Thrive Leadership — Q&A with Founder
The intersection of emerging technology and inclusivity in construction is rarely, if ever, discussed. Throughout this interview, personal anecdotes with Laura Aiken provide perspective to themes that the industry needs to address in order to resolve many of its core challenges going forward.
The initial discussion reveals the personal challenges that too many diverse individuals, especially women, face in a traditionally male-dominated industry like construction. It also discusses how the construction environment, which often promotes assimilation, can be isolating to individuals. Finally, we discuss the challenges of meaningful implementation of emerging technologies and the importance of diverse perspectives in their design and development.
Our shared connection is through Bechtel, where we never actually met but somehow ended up being in similar places at different times around the globe. We then went separate ways and left Bechtel. What was your trajectory? How did you end up where you are now?
Cool, big question! Rewinding the clock, I grew up in the UAE in a very dynamic, multicultural environment, and that was just life. I think that fueled or set up my value system for a lot of the diversity and inclusion work that I do now.
I then went to study chemical engineering in the UK. After finishing my chemical engineering degree, I was looking for opportunities to go and make a difference in the world, and this company, Bechtel, came across my radar which I joined in London with Oil, Gas, & Chemicals.
I was honestly quite confronted by some of the dynamics in the workplace. In large engineering organizations, I realized how hard it can be to influence positive behavior and culture from everyone.
In my first months of working, I had someone make a really awful comment to me. A senior construction manager commented about the length of my skirt and wanting to look up it, to a 23-year-old young woman who was fresh into the workplace.
Oh my. Was this in the office or on a jobsite?
I was in a meeting.
In front of other people.
It was leaving a meeting room. It was in front of other people. No one said anything. I just froze because what —
When you look back on it with years of experience, you try and reconcile what you should have done, but really, there’s no telling what I should have done because I was in a new environment and I didn’t necessarily feel safe to respond.
That really seemingly insignificant thing, it lands on you. It’s like one paper cut and over the course of nine years in the industry, I got a lot of other paper cuts.
A lot of great experiences too, and the work I do now is to try and bring a little bit more awareness and exposure to the seemingly insignificant individual paper cuts that can really cause individuals, not just women, but anyone who feels like they’re othered or excluded.
I spent nine years in the industry, some great times, some fantastic projects, met a lot of wonderful people, built connections with people that I consider to be family, as I’m sure you will relate to.
Yes. That female workplace experience is really unique, especially in construction and on jobsites in general. My mother was one of the first female master electricians in Wisconsin, and so growing up, I could sense the frustration and heard too many stories about things that should not have happened — and it was fully on account of her being a woman.
But I also think that more broadly, youth, when you’re young, you’re vulnerable. I know a lot of folks who don’t feel included during that stage of their career because they worry that they don’t have the experience or they’re not respected, or they don’t feel like they’re being heard, or maybe it’s just the way they are, maybe they’re a little reserved or standoffish.
I know very early on in my career, in my mid-20s, I didn’t have the courage to push an issue even though it was right and it resulted in a multimillion dollar change order with big impact on the project schedule.
I won’t go into the entire story, but my engineering managers and the owner reps they reported to were too, “we’re big construction guy, we know everything, we don’t need to hear it, we’re going to do our own thing” to actually listen. You think about it, if it had been an environment that was more inclusive, there’s actually a dollar and cents component to this as well.
Definitely. That lack of psychological safety costs money. If you’re doing it for no other reason, there’s a bottom-line impact.
And people leave or you push people over the edge, or worse. Construction has a really awful record when it comes to people taking their own lives, and that’s actually not indiscriminately women — that’s actually men who are mostly in those statistics.
I can send you a few studies that I reference when I’m talking about this, but in the UK, there was a study by CIOB that said one in four construction workers were contemplating suicide. In the U.S., comparing the Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation to the 2018 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries showed the suicide rate in construction was five times higher than all fatal work-related injuries.
Think about how much time and effort we put into workplace safety when the rate of people taking their own lives is five times greater. All of the efforts we have in workplace well-being are reactive, and not proactive.
What is it about the construction site that you think contributes to that?
You pointed to it earlier. From the outside it looks like a monolithic group and assimilation is encouraged because it can be a macho culture.
When you have a lot of people who maybe look the same, they’re from the same background, there’s a tendency for people to act the same too. People have this tendency towards assimilation. When there’s lack of alignment between who you are at work and who you are at home, that can be really grating for people.
The construction industry can also be quite isolating from people’s families. That can be really difficult when you don’t have the supportive relationships to lean on.
Then the other piece is unhealthy coping mechanisms like drugs and alcohol which tend to be fairly rife in the site environment.
You definitely see all three. OK, let’s maybe steer this towards technology. I’m working on a new research project through Placer Solutions on emerging technology in construction, and the first one we did was on augmented reality and mixed reality.
One really great takeaway from this research was that the technology, it actually has a very strong inclusivity presence. Because one thing we learned during the pandemic, with the entire work-from-home experience, was that different people operate and thrive in different environments differently.
Augmented reality provides this brand new environment for people to thrive in, for a new generation of people to have this tool available for them to feel like they can be involved in the project from day one. I’m curious if you’ve come across similar concepts?
Definitely. The augmented reality piece, there’s flexibility there, like you said, to cater to different learning styles and participate in the workforce. With augmented reality, you can be immersed in a very kinesthetic learning experience, but you could also be visually comparing drawings to what you’re seeing and there could be auditory elements that you’re building in as well.
You’re catering to those different learning styles, which is one piece of what augmented reality can offer. You touched on the ability to have people work remotely who have different needs. Some of those could be primary caregivers who need a flexible schedule. There’s a whole sandwich generation of people who are maybe just slightly older than us who are starting to have to care for their parents as well as their children.
Then you also have potentially more disability-based access in working in construction, which I think is fascinating. In a construction environment, the landscape is really not conducive to people who, for example, can’t walk. This extended reality technology allows engineers or other technical brains or consultants to participate and be a valuable part of the construction workforce, which I think is just brilliant.
I don’t know if we’re using it for that yet, though. I think we’re using it as a cool technology thing to impress our clients and not as a tool built into a job description that is intentionally friendly to people of different abilities.
That’s absolutely it and that’s the frustrating part of emerging technology in construction. There are all of these brilliant applications and uses and potential for everything we just discussed, but there’s too much VC hype — and a lack of, I think honestly, technology providers with an understanding of how to make it work in the industry and construction companies who know how to implement in meaningful ways.
There’s a couple of things there. The first is the behavioral aspects of both suppliers and adopters in tech and construction, but the other thing I’d love to talk about as well is bias in design because we still have predominantly White men of a certain maybe privileged background being the leading providers of tech, and there are gaps.
Please, what gaps have you identified?
Some of the classic examples, this isn’t tech, but it took so long for women to have properly fitting PPE because the people designing PPE didn’t think of the needs of women in construction, because they weren’t women.
There’s implications on how does technology fit for use? The shape of wearables is an example. Is there bias in the avatars or the people that we’re seeing in augmented reality situations? Are they all construction bros? Are technology providers taking steps to audit their technology for exclusionary design or exclusionary language?
What do you envision the audit process looking like? Would there be a team internal or might there be an external body that helps govern things?
It’s a great question. I think you could do both. I think getting diverse people to use the tech is a great way — just a little focus group of people who aren’t in construction or maybe aren’t one type of demographic in construction using the tool and providing feedback throughout the development phase and just being really intentional on having diverse voices in design.
Exactly. Having a diverse range of people in the room, the right eyeballs on it, the right brains on it, thinking about all of these perspectives can not only improve the product, but improve adoption. It’s the edge cases that you’re not going to know unless someone is in the room to say, “That’s a really dumb idea. We shouldn’t do that because it’s going to exclude or upset people, and ultimately narrow our impact on the industry.”
I think in general, if you can bring diverse and inclusive and psychologically safe teams together, and you give them some tools to be in their best head space and look after themselves and each other — people want to work, people want to do a good job, people want to create, people want to innovate. You just have to help them get out of their way sometimes. Diverse, inclusive, psychologically safe, mentally resilient teams do that.
I love that term, “psychologically safe”. Let’s maybe land there with a shared experience at Bechtel. You saw a lot of the tech that came out of some of the projects we worked on together. How would you summarize your experiences there? You were saying it was really great stuff that evolved.
Yes. I think what worked really well is that our [Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex] project was in some ways autonomous and supported by the client, and able to take some of the things that had been proposed, but also propose our own things and just run with them. We had a team of really slick innovation people, a team of developers, people who were tinkering in different physical and digital tools.
I think investing in those people and giving them the time and space in a project environment where there’s urgency, really helped accelerate things.
A lot of the app-based innovation, the trackers and automated scanning and the tracking of equipment around site, all of that accelerated very quickly because there was a demand and there was a supply. Applying that autonomous group in the project environment worked really well. I think they also had a lot of support and credibility and were given a lot of ownership, and kudos from the leadership, which was well-deserved. They did a great job because of that.
This team of a half dozen or so people were funded by the project to do innovation and tech. And I think that’s a key too. I think that’s part of an operating model for successful tech implementation in construction.
Dedicated people. If people are double-hatting, it’s not going to work. By giving someone one hat, which is make to these innovations applicable and practical and work on project, then they’re going to focus their time and effort on it.
But the owner sponsorship too, because I think that’s unfortunately an exception. I think Shell was willing to invest in this, whereas a lot of owners aren’t necessarily going to have FTEs do this on a project. I think it’s a great example, but I also think the fragmentation of the industry below the Bechtel’s of the world can be a headwind.
We were busy every day helping collate ideas and turn them into reality as quickly as possible because you had to prove they were there for a reason. If we apply that same rigor to those teams, and there’s goals and there’s deadlines, and there’s project-based urgency associated with the tools that they’re rolling out, then that’s where it can work, and you can start to see the business case, and you’re leveraging the project culture to drive results.
I definitely see project-based urgency being a key. Because I think the worst case scenario for tech and innovation in construction is that you invest in it on a project and it dies on that project. In frankly every other industry on the planet, you’re able to operationalize much more easily than you can in construction.
Because operationalizing in construction usually means you have some corporate group sitting in the background, looking at it at an enterprise level, having some strategy in place. The field-based and project-based nature of construction makes that more difficult.
The follow-through of tech from projects comes back to behavior of people related to innovation. If the behavior of people on a project is, “Look how cool we are, we’ve got all this stuff,” rather than we are using this practical environment to progress our culture, keep people safe, make the company more inclusive, and we want to work together to do that, then those are going to have two different outcomes at the end of the project environment.
All of that, it’s a big ship to steer and it’s a big change to influence, but working with people, supporting people, making sure that there’s positive relationships, that people are looked after — that’s just one step towards helping people let their guard down. Soften the ego a little bit, and work with people in a more authentic way that still creates the results.
Nate Fuller is a passionate and accomplished construction technology leader with a diverse background in corporate innovation, construction technology, and entrepreneurship.
His proven track record defining strategy and directing change management in construction has led to successful consulting engagements with North America’s largest construction contractors.
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