How Workforce Development Helps Safety & Health Through Innovative Results

ALEX MCMANUS: Hi. I'm Alex McManus, CEO and Co-founder of Eyrus. And we're going to talk to you today about how workforce data provides leading indicators for safety on site. By way of background, I have a mechanical engineering degree. And I have spent my almost 30-year career in the construction industry.

And really, when I started out in construction right out of college, I was really into data and software side of construction. So I worked for a company. And we had a really good detailed understanding with data and software of the entire construction process, everything going into construction and then everything coming out of construction, close out.

But what I realized over time is that we had a large black hole when it came to what was happening on the construction site. So fast forward 15 years into my career, 20 years into my career, I met my co-founder of Eyrus, Hussein Cholkamy. And we were really focused on providing visibility onto the construction site. We created Eyrus to provide workforce and worksite visibility.

STEVE BARET: Hey, everyone. I'm Steve Baret. I'm the Head of Strategy and Partnership for Eyrus. My background is actually general contractors. I was in the general contracting work for 12 years, most recently with [INAUDIBLE] as an innovation manager for their data center project.

And I actually implemented the Eyrus on my project. So I'm really excited to talk about this today and see how it relates to safety.

ALEX MCMANUS: So we were lucky enough to bring Steve on board. But he really does have the experience of implementing and using Eyrus on a construction site. So what are we going to talk about today? First and foremost, neither Steve nor I are safety experts. But what we really do have a good understanding of is the workforce on a construction site.

And we work with a lot of safety managers that use our data to proactively manage safety concerns. So what we're going to talk about today is the general status of the construction workforce, and then how the demographics of that workforce tie into kind of safety risks and the cost of those safety risks, and then how you can use that information to provide preventative tactics to improve safety on site.

So to highlight again, we're going to bring you to where there would be a potential safety issue, it's really up to the safety professionals and the safety managers on what to do with that situation. So we're going to use data and information to be a leading indicator for a potential safety issue.

We're going to cover very quickly how you might capture that information, so you have the right structure and setup and a little bit of ROI on that data.

Getting into the current status of the workforce, I mentioned that we have a really good understanding of workforce on construction sites. And some of the data that we've pulled for this presentation comes out of our aggregated database. So Eyrus has been in business for the last seven years. And over that time, we have about 50 million hours of recorded work site hours.

And that's across 7,000 different companies and about 130,000 construction workers. And just to give you a general sense of workers on site, on an average project site that Eyrus might be on, which could be anywhere from probably $20 to $70 million, there might be a peak on-site workers of about 200 workers per day.

But across that project-- let's say, might be 12 months, 22 months-- there's going to be 1,200 unique workers on that site that, as a general contractor and potentially safety manager, you're responsible for their wellbeing. On some of the bigger projects we're on that could cover hundreds of acres, maybe a hyperscale data center, there's upwards of 1,500 workers in one individual day.

But there's going to be more than 7,000 workers coming onto that work site during the course of construction. So that's a lot of individuals. As a safety manager, they're responsible to understand and know what's going on. So backing further up into the construction labor process, I think this is kind of intuitive to everybody.

But when you're running a construction project, the highest labor is in the actual construction site. That's when the most people are working on a project. And having the highest labor at that point is also the highest risk. So for projects that have a total project cost, labor can encompass about 60% to 70% on the high end of that project cost.

So the majority of your construction budget, the majority of your organization and effort, is on the workforce. And what we're seeing right now in the industry is that that's not getting any cheaper. The cost of labor in construction has increased 6.3% year over year. So it's going to continue to increase on the overall cost of a construction project.

And it is really the most important part.

STEVE BARET: If I can add to this, when you look at all of the phases of your project, the construction phase is where you carry the most risk because of all of those variables. There are so many moving parts. And this is where you carry the most cost. So it's very essential for us in this environment to understand the workforce.

Because just like Alex said, it's not getting any cheaper, either.

ALEX MCMANUS: And so just like the rest of the economy right now, there is very low construction unemployment rates, about 3.5%. Which also means there's a significant amount of unfilled positions currently in the construction market. And then, that's also increasing year over year. So you have 93% vacancies in any companies.

And most of those companies are having trouble filling those vacancies. And because of that-- Steve really likes this fact.

STEVE BARET: And that's my fact. We're struggling to find people. So somehow, we've get to fill the gap. 74% of contractors are asking skilled labor to do more work. So that create risks, right? Why? Because if somebody has to do some extra work, well, there's stress with that.

If there is stress and you have to do more than you usually thought you were going to do, then there might be mistakes happening. And if there's mistakes happening, then that's where, again, stress, and safety injuries, and potential safety risks are coming into play. So it's very, very important to understand this.

ALEX MCMANUS: So the other interesting thing that's happening in the construction industry is the average worker is getting older. That's something I didn't realize until we were putting this presentation together. But the construction industry has the greatest average age increase of the workforce.

So what we're seeing in the workforce is that for every five retirees, there's only one younger worker to fill the gap. And what that means is the other 80% of workers coming into the industry are older workers that are being retrained from other industries. So they have less experience, even though they're actually older.

Everybody inherently understands that if you have safety issues on site, there's significant cost to that. So quantifying that for everybody, work injury costs a total of about 15% of the total construction market in the US. So it's about $1.1 trillion, the total size of the construction market in the US. 15% of that is just worker-related injury costs.

But the other really important point that we want to highlight is the time loss associated with injuries and safety-related issues. Because as we just discussed, there's not enough workers in the workforce. Workers are being stretched thin. Workers are being asked to do more. That's increasing injuries. And then, those injuries are taking workers out of the workforce.

So it's imperative to the entire industry to make sure that we keep our workers as safe as possible, not only for their own sake, but so that projects can be completed on time. So we're really taking a look at the industry. And now, we want to tie that into some of the details of the construction demographics and how they impact risk on the worksite.

STEVE BARET: Thanks, Alex. What we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about is about worker turnover. I'm going to present here a little bit of the industry turnover, it's about 22%. What's important to understand is that the most important, when it comes to turnover-- what the most important data is, what's happening on your site.

We don't understand where people are coming from on our projects, but we know when to get on our projects. And that's very important. Because turnover, whether people are coming with experience or a brand new, they still have an adaptation period. There are new workflows. There are new people that you work with in a new environment.

So these are really-- there's a greater risk, basically. When we look at some data on our projects is that for the first 90 days, that's when 40% of all construction workplace injuries happen. And of those 40% of those injuries, 50% of them happen during the first month. And when we go even deeper, most of them happen even in the first two weeks.

So it's very important that we take the time to onboard our people. And the reason why it's important is because if we take the time, they'll feel more comfortable. And we'll be able to adapt more. If we're looking at a project-- so at Eyrus, we looked at our own data for a project. So we looked across 4 million workforce hours from 27 different companies.

And what we wanted to confirm was the correlation of the turnover and the number of injuries per hours worked. Obviously, everybody knows that the more you work, the higher the risk. There's more potential for injuries. So we were able to confirm that with data from companies.

And what we saw is that the bottom three companies that had the highest turnover had actually the highest number of injuries. So what we were able to confirm with the industry knowledge is that, yeah, turnover does have an impact. So it's very essential that we do everything we can to retain our workforce for the sake of safety.

ALEX MCMANUS: And so the other thing that's really important to understand, as Steve was talking about, is that you have to understand where you have worker turnover. So when you have new workers on site, new workers coming in, really being able to key in to when that's happening and where is going to be an indicator of where there's potential safety issues.

So shift changes, safety issues. But the other thing we took a look at on our projects-- and this correlates with the broader understanding of the construction safety industry-- is the number of workers that are working longer on site. So we did an analysis of very similar projects. And what we noticed is the project that had the most workers working more than 8 hours on site, so in that 9- to 12-hour range had also the greatest amount of injuries. It makes sense.

So the important point is to know what data point you need to capture in order to prevent the injuries from occurring. And so we took one project very similar to a series of other projects in our database. And the other projects had probably 37% of the workers working over 8 hours, but they also had significantly less injuries.

And then, that same information Steve is going to talk about correlates, obviously, to the number of hours you're on site.

STEVE BARET: How I talked before, the more hours you work, the more exposed you are to injuries. What we saw is that the top five companies on job sites with the most worked hours were the ones that were accounting on average up to 80% of all of the injuries on the job site. We look industry wise, losses can exceed $136 billion.

So it's very important that we don't stretch our workforce too thin.

ALEX MCMANUS: So when we're talking about turnover on a construction site, we're really talking about something we call trade consistency index, which is TCI. So again, looking into our database, we were able to understand the trade consistency index. And we're trying to-- when you're looking at it by an individual trade, we're also trying to correlate that to injuries or fatalities.

And when we look at a project site, a good trade consistency index is probably 85% plus. So some of the lower trade consistency indexes that we have are roofers, which also happen to have the highest fatality injury rate. Part of that is due to the consistency of the workforce and also the risk obviously associated with that work.

STEVE BARET: So workers that do a lot of work at height-- some other traits that we look looked at that has a greater risk because of the low TCI, so the greater the greater the turnover, is for flooring, and landscape, and exterior finishes. There's a lot of turnover there. And exterior finishes and roofers is very important, because these are trades that do a lot of the work at height.

So training and adapting to the work environment is essential to safety. So we've got to put our efforts in really trying to lower the turnover and improving the TCI for these kind of trades because they work at height. Now, we're going to talk about, hey, what are the preventive tactics that we can do to help improve?

So Alex has some data here that I think is really important when it comes to using the data on our job sites.

ALEX MCMANUS: So a lot of what we just covered, probably the folks in this room inherently understand. Workers, when there's turnover, even according to OSHA, the majority of accidents happen the first 80 hours somebody is on site. When workers are working too long, they're going to increase their chance of injury.

So that's intuitively understood. We can make those connections together. But what we really have to get into is how you use that information to proactively manage your site. And so a kind of fun stat out there that we picked up is, 53% of contractors or large contractors are using some digitalization system to manage safety on site.

However, they're only using 5% of that data. Or conversely, 95% of that data is not being used. So it's being collected and not used. So let's discuss how we have the right information at your fingertips, so that you can use it to proactively manage your site, understand when trades are turning over, understand when workers are working too long, and being able to communicate effectively with your project site.

STEVE BARET: And it's very important because, from a general contractor perspective, what I want to understand is if my data is reliable, what I get is reliable, and it's a single source of truth when it comes to workforce database, because I'll be able to make a better-informed decision. And the way that I can do those better-informed decisions is to visually communicate the data.

A lot of us are visual learners. And this is sometimes the best way to communicate. So for me to take in and visually digest the data is key. But what is also important, what is also key is that all stakeholders can look at the same set of data in whichever way they want to. It's important, because we're getting key insights from all stakeholders.

And it's very important that this data is in real time. I don't have the time when I am on a job site to say, hey, you know what I'm going to wait for my insight into tomorrow morning. I need something right now. I need something that shifts as it goes.

But addition to that, I really need to automate the reporting. I have the data. I need reports that I can feed into my visual tools to understand the data and to communicate the data. The reason why I want this automated is because I don't really have the time to go into any software, any platform and look for potential issues and issuing reports day after day. I want this smooth, accurate, and automated.

What I really want too, as well, is the alerting. And the real important reason for me is because I want the data to come to me. I don't have to go get the data and dig through a bunch of stuff to find what I need. I need it to come to me. So if there is any deviation in the data from my goals, I need to know it.

And I need to see it right away. So look this will really help us in taking actions right away, because we have the right set of data. And it helped me improve my decision-making abilities and to communicate more efficiently. Some of the ways that we can do that is understanding who's on our job site.

This is the key of safety. I really need to understand who's on my job site. Not only holistic, but I need to understand which trade partners has how many people. And if we look at safety and productivity, like we talked before, working 9 to 12 hours-- the more you do that, the more the chances you have to get injured.

So do I have the right number of people to complete the task? Because we don't want to stretch our workforce too thin. In addition to that, I need to understand, I need to have a workforce database and really understand my workforce. Are they trained appropriately? Do they have the right access?

I need this, because different jobs have different circumstances. Different trades have different requirements. So we really need to understand who is getting which certifications. And we need to understand who needs what certification. How can I use this? I'll take this as an example and, it'll tie into my next point.

I may need to, if I'm at a data center, I may need to only give access to a live electrical room to my certified electricians, nobody else. Because that's a greater risk. And I need to get that alert. If somebody is there that's not supposed to, I need to know right away, not tomorrow. That's why that real-time alert is huge.

But I need to understand that project by project and company by company. What I need to understand as well is for a piece of equipment, are my crew certified to use the right piece of equipment? Is the right person with the right certification is going to start the right vehicle?

It's very vital and can really help have insights in how safe our workforce is. So Alex, I don't know if you have anything to add on this.

ALEX MCMANUS: So what Steve is really talking about is that you need to have a kind of automated real-time information as to what's happening on your site. If you're a project manager, if you're superintendent, if you're a safety manager, you cannot be everywhere at once. And so you need to establish that structure and that database by having each individual worker in your central workforce database with the profile that you have this information in.

And then, you can organize your site in such a way that with IoT, when they're coming on site, where they are, if they're a restricted area. And the software will send an alert directly to you on your phone so you have that information. So it's not about collecting the information and looking at it later on to say, we have to make sure people aren't in this restricted area.

The real focus in preventative tactics is to know as soon as a worker is in an area that they shouldn't be, and have that information go to your phone and alert you. Other things that you can do with that, if you have a worker profile set up-- and a lot of the sites that we work on have a cell phone associated with that worker.

So that enables you to communicate to workers in real time. If you have an understanding of where workers are on site, which is the picture over on the right or the left. I don't know which way, probably your right. Then, you can do things like notify certain workers. Let's say you're out in Arizona in the desert doing a construction project, and you have an automated report that's sent you that said, these workers have been out in the sun for the last however many hours, 2 hours, you can communicate to those workers that they should be taking a water break.

Just a very easy safety way to improve your administration and be aware of what's happening on your site without having to be everywhere. So the next slide is going to get into other things that we can do with that information.

STEVE BARET: If I can go back, there's something that it was very important to me. For safety, maybe I want to understand in real time location of my workforce, because do I need-- do I have too many people in one area? That might affect our productivity and create greater risk for our workforce.

So in addition to this, we've talked about people working from 9 to 12 hours. We've established that there's a greater risk. Getting that report in real time, hey, these workers have been working this amount of hours, there's a risk. The point I want to make is this is really a leading indicator-- the data is really a leading indicator from the workforce database on how we can potentially prevent injuries.

In addition to that, when we're looking at digitizing form, the purpose is to really have access to the data for what is usually done on paper. A lot of our safety forms are on paper. Digitizing that will really help us correlating that data with other data sets, so we can have even greater insight into our workforce.

And Alex, you want to talk about-- Alex is going to take you through the evacuation reporting to maybe say some things that might have been missing fatigue and digitizing.

ALEX MCMANUS: No. I think everybody is following along here, that once you understand how your workforce demographics tie in to what's happening on your site, you have that information in real time. And it allows you as a safety manager to address an incident before it happens.

If we have a workforce database on everybody that's on site, and you've captured as a company detailed information about them, including potentially cell phones, there's really great things you can do in evacuation issues. So if you have automated, collected real-time data and there is an emergency on a job site, you can immediately communicate to everybody on site about an emergency.

And then, you can use the software system to coordinate the check off of all the workers. So this is an amazing ability to preemptively warn people of an issue, as well as make sure everybody is accounted for after the fact. The other thing we talked about, the value of understanding the trade consistency index on site, not only for your overall construction site, but individual trades, and also down to the worker level.

If you set that up properly for your project, you can have an alert that lets you know when trades have shifted. And that will then notify you as a project manager or safety manager that there's an increased potential for injury for this crew and this location on your project site. So it will give you preventative insight as to where you should focus on your project.

STEVE BARET: Now, we've talked about how data is great, but how do we actually capture it? So talking from a general contractor point of view, the kind of data that I need is, I need objective data. I don't need subjective data, I need facts. I don't need perspective. I need facts.

And the reason why that's important is because when the flow of information is coming in, there are great solutions out there. But what I need is a solution that fits my workflow. I don't need to adapt to a product, but I need a solution that really fits my flow. And I want something really easy to use, in which I can minimize my data entry.

Why is this important? It's because our labor is already stressed, and stretched thin, and works long hours. If I add more to it-- and I'd like to suggest that if I'm adding clicks or if I'm adding steps to already existing workflow, I like to suggest that we've failed our workforce because we're not making their life easier.

And the data that they get needs to be reliable. Regardless of the position that we're in, the data we get, the reliability is everything, so they get the correct data. But also, most of us in this audience come from the general contracting world. And we might have different projects in which we need consistent data.

Because ultimately, what we want is a centralized workforce database in which we can gain insights into our workforce, so we can make better decisions and really streamline our administrative efficiency. Like I said before, we don't have the time to go look for data. We need the data to come to us.

And Alex, maybe you want to talk a little bit about how we can set up our site and how we can acquire data.

ALEX MCMANUS: So what's really important is that one, you have consistent data across your project sites. So then, when you're drilling into the insights, you understand what they mean, and you can use them consistently across the project sites. And then, you also need a kind of data collection method and a platform that enables you to manage multiple different types of project sites.

So very quickly, I'm just going to go over some considerations for collecting data and software that you might want to use for that. It's not the point of this presentation. We can drill into this in more detail. And come to our booth at Autodesk, we're happy to talk to you about it. But the first and foremost, you need to configure your data collection by your site.

So you have to figure out how you want to collect the data, what's the specific setup of your site. And then, that might change across projects. Or it might actually change as the project is progressing. So as you're going through the project, you might need more data granularity. You want to start looking at workforce by location versus just who's on site in general.

And then, even further on, you might actually want to be able to virtually or physically define actual access to certain areas on site. So that's all about how you're going to configure your site. You also need a fair amount of optionality in how you're going to collect your data. Again, it's going to change across a project, as well as maybe during the course of our project.

And then, it's also associated with operational ease and cost. So you might want to have just a digital badge, which is an app on the phone that tells you whether people are on or off site. Or you can use different levels of IoT to collect that information. Along with that, you need to consider how you're going to register your workforce.

And some larger sites might have a site administrator that register the workforce as they come in for the safety briefings. On other sites, you might want workers to self register. So you want to have a platform that enables you options and ease of workforce registration and onboarding.

And maybe workers just pre-register before they come on site, maybe they scan a QR code. But those are things you want to consider. So you make it as easy as possible, as Steve was saying, for your construction site to manage construction and then autonomously where you get your workforce data demographics.

So Eyrus is in the business of understanding what's happening on your worksite and your workforce and tying it back to safety. We just looked at some of the ROI associated with this, specific to a safety system.

STEVE BARET: So let's look at a project. How did a centralized workforce database actually help safety? We took an example from our previous projects. We had a client that had a confidential data center in Tornado Alley. What they wanted is real accurate, real-time, attendance, because they needed to understand who was on their jobsite because of the weather threat.

And we actually created our evacuation report for this project for this purpose. And by gathering all of that workforce data set, the company was actually able to provide and streamline the creation of compliance reporting. So how did the centralized database help with safety? There was three full tornado alerts.

We needed to understand-- our client needed to understand if everyone was actually in the shelter rather than just guessing and making sure that people were evacuated. We needed to in real time that people were actually in shelters. We accomplished that. So it goes straight to the value-- Alex talked about the different ways that we can acquire data. Not every site is the same.

But in understanding and looking at how you will use the data and how you will use all the systems, you have a wide variety of things that you can use to understand your workforce and its location. So that's very vital. And Alex will even have more insight and more ROI into how it helps our safety team, right?

ALEX MCMANUS: As Steve had on that previous slide, there's also a fair amount of administrative savings associated from your safety team, as well as your superintendent and your productivity of your workforce. So that was just one example of a singular project we had done a case study on. It's on our website.

Again, we can talk about it more if you come to our booth at Autodesk. But also, we've aggregated some of the ROI for the safety teams on having a centralized workforce database and automated reporting. And what we found is that there's-- across all of the projects-- an average of 15% of time saved on just your basic safety team reporting and communication to the workforce from that specific angle.

What we also found out from talking to the safety professionals on site is on average, per job site, they correlate that having Eyrus avoided up to six injuries per site by having that predictive understanding of when workers are fatigued, when there's been a trade consistency change, when workers are in areas that are too crowded-- as we talked about-- or because we had really efficient worker evacuation reports.

So on one of our project sites, they told us that doing an evac, whether it would be a drill or an actual emergency, they reduced the time from clearing the site from 4 hours to 30 minutes. And all of that data is automated, and digitized, and collect in the system. So that's a significant savings.

When you go back and look at the cost of having an injury or a delay on site due to safety incidences, we project all of those to be about $780,000 in savings on average for our projects. So pretty significant direct ROI cost in having this data at your fingertips and enabling you, as a safety manager, to manage your job more efficiently.

STEVE BARET: And Alex, if I can add to this, what's important to me is like, hey, I saved 15% of time and reporting for my safety. Team that means they can actually spend more time in the field, which is huge. And looking at the six injuries, what is huge is our team is getting live data and live alert, text messages that they can address on the spot to avoid those injuries.

As a general contractor, it is priceless, because then it really is a leading indicator to help improve our safety.

ALEX MCMANUS: So we just want to thank you. And we want to thank Autodesk who we love working with and we're happy to be here. And happy to look forward to seeing you at a conference. And to bring it to the-- yeah, there we go.