By Adam Roderick, Datateer; and Nick Williams, R.I.S.E. Inc.
We were sitting together in ASAC’s Trade Partner Connection, experienced leaders from across the construction industry trying to tackle some of the challenges we all feel every day.
The topic of the day was employee well-being. Inevitably the familiar old mentality creeped in:
“This sounds good in theory, but profitability always has to be the priority”
Sound familiar?
In construction, anything perceived as soft is often viewed as competing with schedule, margin, and production. Many leaders have been conditioned to believe that focusing on well-being comes at the expense of accountability, urgency, and output. In an industry where the environment is literally trying to break you, that resistance isn’t irrational. It’s earned.
The tension was palpable and turned into a lively debate.
Then Linda from Mountain Man Welding spoke up, and the room went quiet contemplating her comment.
Linda is a veteran in the industry. She’s run her firm for decades. She is less interested in fluff; she’s interested in what shows up in the steel.
“I can tell when something is up with an employee or even an entire team. The rework metrics start getting worse.”
She doesn’t discover rework as an explanation for declining profitability on a monthly financial statement.
Linda sees rework as a leading indicator. Before anyone approaches her with a problem. Before job costs or schedules start to meaningfully shift. And well before her P&L indicates something went wrong.
Most of us treat rework as a lagging financial failure. It’s the tax we pay for a mistake already made. We look at the spreadsheet, find someone to blame, and try to improve management or training so it doesn’t happen on the next job.
Linda’s comment was short, but it hit everyone in the room the same way.
When a skilled welder–someone who knows the craft inside and out–starts producing work that doesn’t pass muster, it is a check engine light. It is a physical, measurable manifestation of a breakdown in the human system. Long before the project manager realizes the budget is blown, the rework is screaming that the team is burnt out, distracted, or disconnected.
Rework alone can’t tell you everything. It is rarely a craftsmanship issue. Sometimes it is fatigue. Sometimes distraction. It could be a crew operating under chronic stress, poor communication, or burdens in their personal lives.
Instead of waiting until damage becomes visible in budget vs actuals reports, claims, or incident reports, we could act earlier. This is where the human element actually improves profitability and every other financial and efficiency metric.
Let that sink in. This is not limited to rework.
The same force also drives turnover, safety incidents, communication breakdowns, near misses, tardiness or no-shows, and disengagement. These are not isolated personnel issues! They are signals in the noise, indicators you can rely on as an early warning that someone’s life and well being are degrading.
Human well-being is upstream from operational performance, not separate from it.
The conditions of the workforce directly impact communication, quality, safety, trust, retention, schedule reliability, and profitability. If we want to protect the schedules and margins, we have to protect the focus, stability, and well-being of the people doing the work.
The best field leaders already understand this intuitively. They know crews are not machines. Attention, trust, communication, and mental bandwidth directly affect execution. The future of construction leadership depends less on blindly pushing harder and more on learning to recognize the human indicators.
Thankfully, this conversation is no longer isolated. It is converging across the industry. In addition to ASA Colorado’s Trade Partner Connection, AGC Colorado’s mental health efforts, to Total Worker Health research at the Colorado School of Public Health, to recovery-friendly workplace programs, safety leadership evolution, suicide prevention training, and the ongoing fight to retain a workforce that has more options that ever before. Everyone is coming to similar realizations, from all different directions.
As an industry, construction is excellent at measuring what matters financially. The next evolution is learning to recognize the human indicators that drive those outcomes in the first place. The firms that learn to recognize those signals early will build stronger cultures, safer teams, and more resilient businesses.
About the authors:
Adam Roderick is CEO of Datateer, a data analytics firm transforming how construction companies manage financial complexity. A veteran technologist, Adam specializes in making massive datasets radically simple to act upon. He previously worked for PwC and built a premier software firm to 30 employees. An elite full-stack developer, he has architected systems processing hundreds of billions of records daily and led products serving hundreds of thousands of users. His clients include The State Group, Double L Management, Morris-Shea Bridge Company, Northwestern Mutual, Pearson, Vail Resorts, and the US Olympics.
Nick Williams is the CEO of both R.I.S.E LLC and the American Subcontractor’s Association of Colorado. He has chaired the AGC Mental Health Working Group since 2021. He is the Vice Chair of the non-profit training company Recovery Friendly Leader. He holds a graduate chttps://fasacares.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Nick-Williams.pngertificate in Total Worker Health from the Colorado School of Public Health. He loves traveling the world with his wife and son, is almost always with his Westies named Pacey and Joey, and is an avid consumer of all things pop culture.
