When pricing a project, what is the price of a life?

There are some things we do in life that are pretty hellish: army camp as a 14-year-old; or childbirth for example. Yet when we reflect on those hellish experiences, we often find that our brains have been kind to us and have transposed those uncomfortable memories, for rose-tinted ones. Our memories become focused on the wonderful outcome of our efforts and the satisfying feeling we felt once the hard work was completed.

When interviewing a project manager in the construction industry a few weeks ago, I was poised to remind him of how good he would feel once his brain had shrouded the pain and stress of the last month leading to project handover with feelings of achievement and reward. But this was different.

Joe had been leading a fast track project for 6 months which had had the usual constraints: a client who would like their office space yesterday; a professional team who hadn’t been afforded enough time to prepare it properly; and Joe’s contracting team, who had felt compelled to say they could deliver the project in record time, all the while lacking the resources to do so, and for a cripplingly insufficient profit margin. Every project manager knows how much is riding on their shoulders: profit, program, personal reputation, company reputation, liquidated damages, not to mention their relationship with their partner. The expectation from the industry is that project managers (and indeed their teams), just have to 'get it done' (whilst pricing up new tenders!) and this is a firm test of one’s resilience.

Resilience is a word that is trotted out with many job descriptions these days, a reflection perhaps on the fact that we recognise the demands on people’s roles are becoming increasingly difficult to handle. Resilience is also a word that people associate with ‘bouncing back’, much like a rotund weeble would ping back to life no matter how hard you hit it over. But resilience is better envisioned as an engine, I think, one which starts full of fuel, and the level of fuel inside it depletes with knockbacks and stress and is restored or topped up by the good experiences. For Joe, being the project ‘punchbag’, sucking up the blame for other people’s mistakes and taking phone calls and zoom meetings without fail on his days off, had lacked the volume of restorative fuel he needed.

At the time I spoke to him, he was talking about leaving the industry. He was starting a family and he couldn’t see how family life was tenable if the industry didn’t change. He couldn’t connect with the same feeling of reward and achievement as he once did, even with the help of a bit of distance from the project and his rose tinting brain. It had simply been too much. This was not because he wasn’t resilient. This wasn’t because he couldn’t 'get it done'; he had got it done 'successfully' by all measures of the word in construction. But 'success' has to be about more than price and time. If the cost of success is jeopardising wellbeing and driving exceptional people out of the industry then the industry is propagating a false economy and playing with people’s lives. Joe’s experience is by no means representative of every project manager, but it is representative of too many. Thankfully, Joe is talking about leaving the industry, not leaving the planet.

Since the Farmer report said construction must ‘modernise or die’, the industry has been increasingly conscious of the need to change, to alleviate the pressures on the on-site labour force. There are many initiatives, such as the construction innovation hub’s “values toolkit’, which is designed to change the way the construction industry thinks about and measures value. The toolkit espouses ‘optimising the social, environmental and economic outcomes from your projects...’ But do companies interpret ‘optimising social outcomes’ to include their own people as the branch of society to whom they dedicate the most care and attention? And how relatable and implementable are these theories and recommendations to the thousands of SME contracting businesses? Government-backed initiatives can feel very distant for SMEs who don’t have the resources to dedicate themselves to understanding and implementing them.

Toolkits and other initiatives, have to be worked into a business, not onto it. Integrating them properly avoids it becoming yet another task to complete on top of everything else. If we are to transpose optimising social outcomes i.e., wellbeing, into businesses, we must not treat wellbeing and project performance as concepts that are divorced from one another. We need little reminder that people perform at their very best when they feel good and at their worst when they don’t. Wellbeing support and advice are essential, but we must deal with the root cause as well as the symptoms. Unless wellbeing is integrated with project performance, to become a measurement of success, then we won’t affect the change we seek.

The answer is out there, and it doesn’t lie in gutsily putting up your price, especially in an economically strained marketplace; those who don’t go with you will win the work. If we are to successfully drive change, functioning with a poor wellbeing record has to become a topic of dishonour for companies and clients, in much the same way as it has become for those who lack gender and ethnic diversity in the workplace. Companies who value wellbeing could make their efforts visible, before a government doctrine insists that they do so. Could we measure and publicise wellbeing performance on a project? Could clients and their teams insist on wellbeing benchmarks being met, and playing their part in meeting them, as this is not an issue for contractors to tackle alone. We will have to think laterally, be experimental, take some risks, and be ok with failing but this is the time to embrace the zeitgeist of this post-covid workplace and do the right thing by the industry’s people.

Many might see my assessment of this as negative and I acknowledge it’s certainly not fodder for construction PR. We have data that tells us that the pressure in construction is too much; we lose one person a day. I believe that knowing this statistic and hearing first-hand accounts of the pressure on people you know, or people you feel you know, like Joe, will help to motivate the construction industry to evolve with increasing vigour and recognise that every tiny step will take us somewhere. The status quo is not acceptable and however difficult it might be to envisage the solution, the worst we can do is to let things continue as they are. When pricing your next project, think about what a life is worth and think about what you can do differently.

"There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." - Nelson Mandela

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If you are feeling uncomfortable levels of stress or anxiety and need to talk, here are some great people who can help.

https://www.constructionindustryhelpline.com/

https://www.samaritans.org/

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/helplines/

#mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthawarenessweek