SDV CONSTRUCTION INC.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with SDV Construction Inc. president and CEO Paul Farless, whose comments have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
What’s the best thing your organization does to retain its talent?
“People spend the majority of their lives at work, and I had come to realize early on that if I’m going to focus on my people I really need to know what they need, right? So in order to do that, we instituted kind of a blind survey of, if there’s anything that you could change, what would that be? We really got a lot of honest feedback, and I think the biggest action items coming out of that really was our move to a full-time 4-10 workweek just to allow our people to have more time at home with their families. We’re just about to crest a full 12 months in this first round of full-time, semi-permanent 4-10 workweek, and it’s really fared well. I think that’s helped to not only retain who we have, but also attract others. It’s really just been a byproduct of our attempt to try and make this work environment better.”
What was the best way to meet workers’ needs that you found during the pandemic?
“Personal attention. Just really, truly inquiring about their needs. Both personally and professionally, in an effort to just really learn how best to continue keep each individual whole. Being able to give them time to get to the day care. We have quite a few of our employees that are spouses that are teachers in the local school systems and most of the teachers were teaching remote, but at the same time they had small children and no day cares, so really just being flexible and understanding and allowing that. We’ve never really been clock watchers but really just eliminating the clock watching mentality as a manager or a leader, and really focusing workload and making sure that it was a fair and balanced workload, across the board for the team.”
In what way did your staff step up to meet the clients’ and community needs in the pandemic?
“I would dare to say that nothing changed. And that’s not in a negative manner, that’s not because the effort wasn’t put forward. I would say that is because we’ve always done that — our charity endeavors, our support endeavors, our client and customer relationships, our service level. It was really just a function of ensuring that public safety and public health was first and foremost during the pandemic, (because) we do a lot of public-school work, we do a lot of government work, so really ensuring that our customers and clients had the ability to service their clients without any interruptions.”