The industry should – as rightly worded by Turner & Townsend in The importance of gender diversity in construction – be “aware of the implications of unconscious bias” and work towards creating an environment that is more accepting of diversity.

Working with the construction industry, I have been presented with a world of opportunities that I was previously oblivious to. The same can be said for many women out there, but in order to achieve greater diversity and attract the next generation of women, the industry must first create a culture that allows diversity to thrive. It’s been great to see Aphex embrace these values; our CEO Carlos Adams has expressed that “when founding Aphex we wanted to ensure we created a company that was representative of lots of different experiences and backgrounds”.

In partnering with the Women Returners program, the Thames Tideway Scheme succeeded in walking the talk and helping gender diversity to thrive. What’s your company doing to allow diversity to thrive?

Chelsea Munro
Content & Creative
Aphex

 

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Let’s Talk About Weather.

Brits love to talk about the weather.

Whether it’s good or (typically) bad, we love to discuss the weather.

In the construction industry, however, the topic of weather is usually associated with the latter. This isn’t surprising when Aon‘s annual report Weather, Climate & Catastrophe Insight 2017revealed that last year was the costliest year recorded for weather disasters, coming to a total of 344 billion USD.

Even if it doesn’t sit within the disaster category and is just a relentless down-pour of rain, the weather will always affect the construction industry. Bouygues is an industry example, having seen a 15% dip in profits in 2018 compared to 2017 due to “adverse impact of poor weather across Europe in the first quarter” according to Construction News’ article Bouygues Blames Weather As Group Construction Profit Dips.

Unfortunately – although we might wish it sometimes – we can’t control the weather. However, we can control the actions we take as a result of being well informed, thanks to our trusted weather insights. In the IBM and Oxford Economics 2018 report Just Add Weather, 99% of the 1,000 surveyed global C-level executives claimed that improving weather insights can reduce annual operating costs…

We also love to blame the weather.

It’s easy to blame the weather, particularly when it’s so inconveniently unpredictable and out of our control.

However, In The Construction Productivity Imperative, McKinsey & Company suggest that “too many companies work out the design in the office and therefore do not take into consideration actual site conditions”. Their article goes on to discuss how companies are often fixated on the upcoming months and less so on the imminent days to come and therefore the result is that the “necessary equipment may not be in place” for any imminent changes. You can’t deny that weather is uncontrollable, but could you be doing more to factor it into your short-term plans?

Aphex are partnered with IBM’s The Weather Company for this reason; we want to provide our users with up-to-date, location-specific weather and tidal data to better inform their short-term planning. While the Weather Feature has always been present within the Gantt, we have recently incorporated Tide Times to support our Thames Tideway Scheme users:

“To reduce project emission and nuisance to residents, we plan to reduce the number of road vehicles and deliver the project under “more by river”. The addition of weather and tide times to Planner has benefited the team by increasing the overall efficiency when accessing tidal  information, enabling us to improve the short term plan”

– Phil Evans, Thames Tideway Scheme

As so perfectly worded by IBM in Just Add Weather, “How could you improve planning with better weather insights?”.

Chelsea Munro
Content & Creative
Aphex