That's a Wrap on Summit

It’s been a few weeks since we hosted you all for StructionSite Summit. If you tuned in a few weeks ago, you would have heard our CEO, Matt Daly, share some thoughts about why we decided to pivot and host a virtual summit this year. As we settle into the final weeks of the year, we wanted to share some of the themes and highlights from StructionSiteSummit.

People
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that people matter - the people you work with, work for, or live around. As Sasha Reed said in her keynote address, great leaders “focus on people and make sure they are focused on solving problems for the customer” and we strive to partner with our customers to do this every day. By focusing on the people who build the technology, answer the phones, and evangelize our product and brand, we are able to better serve the industry as a whole. The pandemic has also shown us certain inequities that exist within our industry when it came to field versus office jobs. Over the year, we’ve seen many organizations have to wrestle with jobsites considered as essential work and open--albeit with health and safety modifications--to office buildings forced to work remotely. Skanska’s leadership addressed the challenges of these inequities and how navigated the challenges with open and thoughtful discussion about how to leverage technology to better collaborate and coordinate with teams on and off the jobsite to keep projects on schedule.

Technology
We’ve seen a rapid rise in technology adoption during COVID. One of the main reasons was due to the COVID health and safety restrictions on maintaining six feet from one another. The firms that found the greatest ability to pivot were the ones who regularly experimented with technology and were able to operationalize it overnight. This experimentation also encouraged firms, like Sellen, to lean into their servant leadership principles to “embrace [staff] along their journey of where they're at, and understanding that everyone learns at a different pace.” While on one hand, they were teaching some life skills like operating a computer for the first time, they also had interns revolutionizing how they use technology to navigate through Navisworks models. Sellen is like many firms who recognize that we are in a digital age that needs to bridge the requirements of the legacy world as the industry moves into the improved digital age.

Process
We’ve also seen that contractors who made early investments in their technology and processes saw an increase in communication and collaboration. Many suspect that this will have long-lasting impacts to how we do work because of the intentional behaviors every person has had to take. Skanska immediately adapted their work plans to leverage existing technologies to ensure every worker on a jobsite understood how jobsites would function with new regulations, and coincidentally saw a drastic decrease in work-stopping safety incidents. And for an industry that has experienced immense change, Dave Burns at McCarthy calls out collaboration and integration of technology as critical to understanding how technology can facilitate leadership priorities so that all teams are collaboratively working together to achieve those goals.

As we close out this year and look to hitting the ground running in 2021, it's abundantly clear that our industry is interconnected and reliant on best practices from one another, and we hope we were able to share some of those insights through Summit.

If you missed any of the sessions, no worries: please reach out to our team to get access to the recordings!