How Morgan Construction improved remote workforce communications by eliminating spreadsheets

Kathy Wells00:00

Hello everyone, thank you for standing by. I'm Kathy Wells, editor of Construction Business Owner magazine, and welcome to How to Improve Remote Workforce Communications by Eliminating Spreadsheets, sponsored by FlowForma. We'll share Morgan Construction's experience of empowering a remote workforce and streamlining processes through automation.

Kathy Wells00:46

Carolynne McCaughey is director of corporate services at Morgan Construction & Environmental Ltd, where she oversees human resources, safety, corporate communications, administration, facilities and IT. Rick Dowell is president and co-founder of Pontem Innovations, a licensed professional engineer with an MBA and a background in senior operational leadership. And Shay O'Connor is head of solutions at FlowForma, with more than 25 years in consulting and business development. After the presentation, we'll open the floor to your questions.

Shay O'Connor02:03

Thank you, Kathy, and welcome everybody. Today is a very interactive conversation with people who've been through digitization. To kick it off, we have a poll: what organizational challenges are you currently facing?

Shay O'Connor02:57

These polls reveal a lot, because it's direct information from different sectors. And as is so common, the highest number here is embracing digital technologies. Carolynne, would you concur?

Carolynne McCaughey03:20

Absolutely, Shay. Change is scary, right? When we're already so busy running things, actually embracing something we don't really know, maybe with an old-school workforce, is quite a monster for people to consider.

Rick Dowell04:07

I agree, and the third item, staying competitive, is something everybody feels strongly about. They want to do it, then ask: how? How do we embrace digital technologies without interfering with normal day-to-day business, and keep our clients happy? Picking tools and taking a phased approach can really make a difference.

Carolynne McCaughey04:53

In construction we have to run lean. Our pricing has to be spot on to be competitive in bidding. Add an unknown layer of technology and you think, that's going to cost me money I don't have room for in the margin. We don't always know what the ROI is going to be at the outset, but we know once we get through the change that the efficiencies will come, and you can put that value back into the organization.

Shay O'Connor05:47

The big word for me is embracing. It's one thing to embark on digital technologies, but another to get everybody behind it.

Carolynne McCaughey06:21

Empowering remote workers is another interesting one. Our workforce is really up in the bush, with very little internet. And on some oil and gas sites and mines, mobile devices aren't allowed at all; it's grounds for dismissal. So how do we reach frontline workers we're asking not to be distracted, and keep them safe?

Shay O'Connor07:33

Rick, you're directly involved with Carolynne and Morgan Construction's project, so I'll pass over to you.

Rick Dowell08:04

For context, Pontem Innovations is FlowForma's Canadian partner. We help with the integration and application of process automation tools and analytics. Often these conversations are with people a year or 18 months in, sharing results. This is different: Carolynne and her team are two to three months in, so we'll talk about early wins, early pain points and early changes in culture and approach.

Rick Dowell09:04

Carolynne, tell us a little about Morgan Construction.

Carolynne McCaughey09:15

We're an Alberta-based, privately held contractor. Our employee base ebbs and flows: we can be 350 when COVID hits and spike to 750 inside a couple of months, depending on the work awarded. We move dirt. We have a ton of heavy equipment and light fleet. We're predominantly in oil and gas, mines and the energy sector, but we also do infrastructure, environmental, demolition and reclamation work.

Carolynne McCaughey10:04

Our leading value is that we are safe, and a big part of digitization is everything required for safety and compliance. Our purpose is that we build trust, internally and externally. We're in western Canada, with work starting in Ontario and partners we're exploring in the US.

Rick Dowell10:48

You've been with Morgan almost seven years. What changes have you seen, especially around digitization?

Carolynne McCaughey11:00

Huge ones. We're still old school in a lot of ways, but we started flying drones to survey land, and moved all our safety tickets into a learning management system, so we can run training matrices and gap reports. Before, we took pictures of people's tickets and stored them in emails. And we've ridden the oil price drop in 2015, political downturns and now the pandemic.

Rick Dowell12:20

What motivated Morgan Construction to digitize its processes?

Carolynne McCaughey12:33

One of our values is that we always find a better way. In safety, we say that as soon as you think you've nailed it, you've become complacent. Our support team is very lean, so we say: work smarter, not harder.

Carolynne McCaughey13:15

We have GPS in our equipment, so we get all this data, but we weren't doing anything with it. We moved our servers to the cloud and started using OneDrive to share documents and touch the data once. That begged the question: what's the value in the data we're tracking, and are we even tracking it? We realized how many spreadsheets we had, and asked, how do we know we're performing? What are our KPIs?

Carolynne McCaughey14:25

My background is HR, and recruitment is the biggest pain point in our company. When we're hiring hundreds of people all the time, we need to be tight. We were doing it on a whiteboard, with felt pens and erasers, and only one person was allowed to replace a name if they dropped off.

Rick Dowell15:00

That's the scalability piece. And I love 'always find a better way'. If you make things a little better every week, look at the changes at the end of the year.

Carolynne McCaughey16:05

Our recruitment team tracked hires on a whiteboard, and I said, get it on the computer and share the file. Well, that file became a beast. We still call it our HR whiteboard. It's about 40 columns and hundreds of rows. When we onboard candidates, they have about 30 hoops to jump through: easily 12 to 15 hours of training, drug and alcohol testing, physical fitness testing, driver abstracts, client protocols.

Carolynne McCaughey17:06

In an efficiently run business, all these steps run concurrently, so candidates have a good experience. They're not a new hire until they're compliant. And it was a scary tool: if anybody deleted a row, we lost the data, with 14 users in it at any one time.

Carolynne McCaughey17:30

We needed to manage our performance and know our risks, so we could tell the field: we have a gap here, or someone has been referred to a doctor and we don't know if they'll be cleared. And we needed to build trust with customers, showing tight controls with real-time data and clean reporting, while several people still do concurrent follow-up. There was so much human error.

Rick Dowell18:26

How many stakeholders need to know the onboarding status?

Carolynne McCaughey18:44

Our senior leadership team, every day. Our CEO walks into my office asking how many seats we've filled, how many offers went out, how many people dropped off, and I'm counting on the spreadsheet. Pivots would break because we kept changing it. Then there are foremen and superintendents, construction managers, engineers and project managers. And candidates just want answers. If it's streamlined, that hopefully gets them through the finish line.

Shay O'Connor19:36

What Carolynne said really resonates: the difference between working sequentially and in parallel. With a physical folder passed from one department to the next, the work is sequential and takes a long time. If everybody can work on their piece and see everyone else's, that's one of the big time savers when you start digitizing. If you don't get people ready quickly enough to get on site, you lose money.

Rick Dowell21:09

And that visibility builds trust. How many times do people pop into an office, send an email or a quick text to ask if we're still on track? 'In process' could mean step two or step nine, which is a big difference in what you tell your client.

Shay O'Connor21:44

If you calculate all the time spent asking those questions, you get some scary figures, when all that information should be available.

Rick Dowell22:03

What did Morgan Construction require when you looked for a solution?

Carolynne McCaughey22:21

It needed to be straightforward. Our recruitment team is always under the pressure cooker, so we need to make things as easy as possible and give them the right tools. Scopes change all the time on site, with extra work, weather delays and changes of people, and we wanted to make changes ourselves and manage the system easily.

Carolynne McCaughey23:32

We also wanted transparency. A former recruitment supervisor wouldn't tell the field who he was hiring. I said, how will you build trust that way? So I opened it up, with good reporting on all the details.

Carolynne McCaughey24:02

Another big thing was the corporate license. HR was moving faster than other departments, but they'd all been talking about efficiency and automation. I loved that while HR led the way, it would spread its wings once we had a corporate license, and the cost and the ROI would be shared across the business.

Carolynne McCaughey25:00

And I don't trust easily. We rarely use consultants; we try to do everything off the side of our desk and only do half a job. Having a trusted local partner who said, I think I have a solution that works with your Office 365 system, was very helpful.

Rick Dowell25:32

Add real-time status information, and the ability to evolve. If a client says, we need this form for all recruits now, you can make that change in 10 minutes.

Rick Dowell26:06

What has actually been digitized, and what have you experienced in the first days and weeks?

Carolynne McCaughey26:24

HR onboarding kickstarted what I'd call a movement at Morgan, and got people curious. Then fleet maintenance tracking. Our equipment, maintenance, trucking and logistics groups have so many moving targets. Even just tracking parts and repair requests: mechanics, largely subcontractors, email whoever reports a unit down from the field, all on mobile devices. Things get dropped. Who's tracking what's still in process?

Rick Dowell27:58

On the fleet side, there are lots of assets moving between sites with different requirements, and decisions about maintenance cost versus buying or leasing. You have the strategic view of trends on specific equipment, and the daily operational need for a piece of equipment on a site, across 600 pieces of equipment. And it spans three or four departments, so you balance a consistent Morgan process with each department's own details.

Carolynne McCaughey29:32

I tend to move fast. I get an idea, wrap my head around it, and say let's go, while the team is still asking what the meeting's about. The adoption stage is so critical. Our team has lived in this shared spreadsheet, and many are new; we more than doubled the team during COVID, so they only know one way. I expected to flick a switch, but how do you change in the middle of projects, without people getting bogged down while keeping up with a busy day job?

Carolynne McCaughey30:49

Moving to digital and touching data only once has been really good, and the people who are bought in recognize the value. Reporting used to bog us down, taking more time than filling seats, and this is already loosening that up with quicker, automated reporting. And it's about scalability: we have to be ready to keep growing, and run a lean, high-performing team.

Rick Dowell32:06

A phased approach matters, and so does targeting the areas with the biggest time challenges. Not many people have time on their hands. If you give someone time back from manual, repetitive tasks, that changes a lot in an organization over six months.

Rick Dowell33:06

We're two to three months in, at different levels of adoption. What's next, and what feedback are you hearing from your team?

Carolynne McCaughey33:35

Managing change means recognizing where someone is in the cycle: grieving, angry, confused, or understanding the why. Ground it in the business need. Is it making us safer, helping us retain people, creating a more service-centric model? And communicate, overcommunicate and communicate again, in different ways.

Carolynne McCaughey34:29

We've been transforming our safety forms into digital forms, so we can mine real-time data on safety trends, leading indicators and high-potential near misses, and act that day. Now everyone wants everything digital, and we have to get ahead of what we do with the data. We're looking at Power BI with FlowForma to build digital dashboards for our intranet.

Carolynne McCaughey35:39

We're also thinking about building our own apps to reach frontline workers. And something as simple as new job awards: our naming conventions are out of whack across our risk management, safety, HR, payroll and accounts systems. A FlowForma process could push every new award to everybody, so we all have a common language and set up our systems accordingly.

Rick Dowell36:50

With the structure in place, you can spend three to five hours and build a form for that. The fleet team is very excited, because they know the pain of emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

Carolynne McCaughey37:46

If you're on this call because you're looking at how to innovate and drive efficiencies, stay curious and discover how simple it can be. It seems daunting, but there's help out there, and once it's working, it's quite a well-oiled machine.

Shay O'Connor38:20

I always ask organizations: do you see yourselves being totally manual in five years' time? They all say no. So you have to start somewhere, and you can start nicely and simply. The Office 365 infrastructure is already there; you just add to it.

Carolynne McCaughey39:10

A question from the panel: are there processes that would stay undigitized? Our one roadblock is safety compliance. Many oil sands operators have no-cell-phone zones, so our workers can't use mobile apps. Paper hazard cards in someone's equipment aren't going to make us safer, because there's a delay, and others may have the same hazard.

Shay O'Connor40:21

FlowForma's mobile app works offline, but if you can't have the device there, it has to be filled in digitally at some stage, or you won't gather that data.

Rick Dowell40:45

On a rooftop at minus 25, it might not be realistic to use a phone, or worth putting a tablet in everyone's hands. Writing on paper may be easier at the field level. The key is that the paper gets into the system digitally one time, in one spot, with structured, consistent forms.

Shay O'Connor42:02

Some organizations say they want to go paperless, but they start at paper-light. That's change.

Shay O'Connor42:34

As Carolynne said, they've invested in Office 365, and FlowForma sits on top of it. All your data sits in your own tenancy, in your SharePoint environment. We use it as a data repository; it's always yours.

Shay O'Connor43:24

Some organizations want to hand digitization to IT, others want to empower the whole organization. In construction, margin is king, so you can start at a low-cost entry level, with a flat rate rather than consumption charges, and get your own team creating and maintaining processes.

Shay O'Connor44:38

We also have a construction accelerator, because adopting a new platform can be daunting. It comes with a batch of construction process templates as standard. Features include taking and annotating photos on the mobile app, and location services. Our focus is making life easier for the construction worker, supervisor and manager.

Shay O'Connor45:57

Here's the landing page of our construction accelerators. When you create a process in FlowForma, it's automatically rendered for the mobile app. In labor requisition, the step bar across the top shows which step of a five-step process you're on, which helps people new to digital processes. Materials requisition has the same look and feel, and you don't create these forms: you supply the information and they're rendered for you.

Shay O'Connor48:00

Now a quick change to labor requisition. I add a new step, pick up the user's location on a map, add a yes/no question, and a signature field that's hidden until a condition shows it. There's no code involved. In the preview, it shows I'm in Dublin, where it's sunny today. Answer yes, and the screen changes to let me sign.

Shay O'Connor50:49

If you need alterations based on feedback from business users, you can turn them around that fast, and confirm with them that you're in the right space.

Shay O'Connor51:25

Organizations that want to embrace digital transformation often don't know where to start. You need a sponsor to drive it, and support, because you will get pushback. Adoption is key: you're replacing a way of operating that's been there for years.

Shay O'Connor52:13

Start with a process people are familiar with, an obvious one, and digitize it. Being quick to react matters for two reasons: you get a better process from feedback, and when someone asks for a new step and has it the same day, you get full engagement and ownership. Then keep getting regular feedback and adjusting. And the simplest thing: get a trial and try it out.

Kathy Wells53:52

Thank you all. Shay, from your demonstration: do you have dashboards for each construction process accelerator, where you can see all the responses in one place?

Shay O'Connor54:26

Yes, there are standard dashboards, and all the data is also available in Power BI if you want something more advanced. A lot of people start simple and become more sophisticated.

Rick Dowell55:03

Structured data makes it easy to create interactive reporting, and to give different stakeholders different views, rather than grabbing information from different systems and desktops.

Carolynne McCaughey55:34

Power BI is a beast, but it's made us so curious that I recently hired a data analyst in-house, a new computer engineering graduate. He asks what we did before he came along. Well, we didn't do anything. That was the problem.

Rick Dowell56:03

He's also learning FlowForma, so Morgan will have in-house capability to build processes, which is one of the benefits of no code.

Kathy Wells56:22

How do I pick the first process to automate?

Shay O'Connor56:36

Usually the obvious one: something a lot of people interact with, but of a size where you can demonstrate it as a digital process quite easily.

Rick Dowell57:00

Something mid-sized that touches a lot of people, takes up a lot of time, with lots of back and forth in emails and spreadsheets. And an area with a champion who wants to make things better. That combination is a great place to start.

Kathy Wells57:37

Any tips for user adoption and bringing the team on board?

Shay O'Connor57:43

Involve people early. With a no-code tool you can show progress quickly: here's an initial draft, how do you feel about it? Then make changes on the fly. Pontem has these interactive sessions down to a fine art.

Carolynne McCaughey58:24

Think about who could derail it quickly, who's scared of technology or doesn't think it will work, and make them the project lead. My recruitment supervisor was scared of technology, and now she's a pro. She tweaks it, she knows what she wants, and she can lead her team.

Rick Dowell58:53

Hold frequent check-ins over a shorter period. Don't disappear for six weeks and say ta-da. Meet every week and get feedback, so when it goes live it's not a big event. And with this tool, we set our budgets and timelines, and we hit them.

Kathy Wells59:42

That brings our webinar to a close. Thank you to our sponsor FlowForma, to Carolynne, Rick and Shay for their expert advice, and to everyone for joining us.