theceomagazine.com The CEO Magazine - January 2016 79.

In The OfficeEXECUTIVE INTERVIEW

Building Skill Solutions

The Construction Training Centre is injecting innovation and creativity into its training precinct to deliver a greater working environment for its clients in the building and construction sectors.

Images by Julien Star

Since 1994, the Construction Training Centre (CTC) has been an important resource to Queenslanders, allowing

for the delivery of high-quality training programs to upskill workers in the building and construction industry. Set on a 12-hectare campus, theorganisation has purpose-builttraining facilities andequipment available for leaseor short-term hire.

Phil Diver has been CEO of CTC since his appointment in 2006. Coming from a background in health, private equity, and consulting in Europe and the Middle East, Phil brings a fresh perspective to operations, and is always looking to ramp up the company's innovation and creativity.

“In the kind of business that we run, you could argue about

whether you really can be different, innovative, and exciting,” he says. “I have found that yes, you can. I really value the concept of creativity and getting that out of our team. If you’re in a creative industry, it is easy to innovate, but how do you do it in the seemingly staid environment of commercial leasing? Well, every place can have creativity, and we’ve demonstrated here exactly how you can do that.”

Phil understands through solid experience that a company has to have good, strong financial systems, policies, and procedures, but he also firmly believes that innovation and creativity need to be in the mix no matter what industry you’re in, and that they should never be overlooked. “No one’s going to say, ‘We don’t want creativity’, but how you actually promote it and think outside the square is really important,” he says. “Our point of

difference is really about the things that make people want to come here, and you can only attract those people if you have team members coming up with fresh ideas.”

When smaller companies approach the Construction Training Centre, Phil wants to be able to offer them a solution that makes them feel a lot bigger than they actually are. “If you work for a large company, then chances are that they are already offering worker health and wellbeing programs and all these sorts of things; but if you’re a really small company, you struggle to do that,” he explains. “Becoming part of a community like CTC helps your business participate in those types of initiatives because we can offer it as part of our mix. Companies can then offer that to their staff, and chances are that it will help to retain them. Getting talent and then retaining that

“I really value the concept of innovation and creativity and getting that out of our team.” - Phil Diver

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talent, even in the current labour market, is still a hard task. Really good people are hard to find. The idea is that if you can actually keep them and create an environment where you can nurture them, then you will get that creativity out of them.”

One of the innovations that CTC has introduced is ‘Hot Leasing’.

Born out of the notion of ‘collaborative consumption’, Hot Leasing is a cutting-edge training initiative which provides registered training organisations that deliver high-risk work licensing and safety training with a highly flexible, low-risk, and cost-effective solution to deliver these programs according to their own schedule. Resources and assets are pooled to maximise value and minimise waste.

“How do you innovate or disrupt in the industrial leasing area? It’s not really that obvious, but what we’ve done with Hot Leasing is we’ve gone out there and taken the risk out of it for people who just want to be here on a short-term hire basis,” he says. “We provide all of the capital and we allow them to come and do what they do best, which is training. Then in the idling time when they’re not training, they are not having to pay for that. That’s the whole notion of Hot Leasing.”

It’s a major innovation for Phil’s industry. “The Zeitgeist of current business practice is disruption, and everything now is ‘hot’ from hot desking to HotDoc for your GP appointment, but we were the first in the ‘hot’ area, which we are pretty happy about.”

CTC also has initiatives in place to encourage the health and wellbeing of staff and tenants, including an internal mindfulness program. Phil says the idea of mindfulness has the potential to deliver great business results. “All of our team members have had emotional intelligence training, and we’re all going on mindfulness training courses too, starting in 2016. So we’ll all be meditating—which is an interesting concept [he says with a laugh]—but we’re doing it for business reasons. It will help in other areas as well because obviously work–life balance gets blurred. It fits comfortably with innovation. Mindfulness can also help with flow, and flow generates creativity,

so they say. We’ll test this with an eye to the bottom line and business results.”

Phil is loving the idea because he believes it will also assist with improving safety culture. “Mindfulness should help us to live in the now,” he says. “I’m hoping our situational awareness becomes very attuned so that we can continue to see things as we walk around the precinct. If we take things for granted, then this can adversely impact our safety culture, which we need to address.”

In the many years that Phil has been with CTC, he has seen the organisation evolve and change considerably. One of the very first things he brought in as CEO was a commercial approach to how the business was run. “We were probably just a bit over half empty, and I thought that the only way we could actually make this business survive in the long term was to be commercial in everything we did. As a result of introducing a commercial approach, we began to attract more tenants.

“That sounds counterintuitive, but by actually increasing our revenue stream we were able to put things back into the precinct that attracted people, and in most cases kept them here as well. We improved the quality of all facilities, from the amenities and car parking to the café, giving it more of a campus feel, and ultimately providing all of those things that make people feel like they are getting something for their money.

“I’ve seen the precinct getting busier and busier as a result of improved commerciality and innovation, and as we’ve become more business focused and professional, we’ve actually been able to secure a better quality of tenant.”

Phil’s vision for the future is for CTC to continue to work collaboratively with tenants, suppliers, and other stakeholders. He believes this will bring about mutual advantage for all parties involved. As the training industry

becomes more consolidated, Phil says, good relationships will become all the more important. Digitisation is another area he says will become more prevalent in all organisations within the building and construction sector, including CTC.

“We really need to take a proactive role in the move towards digitisation,” he notes. “I see us playing a critical role there. For me, automation is coming. By that, I mean digitisation that will potentially be taking people’s jobs and replacing them with technology. There’s two things you can do as automation comes. You can become a ping-pong ball where you rise with it and always

stay above automation, or you can sink to the bottom and be replaced by a machine or computer process. There will always be professionals like architects and engineers who are proactive enough to use technology to stay ahead of the curve.

“And then there’s going to be some people who for whatever reason can’t change, or they’re not given the skill set to change, so they become the forgotten people in forgotten jobs. I think we’ve got an important role to play in this space. ‘How can we take our workers and equip them to exploit technology to always rise above it?’ That’s the critical question we now need to be asking.”

“I’ve seen the precinct getting busier and busier as a result of improved commerciality and innovation, and as we’ve become more business focused and professional, we’ve actually been able to secure a better quality of tenant.” - Phil Diver

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