In this podcast we cover:
- A question from a listener.
- What to do if you don’t have the labor to accomplish the work.
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· LeanSurvey YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Ztn3okFhyB_3p5nmMKnsw
Welcome everybody out to podcast number 1172. In this podcast, I'm going to respond to a listener for the podcast. Stay with us. This is the Elevate Construction Podcast, delivering remarkable content for workers, leaders, and companies in construction wanting to take their next step. Get ready to step out of your comfort zone with Jason Schroeder as he encourages you to do better. Live a remarkable life and expect more. Let's go. Welcome everyone. I hope you're doing well and enjoying your Sunday. And you might get this on Monday or whenever, but I'm going through and making sure that I'm caught up with any podcast responses and I believe I have one more. So let me go. Hey Jason, hope you're having a great weekend. How's your family? By the way, my family is good. Kate is good and is the best CEO of all time. My kids are oldest three have jobs and are going to school and they're loving life. Quite frankly, I don't care if they ever move out. I'm just going to work to get earn more money so I can buy a big house and keep this core family together as long as anybody wants to stay. All the other kids are enjoying school. We're ready for Halloween. We're loving life. Life is literally pretty fantastic. One of our vehicles broke down in our boat axle. The bearing buddy went out and so I got to get it fixed. So the boat's out for the summer. So I'm bummed about that, but I'll take that and get the upholstery fixed. All right, the vehicle is going to get fixed here pretty soon. We're going to get everything up and running. The house is in good repair. So I'm pretty stoked about all that. So that's how my family's doing and that's really nice to ask. Here, this individual goes on. I might have missed the response you might have done for the above question and also I have another question. So I believe I got the previous one. Here's the next one. By my job, we have done a pole plan with our trade partners from raised access flooring back to where we were on the project at the time on two floors about three weeks. The mechanical duct system has yet to make good on their promises of the pole plan. With the date, they said the units will be installed. We as a team have eliminated any roadblocks that we could. But the problem is they can't get manpower to install the material because of the constraints of our job needing American citizens with no felonies. And we are willing to help them in any kind of way we can to move our project along. But they are the slowest on the train right now. Any suggestions? Actually, I have a good suggestion. I have a good suggestion. And this is going to be a little bit politically leaning. So if you're soft and sensitive about truth with this, probably don't keep listening. Probably just stop so that you can stay a loyal podcast listener as we go. Here's the deal. This, our country has a really, really weird concept when it comes to immigrant labor or outsourced labor. We think for some reason that immigrant labor and outsourced labor is stealing jobs that Americans want. That is just not true. We've got four to five million people in the US that could work that aren't working. We don't want those jobs. Most people don't even want to be in construction. And we're trying to win elections by saying that people are helping the border and coming in and raping and killing our families. It's just not true. The amount of crime that is spread amongst all of those different categories or demographics of people are exactly like, or not exactly, but it's very, very much the same. Meaning we don't have a problem in that direction. But our country is very, very snobbish. When it comes to accepting outside help, accepting immigrant labor, accepting outsourced work, we're just very, very snobbish. We make it hard to come into the country. We make it hard to work here. We make it hard to outsourced work. We make it hard for companies to hire. The other thing that I want to say, and like I said, I don't simply devote crime, and I don't simply devote doing the wrong thing, and I don't simply devote criminals. But the United States has 20% of the world's prison population, mainly because of the war on drugs. So people with felonies probably had some kind of infraction that involved possession of an illegal substance. And most of these felonies, I mean, there are obviously other types of felonies from assault and the like. But saying that you want a job site where you can't hire felons is really, really, really going to impact your ability to get workers. So everything that you do on a construction project is based on the resources of the local region and the system constraints. So let me take you back to the system constraints. These five things always apply. Number one, the paradigm of the owner. Number two, the mindset of all project leaders. Number three, the goal of the system. Number four, the structure of the system. Number five, the rules of the system. So in this case, the structure and the rules are hurting your ability to get work done, because we're being snobby about who we let come onto a construction project, trained to be a construction worker and execute the work. So this construction project schedule, knowing the local region and knowing the rules of the project, somebody should have read those and understood what production rates you could get from a historical standpoint. And they should have done a reference class analysis. They should have looked or obtained a reference class for this project to find out exactly what it would take to build it and how long it would take to build it. So you as a builder, you're going to be stressing out about a trade partner not being able to meet the durations, but they're not able to get the resources, which is a constraint in your local region. So it really is what it is, and you should stop stressing about it. Now you can start helping them with ideas for how to recruit. You can look for other companies that would that you could contractually supplement, meaning bring in another crew to actually help them or another company to help them, because they have additional resources and additional capacity. But the bottom line is the system constraint, the structure and the rules are what's holding you back. So this brings me back to this concept of we've got to do better, better pre-planning. We've got to start getting reference classes for these things. If we had done that, we would have had a higher likelihood of knowing that this is a problem. Here's the problem. You as a superintendent are in hell. You don't have the resources. You are in hell right now. You are in hell because you are dealing with a problem that you can't solve and you are being blamed for it. That is an abusive situation. This is the analogy that I'll give you. What if you had two kids, and I don't believe in any of this, right? Probably it's on my mind because I watched a Speak No Evil yesterday with my wife, which is a very well done movie, but it traumatized me a little bit because I know people like the character in this story. But let's say you have two kids and the father, abusive, like the character in Speak No Evil, beats one of the children relentlessly because of the mistakes that the other child makes. What if that happened over and over? You would see this movie and you're like, this is a horror film. This is so wrong. You would feel negative when you got out of the movie. If this was in a movie, you'd be affected the rest of the day. That's what's happening. The owner set up a really, really stupid structure and rule. Now that's a system constraint as a part of systems thinking. Now you're having problems. Your company chucked this over the wall at you without contracting or leaving yourself open to the ability to contract another entity to supplement, and now you're being blamed for a contractor that's behind that can't get the resources based on the system constraint. You've got to stop shaming yourself and just go to work, trying to fix it. And like I said, help the trade, supplement their work, find a way through attack planning to get them to do more with less, get creative, all of the things. But you can't shame yourself and you can't stress out. And I'm really worried that the person that sent this to me is going to end up in a mental health. And I don't want that for you. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. I'm gonna go. Please join us next time in elevating the entire construction experience for workers, leaders, and companies coast to coast. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to share with your construction colleagues and help us spread the word by rating, subscribing, and leaving a review on your preferred podcast listening platform. We really appreciate it. We'll catch you next time on the Elevate Construction Podcast. [BLANK_AUDIO]
