How to Motivate Your Team Right Now
Builders and remodelers share how they keep energy and commitment high among their staff, even during a global pandemic
With most of the country allowing residential construction projects to proceed, your remodeling or construction business may be back in action, albeit with some pandemic-related safety adjustments. We recently spoke with builders and remodelers about how they’re motivating their teams these days in the new environment.
Give Employees Autonomy Plus Backup
Machi Medrzycki of MLM in New Orleans has been working on his company culture for years, an effort he says has helped him build a team with motivation and drive. His techniques aren’t specific to the pandemic, but nonetheless, he thinks they help during this time, when energy might naturally be lower. Essentially, his philosophy is a combination of freedom and guidance that gives employees ownership over their jobs that they find motivating. Here are some of his tips.
Machi Medrzycki of MLM in New Orleans has been working on his company culture for years, an effort he says has helped him build a team with motivation and drive. His techniques aren’t specific to the pandemic, but nonetheless, he thinks they help during this time, when energy might naturally be lower. Essentially, his philosophy is a combination of freedom and guidance that gives employees ownership over their jobs that they find motivating. Here are some of his tips.
- Give employees autonomy. “The best motivation for any team is when you acknowledge them as the decision-maker,” he says.
- Use mistakes as an opportunity to improve systems. When mistakes happen, as they inevitably will, Medrzycki calmly talks through the issue with the employee involved. It’s not a shaming event or a dressing down, but an opportunity to prevent this problem from recurring. “You make proper checklists and procedures in order for that to not happen again, and kind of leave it at that,” he says. “They don’t have to be reprimanded. That just adds to stress levels.”
- Be present and offer backup. Medrzycki checks in four days a week with his project leads about what is happening on the job sites. They discuss schedules and troubleshoot any issues together. “They feel they have a backup in me,” Medrzycki says of his employees. “They feel I can always guide them.”
Training Employees for These Times
In Washington state, residential construction shut down completely for five weeks in March and April due to the pandemic, and projects simply had to stop, says Anne Higuera of Ventana Construction in Seattle. She and her husband, the business owners, furloughed their eight carpenters but kept paying their health insurance. “When we were able to go back to work, we were able to bring everybody back,” she says. “We wanted them back.”
Higuera used the shutdown time to prepare her business for the strict pandemic-related safety measures required by her state. Just researching and purchasing appropriate PPE took time, but fortunately her local Master Builders Association provided helpful guidelines. Higuera says motivation among her team to return to work was strong, but adjusting to the new rules has been the challenge.
“We spent several hours on the first day just training everybody,” she says. “I think any time you have big changes in how you need to do things, it takes a little while to wrap your brains around them,” she says.
For the first six weeks of reopening, the local area was in Phase 1 and workers had to stay 6 feet apart at all times. That meant they couldn’t do tasks like install a glass shower door “because it’s impossible to carry heavy glass and stay 6 feet apart,” she says. Recently Seattle moved into Phase 2 of reopening, and Higuera’s team could finally install that shower door, as long as they were wearing masks.
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In Washington state, residential construction shut down completely for five weeks in March and April due to the pandemic, and projects simply had to stop, says Anne Higuera of Ventana Construction in Seattle. She and her husband, the business owners, furloughed their eight carpenters but kept paying their health insurance. “When we were able to go back to work, we were able to bring everybody back,” she says. “We wanted them back.”
Higuera used the shutdown time to prepare her business for the strict pandemic-related safety measures required by her state. Just researching and purchasing appropriate PPE took time, but fortunately her local Master Builders Association provided helpful guidelines. Higuera says motivation among her team to return to work was strong, but adjusting to the new rules has been the challenge.
“We spent several hours on the first day just training everybody,” she says. “I think any time you have big changes in how you need to do things, it takes a little while to wrap your brains around them,” she says.
For the first six weeks of reopening, the local area was in Phase 1 and workers had to stay 6 feet apart at all times. That meant they couldn’t do tasks like install a glass shower door “because it’s impossible to carry heavy glass and stay 6 feet apart,” she says. Recently Seattle moved into Phase 2 of reopening, and Higuera’s team could finally install that shower door, as long as they were wearing masks.
More for Pros on Houzz
Read stories in our Resilience series
Learn about Houzz Pro software
Talk with your peers in the Pro-to-Pro discussions
Join the Houzz Trade Program
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Given the pandemic and its effects on the economy, clients and employees alike may be worried about their health, their incomes or both. But the range of how they are feeling could be wide. “Everybody is handling this pandemic differently,” says Shawn Cayer of Windhill Builders in Ipswich, Massachusetts. “Some think that the sky is falling and there’s no hope. Others think it’s a bump in the road and we’re going to get through this.”
Being both transparent and positive can help alleviate anxiety that employees naturally feel about the future. Cayer finds that conversations with his workers about the pandemic’s effect on the business arise naturally when he visits job sites. He’s been transparent about changes in the company’s sales pipeline, both good and bad. “At first we were working with clients that were doing projects but had reduced them both in scope and budget because of what was going on in the market,” he says. After the stock market recovered, clients began to increase their project scopes again, and he shared this too.
Cayer also tries to motivate workers by looking for and sharing positive signs. For example, Cayer’s business has continued to have plenty of work (though his teams shifted to exterior projects in the early days when clients didn’t want them in their homes). Windhill Builders furloughed only one person, who is now back, thanks in part to a Paycheck Protection Program loan. “I tell people it’s better to have a job than to be sitting at home with no job and no pay and not knowing what’s going to happen next week,” he says.
“I have those conversations with the guys all the time,” Cayer says. “What’s the next six months look like.”
Similarly to Cayer, architect Chris Brandon of Brandon Architects in Costa Mesa, California, tries to stay focused on what’s positive — his firm has work — and to check in with his teams. “Scheduling [socially distant in-person] weekly office meetings to maintain balance and ensure we remain on track, as well as maintaining an open door policy should any concerns arise, has helped to maintain and motivate office morale,” Brandon says.