The construction industry in Australia is worth over $360 Billion and accounts for around 9% of Australia’s GDP. In 2021, there were 1,160,700 people employed in the industry and projections indicate that figure will reach 1,263,900 by 2025. Over the next five years, the construction industry is projected to grow by 2.4%. The majority of construction businesses are sole traders or very small businesses with less than 20 employees (National Industry Insights).  

For these small businesses, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to compete with larger firms. These bigger players have more resources to put towards increasing their efficiency, especially in technology.  This leaves the small businesses in a tough spot. As the bigger firms become more competitive, they cut away the market share of the smaller firms, who now have fewer resources to invest and keep up.  

In this article, I will look at 3 of the common challenges faced by the small construction business, what SafeWorkPro can do to overcome them and how SafeWorkPro will help you create more profit from your work.  

Less time training, more time growing 

Poor or non-existent safety training contributes heavily to workplace incident statistics. It is only a matter of time before your workers get hurt if they are not given proper safety training. You can’t always rely on their previous experience or the usual “yeah I have done this/used that before”. Not when you’re the one who will have to pay up if they get injured. 

“Thirty nine percent of construction employers did not provide any work health and safety training to their employees during 2012″ – SafeWork Australia 

A lot of the time this training takes the business owner, too long to complete. Especially considering the high turnaround in the construction industry. Research has shown that worker turnaround is linked to an increase in workplace injuries. Adding poor or no training to this factor only makes it worse. 

How can SafeWorkPro help you overcome this challenge? Our platform makes building simple and easy to understand training instructions for anything in minutes. We can even help you build the perfect process optimised for usability and compliance. Have training procedures already? It’s even quicker to turn these documents into digital forms with our simple drag and drop form builder. 

SafeWorkPro can allow your workers to complete training when they need to use a new piece of equipment or complete a task they haven’t done before. After they have completed their training form, they can sign and submit as proof they have done the training. This helps you keep track of who has completed the training for compliance. 

This simple process will help you decrease the time spent delivering training and build your case for compliance if anything does go wrong. Allowing you to spend more time on profit generating activities and decrease the chance of litigation or a hefty fine in the event of an incident. 

Technological advantages without the headache

Larger firms have the luxury of hiring someone to manage their tech. In the smaller businesses however, it is often the owner/operator who has this task. With so many other things to focus on when running a business, learning some new complex tech is the last thing on your to do list.  

As more and more large firms start to deepen their technological adoption, it leads the smaller firms to lose competitiveness year on year. This makes new contracts harder to secure. If the tech was simple enough for the average, non-tech literate user to grasp, this wouldn’t be an issue.  

That in a nutshell is what SafeWorkPro strives to achieve. To make safety simple. Your safety management system shouldn’t be complex. In fact, it should be quite the opposite if you expect everyone to be involved. We have put time and effort into making our safety software simple for the small business owner. 

See Simplicity: Why Businesses Choose SafeWorkPro 

By introducing SafeWorkPro into your small business, you will find yourself spending less time to do the mundane and repetitive tasks of creating, filling and storing physical documents. We have made our platform very user friendly and simple to navigate.  

Beyond the simplicity, our team is available to help whenever needed. We can help you set up and walk through the platform and customise it to suit your business and your daily process. Don’t have any documents or daily process? Not a problem, we can show you how to build these or create them for you.