Episode 68: Keeping Your Sites Safe With Luke Williams
In episode 68 of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, we’re joined by Luke Williams, General Manager at HazardCo. Throughout this episode, Luke explains the biggest risks to health and safety on a work site and how implementing the proper OH&S systems doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth!
Episode 68: Keeping Your Sites Safe With Luke Williams
In episode 68 of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, we’re joined by Luke Williams, General Manager at HazardCo. Throughout this episode, Luke explains the biggest risks to health and safety on a work site and how implementing the proper OH&S systems doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth!
Show Notes
Transcript
In episode 68 of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, we’re joined by Luke Williams, General Manager at HazardCo. Throughout this episode, Luke explains the biggest risks to health and safety on a work site and how implementing the proper OH&S systems doesn’t have to feel like pulling teeth!
Inside episode 68 you will discover
- The biggest risks to health and safety on a work site
- A faster, simpler health and safety system
- OH&S common blind spots builders face today
- Augmented and virtual reality the future of health and safety?
- Health and safety words of wisdom you need to hear
- And much, much more.
Listen to the full episode to uncover what you need to be incorporating to feel confident you-re on top of health and safety procedures, protecting your staff and business.
Luke Williams - General Manager at HazardCo
Luke Williams is the General Manager of HazardCo Australia and has over 10 years experience in the building and construction industry. Luke was the foundation HazardCo employee in Australia and is a member of the group executive team. Since market entry in late 2019, HazardCo has seen rapid growth in Australia and now has more than 10,000 businesses using the system across Australia and New Zealand.
Luke is passionate about driving change in the construction industry more broadly; with better communication, increased efficiency, improved systems and most importantly a focused approach to improving diversity. Luke is a firm believer that it is diversity that unlocks innovation and believes this is the key to driving the construction industry to ever greater heights.
Timeline
1:30 About Luke and his role at HazardCo
4:37 Potential dangers on a building site
12:58 Common blindspots to consider
19:50 The future for construction health and safety
24:11 Key words of wisdom
Links, Resources & More
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Luke Williams:
If you had have told me four or five years ago that I'd be pedalling QR codes around the world, I would've said that you're crazy.
Luke Williams:
Accidents will always happen. So what are you doing to minimise the likelihood of that happening?
Luke Williams:
The engagement of subcontractors inherently creates risk.
Luke Williams:
Ultimately, health and safety is about active safety management.
Luke Williams:
It's the ultimate shortcut that ticks all the boxes.
Luke Williams:
Someone who operates our platform is three to four times less likely to have an incident on their construction site.
Bosco Anthony:
Hello, and welcome to the Professional Builders Secrets Podcast, a podcast by the Association of Professional Builders (APB) for building company owners, general managers, VPs and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company, from sales processes to financials, operations and marketing. We have another exciting episode from the Professional Builders Secrets Podcast. Joining us today is Luke Williams, General Manager for HazardCo. Luke, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and a little bit about HazardCo?
Luke Williams:
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, thanks for having me on, Bosco. It's exciting to be on the podcast and hopefully I can share some value. HazardCo is a digital health and safety platform focused on the residential construction industry. We made a pretty conscious decision early on in our journey as an enterprise to focus on small to medium residential builders and A&A contractors, so additions and alterations.
Luke Williams:
From my point of view, I'm the General Manager at HazardCo. I started the Australian business, so I was our first person on the ground and set it up from day one. So, I've done everything in HazardCo, from sticking QR codes onto site signage boards and sending them off with Australia Post, all the way through to running the business now that we have about 30 people in the team.
Luke Williams:
My background is very much the building industry, so I've worked in a number of different roles throughout the construction industry, from materials manufacturers through to wholesale distribution, and I’ve run my own businesses as well. So it's been a fun ride and it's going well.
Bosco Anthony:
I smile when you say QR codes because there was a time back in the day when people would look at a QR code and say, "What's that?" And now, even our grandma knows how to use it, thanks to our current events.
Luke Williams:
Unbelievable. If you had have told me four or five years ago that I'd be pedalling QR codes around the world, I would've said that you're crazy and get out of your time machine.
Bosco Anthony:
Yeah, exactly. How did HazardCo get started? You talked a little bit about health and safety and digital transformation, which surprisingly go hand in hand, but how did this idea come to pass and why is it so essential for builders today?
Luke Williams:
That’s a great question. So 14 or 15 years ago, a couple of tradies [tradespeople] in New Zealand were having a chat, probably over a beer. I definitely wasn't there. They were having a chat over a beer about the list of requirements that commercial construction companies and their friends in commercial construction had to do from a health and safety and a risk management point of view. “Imagine if we had to do all of that.” Almost as soon as the thought came into their minds and out of their mouths as words, they said, “That can't be right. Surely that's wrong.” And sure enough, the list of requirements and what you have to do is the same in residential and commercial construction.
Luke Williams:
So they set about on a journey to make health and safety easier. The construction industry has very much always been a ‘she'll be right’ kind of mentality and that's certainly not how health and safety should be viewed from a construction point of view. They started their journey around enabling awareness and education of people on site to do better health and safety. Then, we got some incredibly talented and intelligent investors on board who saw the opportunity to digitise the offering. And then, four years ago, we entered the Australian market with a purely digital platform for builders and it now takes care of their end-to-end safety needs for residential construction sites.
Bosco Anthony:
I've always wondered what's likely to go wrong on a residential building site or the most common injury on site that you've seen. I mean, obviously you're building a tool to prevent that, but what are some of the potential dangers on a site?
Luke Williams:
Construction is a particularly high risk industry and it can be from the most benign thing. Slips and trips are right up there in the rankings as far as accidents that happen on site. That’s often an indicator of poor quality site maintenance and cleanliness. The most common accidents are slips and trips, electrical, ladders and falls from heights. Fall from heights is always a massive one that the regulators are looking at as well. Safe Work Australia and the state bodies are looking at that; they're the things that can happen and it can be minor all the way to serious, in terms of incidents that can happen on site, particularly once you're working at height.
Bosco Anthony:
I'm going to ask the obvious question here, but what are the risks that builders face when it comes to health and safety on the work sites? And if they're not paying attention to it, what are some of the biggest impacts to their business?
Luke Williams:
Some of the things that builders are thinking about are probably not executing on site specific issues; site to site risks. One of the things about construction is that it's dynamic, but that's one of the things that makes it interesting. It's an exciting industry to work in, but every site is dynamic. You walk onto a building site, the same site today and the same site tomorrow, but something will have changed. So, the need to consider risk from site to site is super important. Where we see that fall down is that the emphasis isn't on managing risk consistently. Safe Work Australia and the state bodies would be looking at risk from three points of view. You've got to consider it in the first place, then you've got to identify it and then you have to control it.
Luke Williams:
If you're not considering risk from job to job, that's where risk literally starts to creep into the things that you're doing, and the impacts can be massive. We've seen companies go out of business, into liquidation, close down due to the size of the fines all the way through to things like having to stop construction on your sites. There's a people impact as well. From our point of view, we don't focus as much on the legislative impact, so the financial implications, but the weight of personal burden that comes with having people injured inside your business or on your work sites is pretty huge.
Bosco Anthony:
That can also impact the culture of the workplace as well. So, are most of the sites that you work with safe? I know it's a tricky question to ask, but I'm just curious, when you look at your clientele, where's the validation of the technology, I guess?
Luke Williams:
That’s a great question, a fair question. What we look for and what we achieve, and we can see it in the data, is improvement. So, are all of the sites that operate with HazardCo safe? It would be very hard to say yes, they're all 100% safe and nothing's ever going to happen. The pursuit of zero harm, I really believe is the pursuit of maximum minimisation of harm. Accidents will always happen, so what are you doing to minimise the likelihood of that happening? That's something that we've been able to achieve at HazardCo. So what we can see, we've got 10,000 construction businesses across Australia and New Zealand that operate on our platform. The industry itself has tens of thousands of businesses for which data is readily available.
Luke Williams:
So the data for likelihood of incidents or frequency of incidents in the construction industry more generally is available. We've also got that data for our subset of that industry. So the reality is, at the end of the day, a HazardCo member, someone who operates our platform, is three to four times less likely to have an incident on their construction site if they've implemented the platform well. The better they implement it, the more that likelihood decreases, I should say.
Bosco Anthony:
What should builders pay attention to? Because I'm assuming that yes, there's technology and we're trying to automate this, but at the same time, there's a human component to this. So what should they pay attention to when they're working with you?
Luke Williams:
There are two key things that I would suggest they really start thinking about. One is the site specific nature of what they do. So the fact that they're operating multiple sites or they’re different jobs, from job to job. The second thing is people, like I just said, Bosco. The engagement of subcontractors inherently creates risk. You're giving the task of doing a job on your site to somebody else, and the set and forget principle just doesn't apply. So, part of the journey that a customer would go on when they come on board with HazardCo is not only streamlining their systems and their processes and unlocking a huge amount of time efficiencies, but also that education and awareness journey that they can go on in terms of, “Okay, I've got a duty of care for my subcontractors, but they've also got a responsibility as well.”
Luke Williams:
So it's not all on you as a builder, it's not all on them as a subcontractor. How do you engage with them? Ultimately, health and safety's about active safety management. So it's about doing the doing. And then, the compliance part is just being able to show that you've done the doing, the daily habits, the weekly habits, the monthly things that you can do to consider risk, identify risk and control risk. Then you need a simple, easy system that can capture and surface that as well.
Bosco Anthony:
Do you feel that the health and safety side of things in the industry has evolved? Is it more proactive? I'm assuming the tool that you're bringing is a lot more about prevention and proactivity as well, but where do you see the health and safety processes currently in place?
Luke Williams:
The industry has certainly evolved. So in New Zealand, five years ago, we saw changes in legislation. Western Australia is just going through that at the moment. We've moved to harmonise across Australia in recent history. So legislation is evolving all the time and that's a really tricky thing. When you're a carpenter or a tradesperson and you get your building licence, you go out and you want to start running construction jobs. You certainly don't go and sit down and read 180 pages of health and safety regulations and then the next 20 pages when they get issued, and they get issued in the worst language possible that you can't understand.
Luke Williams:
A big part of what we do is our health and safety advisory. We’ve got health and safety consultants who sit in our offices in Australia and New Zealand and are literally there waiting for the phone calls of our members to help them out as safety consultants. But also, they’re digesting all of that crazy legislation and putting it back to our members, surfacing it to our members in a really consumable way so that they’re educated.
Luke Williams:
So, what we see from a trend point of view is the easier it is to understand, the more people do it. The easier it is to do, the better the outcomes, the less risk, but also then, the less chance of running afoul of the regulator. Then, from a regulator’s point of view, they can go on and off between an education focus, where they’re really just trying to make sure that everyone knows what they should be doing, to a compliance focus, which is really about catching out the people who aren’t doing the right thing.
Luke Williams:
We're certainly moving into a phase of compliance. They're about enforcement and they're looking at making sure that everything's been done, it's been done right, and wanting to check in on sites. They're hiring more safety inspectors from a Safe Work Australia point of view, and they're more active. And so, it's just arming our members, our builders, with the best possible tools and the right knowledge.
Bosco Anthony:
Is there anything that builders tend to miss in this process? You just talked about the fact that when there are changes, there are a lot of changes and it's not usually the best user-friendly language. What are some of the most common things that builders are not aware of or should be better aware of?
Luke Williams:
Delineation of responsibility is probably a good one. So what does the builder have to do versus what does a subcontractor have to do versus what do you both have to do? The HazardCo platform is really designed to break that down. So it's user driven, but it's content guided. So what that means in plain speak is all the answers are in there, you’ve just got to tick the right boxes. That education awareness happens just by using the platform. Often, our members will go from saying, "Oh, I didn't realise I need to need it to do that," to, "Wow, that's so easy to do." Then it just becomes part of running their businesses.
Bosco Anthony:
Are there common blind spots that you've seen in the industry that often get overlooked in this space as well? You talked a little bit about their roles and responsibilities, but if you have to look at the last few years, what's the one most common blind spot that most builders face today?
Luke Williams:
I would go with site specific safety; that covers everything that you do. The biggest blind spot for subcontractors is site specific SWMS, so safe work method statements. Lots of them are running around with photocopied SWMSs from three or four years ago. It's just the same one on every job. Recently, we've seen a few investigated and prosecuted cases where the one thing that was specific to that site that wasn't in the safety documentation was actually what they got caught out with. There were massive fines, a couple of companies went out of business. That starts with builder documentation as well. So site specific safety plans are literally that.
Luke Williams:
A lot of builders will get a safety pack of documents and they replicate that document and they fill in a new address. They might change a few things, but again, they’re not health and safety professionals and neither should they be. They miss stuff or they don't do stuff. The banner behind me is one of our messages around confidence, and 90% of builders who move on to the HazardCo platform speak about a significant increase in confidence that they're doing everything now. Before, they did have those blind spots and they were missing how easy it was to create new site specific plans on a platform like HazardCo.
Bosco Anthony:
It's kind of ironic because what you're just saying is that sometimes they take shortcuts and here is a tool that can automate and give them a better shortcut and make them feel more confident, but they just have to do it the right way, I guess, is what you're saying.
Luke Williams:
Yeah, spot on. You've nailed it. It's the ultimate shortcut that ticks all the boxes.
Bosco Anthony:
Right, fair enough. So, what are some of the resources that you offer builders? You talked a little bit about phone support and you've got consultants, obviously. Tell us a little bit about the app. What are some of those really incredible features that could really help builders?
Luke Williams:
There's a couple of parts to the HazardCo platform from a digital point of view. There's the HazardCo Hub, which is really your control centre and has evolved even over the last 18 to 24 months to an incredibly powerful tool in terms of not only safety creation from a documentation point of view, but safety management, and then the analytics and reporting that give you really good oversight.
Luke Williams:
From a builder's point of view, you can do everything from pre-qualify your subcontractors and manage your contractor management, from a credential management point of view through the platform, create site specific safety plans, literally in a couple of minutes all the way through to really good dashboards and analytics that give you oversight of your business. Where are your biggest risk areas? What is most likely to go wrong on your sites? Have you got coverage across your current active projects of inducted contractors and SWMS documentation and site reviews and those sorts of things?
Luke Williams:
So it brings an incredible level of visibility very easily to the safety and risk element of your business. And then, on site, the app is really about safety in your back pocket. It's got ready to go SWMS templates and a template builder; the content's already in there so you don't have to know the answers. There are site reviews, toolbox talks, reporting of incidents, which are then backed up by our advisory team that we talked about.
Luke Williams:
We've got a team of qualified safety consultants, not only providing phone-based support for, “I'm looking at some scaffold and it just doesn't look right,” or “Do I have to put some edge protection here?” all the way through to 24/7 incident support. So when something does go wrong, you've got that backup that's genuine peace of mind. You don't need it until it goes wrong, and then it goes wrong and you really need it. So, they've got that 24/7 incident support to help them out when things do go wrong.
Bosco Anthony:
Now, health and safety can be pretty complex, as you said, with the changes and the updates and the regulation and everything else. I imagine there's a lot of misunderstanding or myths that surround this topic usually. What are some of the more common questions you receive or areas you often need to correct or debunk?
Luke Williams:
We focus the majority of our efforts, our attention and our product at the small to medium residential construction business. Often the biggest myth in that space is, “I'm too small to be noticed.” The feeling is, “I'm a small fish, the regulator is out there looking for the big guy. They're looking to make examples, they won't come and see me.” But that's certainly not the case. What we see more often than not is the little businesses get caught; they make the mistakes that then get prosecuted. They don't have systems in place, they fall into that trap of, “I'm too small to have to do anything.” But the reality is it's no different for them. So that's a big one to debunk.
Luke Williams:
The other myth is subcontractor management, and where the line of responsibility is. Builders say, "Oh, hey, it's my plumber, it's his job to do stuff." Yeah, absolutely, it is his job to do stuff, but you need to do stuff as well. So there's that duty of care, providing a safe site, making sure that you're capturing the right details. Have you got their insurances, their plumbing certificate, their wire card, their plumbing licence, that sort of thing, and then, providing a safe site. But then also, the plumber has that responsibility to make sure that their employees are safe, that they're inducting themselves onto site, because you've provided a means of induction. So that blurring of the lines between subby [subcontractor] and builder and whose responsibility it is, is something that we help out a lot with and provide the tools to manage.
Bosco Anthony:
What's a typical observation of the industry right now when it comes to residential builders? What are you seeing right now that's a common sort of observation?
Luke Williams:
It's a challenging market out there. Interest rates are rising. We've come off the back of the HomeBuilder grant from the government. The number of approvals has been huge, but the number of completions has separated from that in terms of the gap has grown, which is just putting huge pressure on both supply chain and the labour market as well. So being able to easily and effectively work in with your subcontractors, having a good pool of quality subcontractors so that you've got labour for your jobs is really important. Material supply, managing your project pipeline is also important.
Luke Williams:
It'd be a really easy time in construction to take on a heap of work, but that's where we see builders often getting into trouble. Managing cashflow, managing labour and materials are real focuses at the moment and then, I think demand will start to drop. So, businesses have an opportunity to really position themselves well now, to make sure that they're running efficiently.
Bosco Anthony:
What are some of the trends for health and safety that you can see coming down in the future? Obviously, you're around it so much. If you had to prepare builders, what are they preparing for coming up in the future?
Luke Williams:
From a legislation point of view, so what's required of them. I think it's less about changes coming, more about focusing on getting it right. So, I think what we'll see is an increased investment in inspectors, in funding available to work safe and Safe Work Australia so that they're able to get better coverage. There'll be a higher focus on the higher risk industries, of which construction is one. With the prevalence and proliferation of digital tools, it's easier to do better health and safety. The expectation is that you will do better health and safety. We can see that coming down the line for us in particular and from a digital technology point of view.
Luke Williams:
Some of the things that are going to start to develop are really interactive health and safety. So getting automatically assigned tasks and getting people to follow close-out on safety actions, assigning a control measure, getting interaction at the point of site entry. So with all those sorts of things, health and safety will really start to become interactive and a daily habit, which is what it needs to be if it's going to drive best practice and keep people safe.
Bosco Anthony:
Do you think we'll ever get to the stage where augmented reality and virtual reality will start to change and transform the technology out there?
Luke Williams:
Yeah, absolutely. We see that. We can already see a little bit of that on the horizon. I think with virtual reality (VR), particularly from a training point of view, it's very easy now to create a training package. It's quite expensive, but it's easy to create a training package via VR and show someone how to identify risks on a construction site or what control measures they should be looking for; you can do that via VR. Augmented reality is starting to come into play in the construction industry.
Luke Williams:
One of the things I think will happen in the future is the ability to use drone footage and AI to automatically, without human intervention, pick up on risks on a construction site. It might be a forklift driving too close to something, or it might be something that's precariously perched and could fall. These sorts of things where we get to a point where between video and AI, we're able to identify these things and potentially mitigate them pretty quickly.
Bosco Anthony:
So tell us a little bit about the app. How does it work? Obviously, there are people who need to learn how to use it and some people who are already tech savvy. What can a builder or tradie expect when they're working with the app?
Luke Williams:
They can expect something that's built by tradies for tradies. We absolutely understand that when we started developing the app and getting it in the hands of people in the construction industry, particularly in Australia four years ago, I was the one who was out there on site chatting to people and playing around with the app. I had a concreter come up and say, “I've got a flip phone; I can't do any of this.” Those days are pretty much behind us; 95% of those in the industry have a smartphone. A lot of them know how to use it. So what they can expect is a tool that's been developed for the residential construction industry for tradies to use. It's got all of the content in there. It is genuinely a really guided experience. It's not intended at all to require health and safety expertise or knowledge.
Luke Williams:
You go in and you open up the SWMS functionality in the app as an example, and there are pre-populated templates, there's a library of SWMS templates in there. So if you’re a carpenter and you’re doing roof framing, you can click on that template. It's got a lot of the info that you would probably know but wouldn't know how to input or lay out or how to explain safe work steps. All of that's in there, and it’s quite interactive. You click on the boxes. If you click one answer, it'll give you some options for the next answer.
Luke Williams:
It guides you through the process. Then it creates a really robust compliance SWMS document on the spot. Literally, I think I've seen people do them from templates in 30 seconds. You can build a new template in a minute and a half, two minutes. Then you've got a compliance SWMS that everyone can sign off digitally and it's submitted straight away.
Bosco Anthony:
I could talk to you about this for days because you're basically mixing health and safety with technology. You've already had my attention, but I'm just curious for the listeners out there who aren't prioritising health and safety or aren't aware of this tool, but more importantly are taking shortcuts they shouldn't be taking. What words of wisdom do you have for them?
Luke Williams:
What we do know is that 20% of those in the industry are doing nothing, 30% of the industry are using basic paper systems, which are nearly always falling short where they need to be. So they're big numbers. That's half the industry that could be doing a lot more. What I would say is what we have seen over the years is it's not that builders don't want to do it. It's not that they don't care about it. It's not that they don't value the safety of people on site, it's just that they don't know where to start.
Luke Williams:
As human beings, if we don't know how to do something, it's probably not something that we're going to willingly do. I would say that it's easier to do than you think. It's better to start than to do nothing. And there are digital platforms out there like HazardCo that take all the work out of it for you. It's a confidence thing; you don't need to be an expert. Get the right tool, and you're off and running.
Bosco Anthony:
Well, thanks so much for being here today. We really appreciate the insights as well, and I look forward to seeing many more innovative ideas coming from this particular platform. Before we go, one final question to you is what can the current users expect to see from you guys in the near future?
Luke Williams:
That’s a great question. Some of that interactivity that I was talking about earlier, that's where a lot of our focus is on at the moment; the ability for two way interaction via the app. We've got a lot of engagement between builders and subcontractors, but how do we create that really true two-way communication and interaction for notifications, tasks, reminders, assignment of responsibilities and control measures, submission of documents straight from the app, take a photo of something or upload a SWMS document that you've already got and send it straight through to the principal contractor? So our focus is on really just expanding the capabilities of the app as a genuine safety tool on site in your back pocket that provides two-way interaction and engagement.
Bosco Anthony:
Thanks, Luke. We really appreciate you being here and we look forward to having you back here again.
Luke Williams:
It was terrific to come on. It was great to chat; it’s always good to be involved in these things.
Bosco Anthony:
Thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe to Professional Builders Secrets on your favourite podcast platform and leave a review. To learn more about how the systems at APB can help you grow your building company, visit associationofprofessionalbuilders.com. See you next time.
