Page 46 - BusinessWest September 15, 2021

Pat Sweitzer (with husband and business partner Craig Sweitzer) says employee retention begins with being accommodating of their needs.
been an issue for years,” said Fontaine, vice president of Springfield-based Fontaine Bros. Inc. He noted, for exam- ple, that the average electrician is in his 50s, and it’s similar in other trades.
“Skilled tradespeople are getting close to retirement, and there are not as many people coming into the trades as we would like to see,” he told Busi- nessWest. “With COVID, it was like a perfect storm, where we had a shortage of folks coming in the first place, and then we had some people who retired maybe earlier than they would have — union folks who had their years in but might have kept working without a cat- alyst to retire, but last year, they chose
to retire or move to a different career.” A disruption in projects early in the pandemic didn’t help, as some
worksites shut down for a while, and not everyone came back when they reopened.
“It’s been difficult to manage the projects and keep them on schedule with a limited workforce, for sure,” Fontaine said, noting that other indus- tries have been dealing with workforce challenges as well (see story on page 6).
“We were always on a tight, aggres- sive schedule, and trying to make up for lost time with a smaller workforce has been difficult,” he went on. “Also, people, for whatever reason, don’t seem to be interested or motivated by overtime to work more hours or other shifts. So it’s been a lot of factors. It’s been difficult to work through.”
Pat Sweitzer, partner at Sweitzer Construction in Monson, said her com- pany is in the process of determining whether it needs more hands — which is a much different challenge than the one she thought she was facing 18
“Skilled tradespeople are getting close to retirement, and there are not as many people coming into the trades as we would like to see.”
months ago.
“At the beginning of the pandemic,
we faced uncertainty about whether it was safe to go to job sites,” she recalled. But once the company established safety protocols and distributed PPE, work quickly progressed. It was a chal- lenging year, but a telling one, in some positive ways.
“What we’ve found, even more pro- foundly than we’d realized before, is that we are really fortunate to have the best crew we have had in years, and both our in-house workers and our subcontractors have been really stable and with us for years. So we’re all right in terms of labor force right now.”
Her challenge, in other words, is retention, and she doesn’t take that for granted.
“We are a family business, so we have really tried to operate as a family with our employees and our subcon- tractors,” Sweitzer said. “And we think it’s really important to accommodate the needs they and their families have.”
That means being flexible with paid time off during a year when parents had to deal with their kids’ remote learning, and making sure employees feel comfortable expressing whatever personal needs they have, she added.
And paying well, too, of course — something Ann Bronner agrees is criti- cal to retain talent.
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46 SEPTEMBER 15, 2021
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