Reduce the friction in the field

RCS Influencer Aaron Weinstein says that a safety culture often equals a compliant culture as well.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Aaron Weinstein of Terial. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the recording.

Jenny Yu: Hello everyone, my name is Jenny Yu with RoofersCoffeeShop®, and today I'm here for an influencer response from Aaron Weinstein of Terial. How's it going, Aaron?

Aaron Weinstein: Hey, Jenny, it's going great. How are you?

Jenny Yu: Doing great, thank you. This month we're talking about workforce disruption and labor uncertainty. Can you share your thoughts on navigating labor shortages and compliance pressures?

Aaron Weinstein: Absolutely. First off, this is of course one of the most important issues right now in the industry and across the construction industry and broadly across the economy. What I'd say is, there are a few measures that teams can take immediately to help identify labor shortages ahead of time and then also really address some of those compliance pressures that end up coming to bite teams later on.

So, I think the first thing is making sure you have the right process and procedures in place to have that visibility. A lot of the projects that our clients are working on might be 12 months out, nine months out, and those larger re-roof/new construction jobs; you should have a pretty good sense for resource planning. Whether you're using a Gantt chart tool or maybe some type of calendar planning tool, I think that's really important to make sure that you are allocating your resources according to what your actual backlog looks like. And at least in Terial, we have a really awesome way of helping with labor allocation and resource planning, but there are dozens of other tools that teams are able to confidently use to help achieve that type of visibility that's really going to help them when it comes to those times of resource scarcity and labor scarcity.

When it comes to compliance pressures, I think one of the key things for us is you have to reduce the friction in the field. Having a culture of safety is really incredibly important. Everyone knows this, but one of the things that gets lost is if your foreman, your technicians, your teams are not comfortable using a field app that is going to help address accountability on the safety side, then that's really going to be not a useful tool for you. How we view this is that if you want to promote compliance and have a culture of safety, you need to make sure that you have a field tool that is administering safety reporting and safety checklists in the field — toolbox talks, a lot of these other types of weekly/daily routines that your team is already doing. And you need to make sure that there's a way to document compliance there.

That's one of the key ways that we've found our clients and partners are promoting that safety culture on site. And of course, a safety culture equals, in many ways, a compliant culture as well.

Jenny Yu: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on that, Aaron.

Aaron Weinstein: Of course, thanks, Jenny.