Early days of management research

This Issue This is a part of the Productivity feature

By - , Build 118

The concept of productivity and how it might be measured and managed was just rearing its head in the early days of BRANZ in the 1970s. While management research didn’t prove to be a continuing focus of BRANZ, those early years did reveal some wide-ranging opinions on what made for a productive workforce.

I joined BRANZ towards the end of 1971 in my first full-time position. Labour recruitment and turnover were significant building industry problems, and these were the themes of my research programme intended to contribute towards a Master of Arts thesis in industrial psychology (which it finally did in 1980).

The research was pioneering stuff. BRANZ itself had only recently evolved from the Building Research Bureau, which had been largely advisory in nature. There had been virtually no formal organisational research in the construction industry until then. Getting the unions and the employers’ organisations to cooperate was a key requirement and was achieved across building, painting and electrical trades. It was fascinating to go from a meeting with a right-wing employer association representative asserting, ‘I’ll tell you the cause of labour turnover – there’s no bloody loyalty in the industry!’ to a discussion with a trade unionist who wanted to talk about the pros and cons of Marxism.

Employees and employers disagree on drivers

Interviews of builders and carpenters produced some interesting findings. Employers typically assumed that money was the key driver of high labour turnover, but employees also gave causes such as the type of work, organisation and management issues, supervision problems and site conditions and policies. The largest commercial firms suffered particularly badly – small firms offered a more congenial working environment.

Recruitment was difficult. Employers rated their own apprentices as their best source of recruitment. Advertising and other recruitment options were not very effective at a time when construction labour was scarce.

Productivity on site or in skills?

In 1975, I was awarded an ANZAC Fellowship to work at CSIRO in Melbourne. Anticipating the need to continue the work on labour turnover with support of the notoriously tough Australian trade unions, I obtained a written reference from Ashley Russ, Secretary of the New Zealand Carpenters and Related Trades Union, to Bob Hawke, then head of Australia’s Council of Trade Unions.

The day I arrived in Melbourne, the secretary of the Painters Union was stabbed to death and his body thrown into the Yarra River, so in the interest of personal safety, my research interests suddenly shifted from labour turnover to understanding the determinants of housing productivity in volume home building from the perspectives of construction managers, supervisors and labour-only contractors.

Again, the ratings reflected the standpoints of the people concerned. Managers and supervisors ascribed productivity largely to the capability of the contractors. The contractors referred to site efficiency and particularly the timing of material deliveries.

Importance of applying research to industry

BRANZ moved to Judgeford in 1976, and I was appointed Head of the Management Research Division. This small group also focused on economic and safety research. Some early safety research was undertaken by Bernard Kaiser and George McKinnon.

Harry Benis discovered that a contributing cause to tower crane accidents was that operators stuffed rags in the warning sirens because the noise bothered them. He worked up the first safety procedures for construction lasers. John Langley (now professor and, until last year, director of the Injury Prevention Unit at the University of Otago) evaluated the safety supervisor scheme operating on construction sites.

This project taught me an important lesson. It focused particularly carefully on application of the research by industry at a relatively early stage. The efforts paid dividends, as long after the research was completed, industry bodies were still drawing upon the outcomes.

Management and organisation-related research stopped at BRANZ after the 1970s. It was felt that it lacked the rigour associated with physical, chemical and engineering-orientated research. However, a number of offshore building research organisations have maintained long-term involvement in organisational research.

Download the PDF

More articles about these topics

Articles are correct at the time of publication but may have since become outdated.

Advertisement

Advertisement