S6E144: Unlocking Productivity from the Hard Hat Movement with Will Woodhead

The Project Chatter Podcast

In this week’s pod, we welcomed Will Woodhead to discuss unlocking productivity from the hardhat movement. Will is an engineer by trade who has spent nearly his entire career to date working overseas. At age 21 he was sent to Dalian in northern China for a year by his employer to work on a floating production platform. We Will then move to a further 7 different countries in Asia and West Africa working on the design, construction and offshore installation of oil & gas facilities. During this time Will went back to University in Shanghai, and learnt to speak, read and write Mandarin.
Nearly 20 years later he started Mafic, a construction tech company that has created an alternative payment mechanism that allows tradespeople to get paid a bonus if they graft.It works by recognising the activity someone is doingfrom the movement of their head alone. The system can detect very subtle changes in productivity and schedule and hence in aggregation can be used to understand exactly how a construction site is performing and where the biggest opportunities in productivity and health and safety lie. The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows:

• Productivity is simply the cost per unit of work done. This allows companies to look at the bottom line and allows meaningful comparisons between methods of working
• Efficiency doesn’t focus on individual outputs but is more linked to wastage
• Effectiveness is based on the objective you are trying to achieve e.g. profit or net zero targets
• Productivity means looking at problems with fresh eyes and trying a different approach
• There are many ways in which projects should look to define success outside of the traditional iron triangle (time, cost, quality). This could be in the form of environmental benefits, upskilling local economies, social responsibility
• There is a huge value in having a diversity of thought and experience in project teams to drive productivity
• People generally work at the same rate but the more productive people have less “wastage” when working
• The data from the Mafic hardhat technology shows workers are primarily motivated by money
• If you measure the productivity of a team of workers, there will always be a hierarchy of performance. Getting rid of the lowest performer(s) doesn’t correlate to greater efficiency whereas motivational techniques will have a direct influence
• Companies should not seek to offer overtime during the week as a productivity initiative as the productivity level will be around 60%, companies should aim for weekends.

Here are links to some of the topics we discussed:
· Mafic Progress Data - https://mafic.ltd/time-on-tools/Join us next week when we speak to Rita Arrigo to discuss AI in Infrastructure and how it is going to change our cities.
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