Construction sites are full of dangers that can quickly become deadly if someone on the job is suffering from a mental health problem and not getting help. Even as more awareness is raised and information about resources is made available, the industry continues to strive to combat the issue.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 53.3 construction workers out of every 100,000 fall to suicide each year, nearly five times the overall national rate.
Despite those numbers, mental health, suicide, and substance abuse continue to be taboo topics among construction workers, supervisors, and owners.
Associated General Contractors of America
For 2024, Kime said, the task force is focusing on getting back to the basics and looking more at the contributing factors or those leading indicators that move someone from I'm having a bad day time to I’m having the worst day of my life in a very dark place. The idea is to continue helping stop the growing numbers within the construction industry in terms of mental health and suicide.
Acknowledging the importance of raising awareness of the issue and ensuring people are aware of resources such as 988, she said the goal is to now turn the focus on catching people before they reach a crisis and help them build resilience and coping strategies.
For the group’s first quarterly forum in 2024, the general topic was communication. The featured speaker was Matt Granados, co-founder of Life Pulse Inc., a company devoted to enhancing productivity, intentionality, and motivation to help individuals and their companies grow.
Whether bringing down tense situations or simply having those hard conversations, no matter the industry, communication is so key. Through research, Granados has found that there are a lot of things that come with staying accountable to people, so communication works well.
“All of these issues that we're running into when it comes to communication are a byproduct of the people we're working with,” he said. “We're not going to solve communication, by just telling people to communicate better.”
Transformation will happen within a company when transformation happens within the individual.
Working with thousands of companies in different industries, Granados points out that while everyone works with people, they are not the problem.
“People have problems; therefore, you have people problems,” he said. “There are problems these people are having that I think we can solve using a sustainable system.”
Using a method to close what Granados defines as personnel performance gaps, the sum of all the individual performance gaps that are stopping an owner and their team from moving forward. He likened the concept of PPGs to potholes in the roadway that can form quickly and cause more damage to a vehicle based on the speed.
In the case of PPGs, Granados said company owners and supervisors are not seeing the people who are struggling, nor recognizing the gaps that can be bridged.
“If we're talking communication, if we have bad communication, that's where we are but we need to bridge the gap to get to good communication,” he said, noting that failure to bridge those gaps can lead to some major negative things happening.
“If you don't have intention and structure working together in a systematic approach. . . whatever you tell people to do with communication will eventually go away,” Granados said.
What makes it so hard?
“The reason why communication is so difficult is we have to sit back and actually think about what communication is,” he said. “Communication is the expression of emotions through a logical form.”
People are emotional beings that express emotional thoughts through logical forms and therefore things can get lost in translation.
How often are workers and supervisors engaged in a conversation that sounds like: "I said right, you heard it wrong" or "You didn't listen."
“The issue here is the words came out fine, but they were processed incorrectly by your brain,” Granados said.
The number one excuse companies cite as leading to communication failure is that there is too much to do and not enough time. Because of that, he said there are tons of problems that companies are dealing with at the end, due to lack of time to deal with it upfront.
“We need to focus on the fact of this is if you create proper margin, you will improve communication and minimize mistakes,” he said, noting that by margin he means, can employees be taught to use their time better so they can invest the time needed to communicate.
Associated General Contractors of America
Three lies
To get to the heart of the issue, Granados reviewed what he labels as the three lies we’ve all been told about communication.
“We had been told to do it wrong for so long and we've started to believe our lies,” he said.
The first is the idea that people believe that "They should just understand what I’m saying,”
One of the rules Life Pulse has when it works with clients is that everyone needs to stop "should-ing" on each other.
“We need to recognize “shoulding” doesn't get us anywhere we want,” Granados said. “The question is, do they understand? We need to change our paradigm so we're not accepting this as a reasonable lie as to why we're not communicating effectively.”
Secondly, people need to stop believing the idea that “It is not my responsibility if they don’t understand.”
Granados pointed out that there is a distinction between responsibility and fault. He said responsibility is something that comes from the person sharing the message, whereas fault can be the reason for them not understanding it but that doesn't excuse the speaker from your responsibility of communicating it.
Contrary to what most people believe, it is your responsibility that they understand what you’re saying.
The last communication lie is the “I don’t have time to explain it to them.”
“If you are going to invest in your people, you either do it upfront, or you do it forever,” Granados said. “If you invest the right amount of time, which is probably more than you would like upfront, you will recuperate that time for the lifetime of that interaction with those people.”
Associated General Contractors of America
Solutions
His solution to the three lies is an amendment to the golden rule, which states that we are to treat others the way we would like to be treated. Granados suggests switching to the “platinum rule,” which states that you treat others the way they would like to be treated.
“We’re going to start speaking to the people the way they would like to be spoken to,” Granados said.
As a first step, he said it is important to remember that communication takes at least two people and to always remember the “co” in communication.
“I think the way most of us communicate, we sit there, and we speak, and then we yell, and then we scream and then we send emails, and then we send text messages, then we send follow-ups, then we do all this stuff,” he said. “The problem is, when you're talking to a wall, you're not going to get a response.”
There’s always a second person involved, so it is important the people receiving the message are ready for it.
“If your people are not ready to hear the message you're sending them, then you sending it doesn't necessarily help,” he said. “Stop talking to a wall and remember the “co” is there for a reason.”
Granados also said to always clarify expectations of a statement or question.
“If we're talking in the construction world and there's a problem on a project, having anything but clear expectations, makes it so much harder to work through that problem,” he said. “You all are in an industry, where things move fast. If you have all the best plans in the world, something little changes, and it changes everything.”
Most managers would agree that new hires are not clear on what is expected of them.
"It's our job as leaders and managers to increase that understanding and offer clear expectations that are not just clearly stated, but understood," he said. "Those extra little steps to make sure your expectations are clearly stated and understood will give you the ability to be on the same page for the next logical step, regardless of the situation."
Lastly, Granados said it is important for leaders to not be a Picasso when communicating. Using his analogy, if only a stick figure is needed, don't add confusion by adding extra fluff to the conversation. Whatever is being conveyed should be clear and direct. Whether a company of 50 to 60 employees or 50,000 employees, whatever is taught, must be sustainable and scalable.
“Communication is hard,” Granados said. "To bridge the gaps, we have to make time and take the time needed to do it," he said. "This will take time, but I promise you, the exponential growth on the time that you invest will be massive."
People tend to communicate differently, whether it’s by phone, talking directly, email or digital contact, or texting.
To expose, bridge, and sustain the gaps people have in communication, Granados said people must ask specific questions. He suggested every supervisor should be focused on asking workers these three questions at least once a week: What are you focused on? What are you grateful for? and What are you working towards? For each question, he suggests team members responded with one-word answers, to provide some insight into people's lives without being too invasive. The questions provide some motivation and structure to the entire process.
“If you have trouble communicating, it's not because you're bad at telling people what to do. It's because you're bad at listening to what people say when you ask questions,” he said.
Regardless of the number of people on a jobsite, Granados said they are the most valuable asset of any company.
“Let's equip them to ask the right questions,” he said.
