Spec Finish

Fairpay helps you build a high-performing construction workforce Ed Burns , Chief Commercial Officer at Mafic, writes about their wearable technology Fairpay and how this can assist employers to get motivation and incentivisation right in a way that improves productivity and retention, addressing a key challenge facing the construction industry at the moment. Our wearable technology allows us to measure productivity and progress from the movement of someone’s head. Like a construction version of a FitBit or Apple Watch. We recognise that tradespeople are the most important people on-site and getting them working well is the best way to drive profitability and schedule on a job, because nothing happens on site without them! Yet one of the biggest surprises for us was the size of the opportunity to get motivation and capability right. When we started measuring productivity, we found that the difference in output between the highest and lowest performers is over 4-5 times. So that means the top 33% of the workforce is responsible for more than 60% of the progress. Construction sites can often feel like demotivated places, and it’s not hard to see why as the people who are producing five times more value are earning at most £2.00 to £3.00 per hour more. It is easy for anyone to point the finger at someone who doesn’t work as hard as they do but earns pretty much the same. At the end of the day, we are all human and why would you work your fingers to the bone when there’s no reward or recognition for it? Without technology, the best way to measure productivity is piece rate, but its shortcomings (including the administrative burden on quality standards, inability to recognise complexity, and incentives to do long simple runs) mean that it is too difficult to use. Yet the prize for getting this right is huge, and the economics are a no-brainer, especially in the current environment with labour shortages and people being poached by other jobs for an extra 50p per hour. This is why we have been helping companies such as Errigal Contracts to align tradespeople’s incentives with that of the project. They are using our Fairpay technology to reward people with a bonus when they have a good day. This has improvedmotivation and increased output by 20-30%, and it also lets them recognise who their best people are andmake sure that they earnmoremoney than another site will offer so that they keep themon their sites. Not only is this fairer to their best workers, but because productivity improves, paying their best peoplemore money actually reduces labour spend by 25%. The best thing about motivating the individuals directly is that you need minimal management intervention to make it work and the scheme is quick to implement. It also lets us overcome the initial hesitancy or nervousness that people often have with new technology. Even though our privacy safeguards prevent users from being tracked, what tips the balance and allows us to make adoption voluntary is that the technology also delivers benefits for the users, not just the companies using it. Deployments tend to start with a small number of people, but once everyone else finds out that the bonus is real, they start asking for their own devices and in our experience, it quickly reaches 90%+ levels of adoption. While the system also gives management teams a range of other benefits that make running their sites easier, I think that workforce motivation really is one of the biggest untapped opportunities for the industry. While paying people more to save money might seem back-to-front, it really is a win-win!.. www.mafic.ltd Feature www.thefis.org 21 Ed Burns, Chief Commercial Officer at Mafic Mafic’s technology Fairpay