By HAMISH MACGREGOR
Industry still has work to do on the skills and labour front, and I’d encourage my fellow members and the wider industry to push at the boundaries to make it better
FOR my president’s article this month, Richard Catt asked me to provide some thoughts and comment around the skills and labour crisis.
As someone who’s still active in the industry after 50 years, I hope I have something to bring to the table and some experience to share. It’s a bittersweet subject for me, as I can honestly say recruiting, managing, training, and developing people has brought me a huge amount of pleasure, but in the same breath I’d be lying if I didn’t add that it’s also one of the greatest challenges and at times most worrying part of being a contract floorlaying company.
Finding floorlayers has never been more challenging than now. Each part of my business is important, but good floorlayers who can safely deliver good quality projects are of course one of the most important aspects.
I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say apprentices have always been an important part of MacGregor Flooring and we’ve taken on an average of three or four a year for as long as I can remember.
I’m fortunate to live in Scotland for many reasons. Glasgow is only a relatively short drive away from spectacular scenery, but another benefit is the culture around apprenticeships.
We get it in Scotland, possibly because of our shipbuilding heritage and it’s just that, a culture. So much so that when the CFA and the Scottish flooring trade body (AFCCS) amalgamated, it was one of the key areas of discussion. An assurance that CFA would continue the good work of the AFCCS to protect the principle and delivery of apprenticeships in Scotland.
It may therefore not surprise you to know that in Scotland we have a four-year apprenticeship, and it takes candidates to a level 3 SVQ. The new English trailblazer was written to more closely reflect the Scottish model and from a two-year framework became a three-year standard.
We’re also lucky in that we have a great facility at Glasgow College accessible by many, and supported by a larger proportion of the contractors, distributors, and manufacturers in Scotland. A larger proportion of businesses in Scotland than in England are happy to pay the CITB levy and structure themselves to that end, such that they can claim additional grant funding. Overall, 30% of CFA members pay the CITB levy, whereas in Scotland it is 70%.
An elephant in the room is the problem of training people and them leaving your business and going to work for someone else. I’m sorry to be smug, but again this is less of a problem in Scotland than in the rest of the country as we simply train more fitters. Most of our subcontract labour are ex-apprentices. But MacGregor Flooring has undoubtedly trained more than a few of the fitters that now work for competitors and equally we have pinched a few back.
I see that as part of the free market and capitalist economy we work in. It is to some extent healthy, but I have also had more than one occasion when a fitter has returned to us as the grass is rarely greener on the other side, and the few extra quid they have been offered somehow takes on a different perspective when they reflect on the package we offer, how we run things, and their previous jobs with us. We have some fantastic competitors in Scotland who also look after their staff, but I’m sure you know where I am coming from.
But overall, I do see the fact that we’ll lose some of our fitters as a part of business and one of the things that we have to manage. If we don’t recruit, we become part of the problem. It can be a kick in the teeth if you have invested heavily in an individual and they leave, but in no way does it detract from my understanding of the fact that I need to ensure that as a business we invest in training and develop our staff. On the whole, our main competitors do that too.
This is necessary for succession planning and ensures we are able to plan, maintain, and manage the quality of work that we deliver.
I’ve had some failures and more than once have found myself staring at a glass of wine at the end of a week wondering what it’s all about when someone lets you, or themselves more often, down badly. But overall, we’ve had more amazing successes than failures by a long stretch. Young men (they do tend to be men) who join us as floorlayers blossom, not only as floorlayers, but also as people.
Gaining responsibility and growing an income such that they set up homes, start families and can afford some luxuries in life, like a nice car and a paid holiday. The flooring trade has the ability to do that and sometimes rescues people. That’s why I’m so fond of our industry and the people who work in it.
One of my proudest moments recently was when one of our apprentices, David McGrath, won the CFA apprentice of the year competition in 2020. Regrettably he didn’t get all the pomp and ceremony that others get as we were in the middle of lockdown. But I know it meant a huge amount to him, to me, and to our business.
His prizes were fantastic and a credit to the sponsors and it catapulted him forward. It says something very visible about a business too when you have apprentices as part of your team. Actually, David was a bit unusual as he was a mature apprentice and in some senses that was even more rewarding as flooring has become his home.
If I had one piece of advice, and this is something that seems to be a common area of agreement, when you are recruiting look also for people in their mid-20s and beyond. You can put them on an apprenticeship with funding or choose other routes to train, qualify, and ensure they can gain things like a CSCS card. Shaun Wadsworth can signpost if you are a CFA member. The fact is by the time they’ve left their teens, many who might not otherwise have stayed the course, have matured and we get that all important level of commitment from them.
Richard asked me to talk about the image of the industry from a contractor point of view. I would say we have some work to do, and I would encourage my fellow members and the wider industry to push at the boundaries and let’s make it better.
The perfect job rarely, if ever, presents itself but it concerns me how many times we have to ‘discuss’ site conditions and when I get involved (all too often) it means we’re either being asked to do something that will cause a floor to fail, or could be dangerous.
Those discussions are rarely pleasant, and the reality is not one you would ideally describe at an interview with a potential new floorlayer.
During the pandemic, the additional management involvement on larger sites seemed to filter through to better programming and we had more jobs where the temperature on site was satisfactory to lay, we were not having to fight with the ceiling fitters or the decorators to work in an area already behind schedule and canteen facilities were undoubtably better. But in very recent memory, I’ve had to pull a team off a job where the welfare facilities were simply abysmal. I think we must draw a line.
The payments from government and top-ups from CITB are not enough to cover the cost of employing an apprentice and therefore flooring companies must be prepared to dig deep and invest in the future of their companies and the industry. The decline is rapid and worrying. It’s not confined to the flooring trade but has accelerated.
Older fitters eventually retire, and unfortunately we lost some good people during the last recession. I even heard of some apprentices being let go and this was terrible for the young people involved, but it also meant they didn’t finish their apprenticeship, and this has had a knock-on effect. Then of course Brexit has created problems that pulled more labour away from the available pool.
As an industry we need to employ more apprentices and more fitters of all ages.
My call to action is therefore to replicate the model in Scotland across all the nations and simply increase demand for apprenticeship delivery and training. If CFA were receiving calls weekly in specific areas, I know that Shaun would have no hesitation in approaching a college to try and establish local delivery.
I think the industry would also rally and create more training regionally if demand were created. I know the CFA will support.
