Discover the blueprint for construction safety excellence as we sit down with Gabe Guetta from SALUS to discuss the strides his company is making in the industry. Safety isn't a buzzword here—it's the foundation on which every project stands. Our conversation is about innovation in construction safety. We delve into the importance of nurturing customer relationships and fostering collaboration with tech giants for a safer, more efficient future in construction.
Venture into the new era where AI meets hard hats, and learn how technology is transforming health and safety on job sites. As much as we marvel at the capabilities of AI, we acknowledge that it can never replace the irreplaceable—human judgment and critical thinking. We debate the delicate balance between convenience and necessary engagement, acknowledging the potential for AI to enhance hazard assessments while emphasizing the importance of keeping safety checks meaningful. The ultimate goal? To ensure these tools empower workers and reduce the risk of complacency, making each day on the job safer than the last.
Wrapping up, we take a reflective journey through the history of workplace safety practices, identifying the pivotal shift from tedious checkbox assessments to dynamic, behavior-adaptive experiences. It's not just about ticking off tasks; it's about fostering a deep-rooted culture of care and understanding the 'why' behind the compliance. We underscore the significance of personal connections during site visits, reinforcing the notion that the true strength of the industry lies in its commitment to not just constructing edifices, but in building a resilient community of responsible and cared-for workers. Join us as we chart a course toward a future where every construction worker can confidently say that they will return home safely, every day.
PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH
FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit
Discover the blueprint for construction safety excellence as we sit down with Gabe Guetta from SALUS to discuss the strides his company is making in the industry. Safety isn't a buzzword here—it's the foundation on which every project stands. Our conversation is about innovation in construction safety. We delve into the importance of nurturing customer relationships and fostering collaboration with tech giants for a safer, more efficient future in construction.
Venture into the new era where AI meets hard hats, and learn how technology is transforming health and safety on job sites. As much as we marvel at the capabilities of AI, we acknowledge that it can never replace the irreplaceable—human judgment and critical thinking. We debate the delicate balance between convenience and necessary engagement, acknowledging the potential for AI to enhance hazard assessments while emphasizing the importance of keeping safety checks meaningful. The ultimate goal? To ensure these tools empower workers and reduce the risk of complacency, making each day on the job safer than the last.
Wrapping up, we take a reflective journey through the history of workplace safety practices, identifying the pivotal shift from tedious checkbox assessments to dynamic, behavior-adaptive experiences. It's not just about ticking off tasks; it's about fostering a deep-rooted culture of care and understanding the 'why' behind the compliance. We underscore the significance of personal connections during site visits, reinforcing the notion that the true strength of the industry lies in its commitment to not just constructing edifices, but in building a resilient community of responsible and cared-for workers. Join us as we chart a course toward a future where every construction worker can confidently say that they will return home safely, every day.
PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH
FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit
Welcome to the Site. Visit podcast. Leadership and perspective from construction With your host, James Faulkner.
Speaker 2:Live from BuildX Vancouver 2024.
Speaker 1:Gabe hello. How are you? Hello, how are you? I'm very well. Yeah, I'm very well. So, gabe Guetta from Salis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been a long time coming.
Speaker 1:It has it, has we should have done this a few years ago. I'm super excited to be here. Yeah, thank you very much. I mean, we've kind of got to know each other sort of in a way that I think we had a meeting at one point all together and I was like what are they trying to do here?
Speaker 2:And I was like this is getting weird.
Speaker 1:But it's cool. I mean, you've really doubled down, focused on safety and you've done a good job and your company's grown and a big opportunity there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of cool.
Speaker 1:Actually, we had you. Probably one of your first customers, I think, was Lower Mainland Steel.
Speaker 2:I believe yeah, lms yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I did branding work for them years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's awesome yeah with Ivan and Ron.
Speaker 1:Yeah and yeah. That was actually, believe it or not, the first back-end system that I ever did with SAS was with LMS. Oh, really, when I had my branding agency and they logged into the back of the website to do their report.
Speaker 2:I had no idea. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was interesting. So, yeah, we did their branding for their golf tournament with Golf BC and all that. That. They had a large New York theme at one point. Oh, las Vegas theme. So on every whole they had these huge design things. They had one with New York, new York and the other one was like a roulette table and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, it's all starting to make sense now, because from the day we started SELUS, I'd always look at SiteMax and be like I love the way that you guys brand and your website and everything else is in your DNA. It is yeah, yeah. I've always been like we got to be like that. Why weren't we like that? They're not talking at the industry, they're talking from the industry. Why can't we be more like?
Speaker 1:that Well, you guys done a good job. I like your S in the badge.
Speaker 2:That's a new brand, right? Yeah, that's a new brand. Before we had a Wreath. Yeah, I like this new one.
Speaker 1:It's got the Superman vibe going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Super safety. That's kind of cool, all right, so let's just talk about that for a minute. So maybe just tell us the solution. I think you had some sort of not a press release, but some kind of announcement that you were, with the new financing, you've done that, you're going to be taking those user proceeds and you could be reinventing or the new era of safety and construction. Maybe tell us about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so our goal here is really to help an industry. We're not the hero of the story here. We're like the Excalibur to King Arthur. Our goal is that safety is powered by Salis right. And so, when you think about that, what are we trying to accomplish? We're really trying to ensure that our customers' lives are easier.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of barriers today to health and safety Workers, administrators, whoever it may be. It's hard, it's not easy to get access to information, to whatever it may be, and technology can help solve that problem. And so when we went out to raise capital in end of 2022, into 2023, that was really our goal was finding the right investor that can help us unlock that vision, and so that's what our plans are is take the funding from our venture capitalists as well as the government that we just got funding from the government a few months ago and really it's in the product, but also in the way that we interact. Our goal, like we want to be original thinkers in the way that we onboard and train customers and get them to value through our product, to the way that we sell to customers.
Speaker 2:I find a lot of times and this is new to me like I come from construction I used to have to build relationships with 10 or 15 customers, not thousands. So a lot of the times when you're trying to scale teams or individuals can get lost in the sale, and it's about your customer. I always tell our team you have to be looking at the person on the other side of the table and treat them like you're your best friend. How would you sell to your best friend?
Speaker 2:The first thing you're going to do is make sure that they need your product. Then how do you actually them using your product? Empower them and make them better, make their company better, and if those things don't happen, then help them find the solution that will work better for them. And that's where we recommended a customer to you guys, because we realized, like actually I think you'd work really well with Sitemax and that's what it is. It's not to me. Our competitors are in action and paper.
Speaker 2:And a group of, whether it's our biggest competitors in safety or other software companies. We need to be working together to unlock that solution for our customer base, and that's exciting, that's cool. Do you guys work with Autodesk? We don't work as closely with Autodesk itself, but we have lots of customers that use Autodesk Right yeah, Because I had them on Luke Forest on yesterday.
Speaker 1:Okay, and yeah they were. They seemed to be really doubling down on a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because they're so known. I mean, autodesk is ubiquitous, obviously. You know, with AutoCAD You're like, okay, well, that's obvious. It's obvious. Any 3D model you ever make is in that to begin with, and then Revit, they have two. So it's like it kind of got it, got it down right.
Speaker 2:I was in San Francisco actually last week. We're looking for a VP of sales and I was interviewing some people and one of them came from Autodesk and she was talking to me about the culture of Autodesk and how they have an entire workshop area down below where their customers come and use their technology to build and unlock things and they're really empowering customers to do better in elevating those customers to tell their story, which I find every like. Whether you're looking at Procore or Autodesk. There's so many companies out there that have done incredible things that I love to learn from and just watch how they and a lot of it is just elevating your customers elevate, elevate.
Speaker 1:Right, which is really cool. Nice, that's awesome. Okay, so let's just chat a little bit. The cool thing about I think you and I being on, you know, on the same session on a recording like this is that you and I probably think about construction and technology all the time and we're thinking where is it going? What's this gonna look like in a while from now? What do you see coming down? You can not share it if you want to. It's like your industry secrets or your crazy thing. You've got you know closed in a box. You're like.
Speaker 2:No one gets to see that yet.
Speaker 2:But if you have something like what is your perspective on where things are going in terms of hardware, software and how that's gonna be impacting safety, yeah, I think the biggest thing that you have to kind of take into account when you see all these flashy things I mean five years, six years ago, when we started Sailors, mobile apps were just starting to come out, mobile phones in the field were just starting to get adopted, and so the flashy thing was a mobile app. And you get lost in these things and AI now and everything else and there's power in all of those things. But I think the biggest thing is, what are you actually solving?
Speaker 2:And recently, even in the last eight months as we built our team up, I've been able to pull myself out of the weeds a little bit and think about what are we doing at Sailors and we started to look at it as like, what is the problem we're actually solving at the simplest form, and are we actually enabling our customers to do that and that's? Are they able to be safer around safety, like? Are they able to create something, share it, iterate and continue that loop? And then, when we overlaid that over our product, we realized our own existing product had gaps. And sure, we have lots of really cool things that can help you do amazing things, but unless you're closing that loop and actually unlocking value for the customer, you're losing. So where I'm going with this is we're looking at all those types of things. We're looking at AI. Ai, I think, is incredible. It really is, especially in health and safety, because there's so much information that safety professionals or field workers or anyone in construction that needs access to that in reality is you can't store it in your brain.
Speaker 2:It's corpus of data you got to get at Like when I was in construction, you had a 300 page safety manual. That wasn't in your back pocket, that was in the job box that was four floors down from you, and so how can we have break those barriers down to information? I think AI can help solve a lot of those problems Pulling data together to make things easier, but without creating complacency, because you have to remember.
Speaker 1:I know that's the hard part, isn't?
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:That's like, that's the. What do you call it? Double edged sword? Yeah, the double edged sword. Yeah, convenience can be, yeah complacency.
Speaker 2:Well, I was talking to somebody on our team on the product side and they were like, well, in the future, maybe, you know, the worker would just hit a button and would do all of this. And I was like, but that's not the goal.
Speaker 1:No, no, because they're the interpreter of the real world.
Speaker 2:And the reality that I think people get lost in health and safety is health and safety processes and compliance is there to enforce that. Companies are proving that they're providing a safe health and work environment for their employees and the reality is that complacency is what kills. Yes, right, I would be working on the 40th floor of a building and the amount of times I had a harness on that was strapped to myself because I forgot to tie off, yeah, was countless, but because I was no longer scared of heights, the danger wasn't there anymore.
Speaker 2:I make sense and these forms that they're filling out are designed to make them stop and think. Yeah, stop for a second, realize that that task maybe it's the same every day. The surrounding environments might be different, all of these things could be changing. And how can we ensure that, every single day, workers or men and women, go into the field, do work and come home safe? Yeah, and all of this technology can help do that, as long as we anchor it in the core Goal yeah, I'm at circle, you've got that nailed down.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's akin to, you know, self-driving cars, right. I mean you know, to the point, you get in your car and you get to, like you know, you know, play, play Xbox on a handheld and not even look at what's going on in front of you that that Self-driving has to be completely dialed?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know, when you're, when you're talking about the, the, the person being the arbiter of what is going on, I think that there's a jealousy, and it's not a malignant jealousy. This is just a oh you know office Job versus a person in the field, you know, yeah. You've probably been using, you know, google Docs or Google Spreadsheets or Google sheets, and you've noticed the AI stuff that's been enabled, it starts to just creep in ever.
Speaker 2:You don't even ask for it and suddenly, or I'll zoom meetings and all sudden you're yeah.
Speaker 1:You've got this, you've got this stuff. That that's that basically provides you the opportunity to Like repeated tasks get done for you, mm-hmm. And if people are gonna do that in construction, as you say, that's where people get killed or hurt or injured is it can't be like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it has to be anchored in what's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So you know that hazard assessment, you can't. They're like oh, I have to do this every day, that's correct. Yeah, you do have to do this every day. Well, can I just hit this and they all do this? Yeah, but you're not reading that one paragraph. Well, that's one sentence, and putting a yes, no or an A.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's also like some of our customers, steve, how's a good example for Memo? Anderson tries to make sure that that Mindset around the oh, I have to fill out this form every day is anchored in a deeper meaning the why behind it. Yeah, for them they put. The why is like your children, your family, your I think another like why are you here doing this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is why you're filling that form out and then where AI can really come in and power this in another level is Can you make that more interactive? Can you break up complacency in a different way, because those forms become complacent same checkboxes, same places, same questions every day? Yeah, it becomes complacent and casual, so can AI make it more conversational? Can it make it more interactive? Can it continuously break up complacency? Can it do the job of what a hazard assessment was built for? Yeah, in a more efficient way. That's where I'm interested, and then there's hundreds of other things, but you also have to be.
Speaker 2:Data is very important. You have to protect customers data as well. Yeah, how do you use a AI? What information is it mining? Yeah, we Us as a business. We're not looking to just unlock a flashy light without really understanding and making sure we're protecting our industry and our Customers. We have to make sure it's being done the right way as well. Yeah, so we're also watching. Right, we have a team focused on AI and they're watching and monitoring and making sure we're doing things in the right way as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It seems that there is so much going on that the construction industry doesn't really it gets. Even when you're saying the word form, form. Have you noticed in Google that Google Docs recently? It says do you want to have a different format than 8 and a half by 11? No, I haven't. It says you want to go wide format. Okay, which is interesting, because if you look at all government documents and all Tax returns every day, it's all a half by 11.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, even though you know you, there's obviously the aunt the eat.
Speaker 1:You know he's submittal or whatever, doing right, but we're all. We're stuck in this thing that came out of a printer, yeah, and that was the fastest way to ship blocks of paper was 8 and a half by 11. And that was a letter that folded this many times to go in the mail to be that price for that envelope. Yeah, that's why it is the way it is. We're all working from a box, I know.
Speaker 2:But it's so, it's like so.
Speaker 1:From back when they came with a, with a horse and handy do a, you know a scroll, yeah right.
Speaker 1:So what's interesting is is that when you say that filling out that form, when I think governments and safety authorities, et cetera the ones who are need to innovate on the outside, because that allows you, as you said, if you want to have an interactive experience, let's say on a hazard assessment for instance, just to focus in on that one and that is a multi-question sort of more interactive, so you don't actually just see a long list, you could go check, check, check, check, check. It actually is engaging in a little more and maybe has the core question is uniform all the way through every single day. So you're actually getting that piece of information, but maybe there is a new message that is looped in that's different, to basically sidestep the redundancy. So it engages you again because something is different today, but even though you still ask the same question just to have. So stuff like that is it's more of an experience and I don't want to see game of five, video game like, but it isn't a form you have to take, but the result is a form.
Speaker 2:Yeah, human instinct, human, the reality of human beings, right Like, these are the realities. You can't live in the idealist perspective, you have to live in the realistic and, to be honest, the government will set out regulations. It's for us to, it's for the industry to determine how they're going to abide by them. And so, yes, a hazard assessment in its form, as a form today is the For core to look at.
Speaker 2:For core or whatever it may be, is the way in which people meet compliance. But as long as you're able to prove that you're providing that safe work environment through a documentation like, does it have to start as a form? Does it? Can it start as more of an open, interactive conversation that then records it as a form? So you have that documentation and then you have to also. The problem with form sometimes is that it's check boxes, so does the actual worker understand what they're doing or is it-?
Speaker 1:They just focus on the right column.
Speaker 2:Right, like I filled out a form to get into BuildX today, Did I learn? Did I actually? Remember, anything Turns to auditions done, Check, check, check, check, check get me to the next step, and that's what human nature is like. Okay, in reality, we still wouldn't wear seat belts in our cars today, right?
Speaker 1:If we didn't have to. If we didn't have to.
Speaker 2:We'd still drive in text. We'd still have our cell phone.
Speaker 1:Have our beer in the car Maybe.
Speaker 2:But all of these things is like human. You have to understand human nature and it's this. It's all around complacency. You don't identify danger because you've never seen or experienced it. And even if you have, eventually you get over that and that's when things can happen. It's a very complex problem that people are trying to solve.
Speaker 2:The exciting thing about health and safety is when I was in construction 10, or not 10 years ago, seven years ago, before Salis it was a very different world. When I started in construction at 18, heart, hat, steel, toe, boots, hive is Vest, that's it. Go get your job done. I've said this before, but I'll say it again if it was really dangerous, go do it on a Sunday, because nobody's watching, and that's just what it was. Go get it done. And so the evolution of safety has changed so much in the last seven, eight years that it's put so many barriers in place. It has created a safer work environment. But it's exciting because there's nobody that's figured it out.
Speaker 2:Everyone is iterating and trying to learn and share knowledge and trying to say, okay, like the why behind the safety that I was talking about with Steve Howe anchors it in is like they're further past the compliance side, where it's. A lot of companies look at their business and say, okay, I need to have this many forms for all my workers because they've worked this many days and I need to have this many toolbox talks and all this stuff tracked, but they're not anchoring it in the real reason of like. Okay, that's protecting the business, but are you actually ensuring that your workers are safer? Are you ensuring that they get it? Are you ensuring that they understand even why they're doing it? If you get your worker to understand the why behind it, all of a sudden the adoption and the buy-in to those processes get a lot deeper, because they understand that you're not just protecting your company, you're actually buying in so that you go home to your family every day.
Speaker 2:And then you get different. That's where you bridge the gap between the field and the office. They start to give you advice on how they would do it differently, to break up that complacency, because they're living and breathing it every day. We forget what it's like to show up on a job site when it's minus 10 and the hoist is shut down and you gotta walk upstairs. Or when I tell people in construction that there's half cans where three quarters of the way up a tower there's porta-potties that are cut in half so they fit in the hoist. People that are outside of construction Half cans.
Speaker 2:Half cans so you'd be peeing.
Speaker 1:and people are lined up at the hoist and they can you're like chest above Chest above Geez, sure, the ladies like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy right.
Speaker 1:How does that work on the ladies side?
Speaker 2:I don't know, I didn't see. Yeah, you just kind of walk past those. No one would get into that, only if you have to do, use those, the.
Speaker 1:I find that you know, with you guys and the culture of construction, I always sort of try and have the different understanding of the different strata of people that work in a construction site. There are those who have gone to trade school and they come done that straight out of high school and they had a path and that's what they were going to do and they decided to do that. Yeah, there's other people up, as you know, in the office who have gone to project management school. They've kind of done all that stuff and it's been like a you would call that an intentional path. And then there are people who are like I'm gonna be really crass about this. I'm just gonna say I'll give you an archetype example.
Speaker 1:You know, a guy came out of high school and he's kind of like I don't know what I'm gonna do. Move to a different town, met a girl, got pregnant. Now he's got a child support payment and now he's got to go get a job. And you know it says you know, hiring, come on a construction site. That person might not necessarily have that same attitude around who they're working for, why they have that job, because they don't even know why they want that job, yeah, and now we're trying to get them to have a a consciousness around caring. Yeah, when you were to say you know you get to, why are you doing this safety checklist? Well, because the why is because you get to go back to your family is like my family drives me crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not a good reason. Yeah, well, they have to find their way. But yes, I know they have to find their way, but sometimes, yeah, it's not as simple.
Speaker 1:It is a. I just want, as soon as it's four o'clock, I am out. Yeah, like even this podcast, I go. You know this is a niche podcast. Yeah, you know. Do I expect people to be go? Oh, I guess it's a 415. Let's listen to the site. Visit, right, couldn't care less after that time. Yeah, like I want to get out. I don't want to think about work. It's a different deal. Yeah, right, so I'm sure there's challenges there on on just the culture of construction and how to get people engaged.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're touching on something that I found, for health and safety, a big problem in construction. The industry itself is the dictator of what level of health and safety, training or quality, or the way you do your job for the. For individuals coming into this world, yeah, whether they're from another country, whether they're from high school, whether they're from trade school, it will depend on what company you end up with will determine the level of training you get.
Speaker 1:I see, in general that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Imagine if hospitals work like that. Yeah, they'll be. Doctors were just like no. Depending on what hospital you end up with will be the level of training you get. There's no unified level of training. You could have a 19 year old worker that comes from high school. That, whatever their background is, is going to be their risk tolerance Maybe they were a rock climber, maybe they weren't and is just thrown into a pool and ideally they end up with a company that takes health and safety seriously. But a lot of the times, even today, there still isn't that standard, which is scary.
Speaker 1:You just touched on something that, like, I don't really know how to even address this, but there is a even on the ESL component, right, so we need a lot of people to come from overseas to fill out these jobs. We just don't have enough domestic people to come and do this. So but with that I have seen personally we were around when my wife's parents passed away and all that kind of stuff and the level of consciousness at hospitals with some a little bit of ESL is different and that worries me a bit because we need to appropriate the different cultures into how we do things here in Canada or in the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it like it's just again reality of human nature. Human beings will come into whatever environment. Whether it's my seven-year-old kid that grows up, goes through high school and ends up in construction, or if it's somebody from another country, they're going to bring their experiences to that environment. So if you have somebody coming from another country, that health and safety or quality or whatever it may be, is at a different standard. They're not gonna do it intentionally.
Speaker 2:But they're gonna come and that's naturally like I could work on the 10th floor of a building three feet from the edge without a harness. It was okay. And so, unless we have that gateway where it's like like, okay, you actually need to be further back from the edge to not have a harness and you need guardrails set up. And, by the way, anything over 10 feet you have. Naturally they're not. Nobody's doing it intentionally, right? Nobody wants to get in hurt. But hey, you don't know what you don't know. I can tell you right now. With my upbringing, I was in so many unsafe environments Working on a swing stage. I was 22 years old, three weeks on the job, working on a swing stage replacing glass on the 40th floor of the building. No fall protection training, no swing stage training. But because that's just you didn't do it back then, geez crazy Right but that's just how it worked.
Speaker 2:I had a harness on, I had all that stuff, but it wasn't as formalized, it wasn't as, and so we are getting better. But I mean, I didn't have any bad intention, I was just like I'm coming here to do the job and I'm gonna get it done.
Speaker 1:That's cool. All right, well, these are short podcasts. We should do a long one, but that's a pleasure. It's really nice to have the opportunity to chat with you and get to know you a little bit better. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.
Speaker 2:It's a great conversation.
Speaker 1:Okay, thanks, gabe. Yeah, take it easy man, thanks.
Speaker 1:Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for a monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom slash the Site Visit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the Site Visit podcast and Sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building. All right.