Dimitri
Welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation podcast. Today, we have Dean Brajevic, General Manager of Human Resources at Monadelphous. Dean, thanks a lot for coming in and talking with us.
Dean Brajevic
My pleasure. Thanks, Dimitri.
Dimitri
Dean, maybe we should start with Monadelphous. Give us a little bit of a story about that.
Dean Brajevic
Okay, so. So I’m Monadelphous. So I’ll probably call it mono. It’s just out of habit, but I want to know if it’s ASX-listed. Organization founded in 1972. So just over 50, 50 odd years. We’re an engineering, construction and maintenance services contractor. So, Perth-based in terms of our corporate head office, got a footprint across most of Australia, PNG for many, many years, Papua New Guinea, sorry. Fabrication facilities in China, Vietnam.
And essentially, what we do, we construct that’s the engineering construction side of things. The mining assets of T1 mine is the big global mining houses as well as maintaining those assets. And then in the energy side of things, build, maintain your big LNG assets both onshore and offshore.
So, our core, the core of what we do, is blue-collar trades, welders, boilermakers, mechanical fitters, sparkies, crane operators and everything else that goes with that en masse. So yeah. So been around a while. I think we do what we do pretty well relative to the, you know, the competition.
Dimitri
So you are, really providing the manpower that does the work.
Dean Brajevic
But we’re more so that will build, you know, the mining construction on a greenfields basis, you know, and a lot of these things obviously, you know, out where no one goes out and, you know, some pretty remote and rugged places. So, and then major mine expansions. So we’ll do crushers, overland conveyors, all of that run a mine-type assets and infrastructure.
We don’t mine. We’re not miners. But then, once the mine is up and running, we hopefully convert that fantastic job from construction into a job in terms of maintaining. But not the actual mining.
Dimitri
And I suppose disassembly too. Yeah.
Dean Brajevic
That’s right. And that’s becoming more and more relevant. Yeah. End-of-life asset maintenance, which is a term that we’re sort of coining and then ultimately decommissioning. But decommissioning is probably not the rich vein of work that perhaps is thought because it’s short and sharp, it goes. But that end-of-life asset maintenance is something that’s certainly growing in footprint.
Dimitri
So your blue-collar workforce is the dominant workforce inside your organization. And, it’s skilled blue-collar workers, basically. How much does that change? And how often… Because it’s a project-based business. And it’s projects in different locations. Right. So now you have a couple of different parameters there. How is it changing and how are you thinking about managing that?
Dean Brajevic
Yeah, it’s quite a dynamic beast to be fair. So it’s changing on, like at any given point in time we will say, you know, the point of the month where we, we, we do our board and senior reporting in terms of numbers will say, “We’ve got 9,000 employees,” but over the course of the month that’s moving and shifting on a daily basis, as it were, you know, because if you segment our workforce, large greenfields, construction projects, you know, 500 to 1000 people, all your blue-collar trades, your safety advisors, your schedulers, your engineers, your project people, all of that, you know, and that will be an ecosystem.
And you’ll get bigger, smaller. Some might go for six months, some might go with that project for four years a large LNG facility out of Darwin and then all in around that you’ll have shut down activity, and that shut down might be 600 people for three weeks, it might be 30 people for three days. It might be, an anything in between. And then, when you look a little bit further afield, we’ll have day-to-day maintenance personnel, again doing either just planned ongoing maintenance that might be doing what we call structural integrity, which is small projects on an ongoing basis. And then we have people embedded in our client organization doing planning and all the rest of it. So many, many, many layers to fill in that bucket of that total 9,000.
Dimitri
So let’s talk about that from a workforce planning perspective, because the workforce planning for this is probably first, extremely dynamic. And second of all, pretty directly mapped to top-line revenue.
Dean Brajevic
Absolutely.
Dimitri
Right. And of course, then to profitability. Right? Which, in the HR world, for most Avature customers, the connection between those two is actually quite difficult to draw. You have to be a rocket scientist and have a lot of tech and a lot of time to sort of clean the connection. But you don’t. You actually know. If you run into an issue, it shows up right away. Have you always done a lot of modeling, or are you evolving your modeling, or are you getting to a real-time understanding? How happy are you with where you are with that right now?
Dean Brajevic
Yeah. I think there are different levels of maturity within the business tied to the nature of their work. So maybe the best-case scenario, first are those large construction projects. The degree of granularity and the quality of those workforce plans are second to none. Put aside technology for a second. But in terms of the outputs of those plans, because they inform the schedule, pricing in that direct link, as you mentioned before. You know, you get them wrong, you know, and margin, money, the rest of it, just there’s a direct, absolute direct linkage.
So, the maturity, the quality, the actionability of those in those environments, I think very happy as an organization, just part and parcel of what they need to do to put our best foot forward, both to win the work, get a foot in the door and then execute the work following the securing of the work because those plans obviously change, you know, different events and different, you know, known issues it can face and all the rest of it.
So, the dynamic as you get on the field of play. Other areas of the business where it’s less, I suppose, directly linked to the work output. It might be the case that we’re providing, I don’t know, a gang of 20 or 30 people to run a series of work that might go on for a long period of time. So, the workforce planning around that’s a little bit more reactive, attrition-based or work scope.
Dimitri
Well, it also depends on supply and demand, right? As well. And even with a great project plan, you know, you plan out two years, and then it turns out that the number of electricians in the area is not quite living up to your requirements. So, you do have to do it from a manpower perspective, from a TA perspective, from talent acquisition.
Dean Brajevic
Correct. And that’s absolutely. And that’s real linkage into the TA teams to be you know, linked, connected and be part of designing those plans because it gets into, great to have that plan. But if they haven’t, you know, you’ve got to drill down into where we’re getting those people away. Get those people where usually a remote workforce, there’s there’s an onsite and an offsite component. But the majority of work is on-site.
Now, if you price to get those people as if they’re local and you don’t price in point a higher, and that might be for some trades, it might be international. If you don’t price that in and that pricing that in is that that TA input in terms of well where are we going to get them. And are they alumni? Are we reengaging. Are we hiring fresh people that we haven’t known before? What are the customer requirements to put boots on the ground? So that linkage into the art of the possible, I think, is just, again, so, so critical. But you can say projects that were just, you know, especially at the tail end, when people jump ship, they’ve only got like two or three months to go and so they’re off to the next shiny thing, right?
You see those plans just, just totally go out the window. And the poor old recruitment team get a bit beaten up.
Dimitri
Yeah, I used to recruit for the mining industry and, when the mine was coming to a close, people were jumping ship, and they weren’t able to finish the mine work because people knew they needed a new job in six months or a year, and they started leaving already. It can be challenging.
The trades you have, of course, all have to have, like you said, you know, what’s the customer requirement for boots on the ground? What the local regulatory requirements for boots on the ground. So you have an extra dimension there in terms of skills and certifications and everything.
And in terms of workforce planning and modeling, I mean, how focused are you on skills and how are you looking at scarcity and figuring out how to compensate for that? Is it a very active TA program to look at scarcity, for example?
Dean Brajevic
I’ll say yes. And it should be how well it’s done in certain areas. Is, is it varies a bit. Like a, like a, an interesting, important metric for us. And, I think, I might circle back to some of the whys later, but, a really important metric that’s come to light in recent times by virtue or some of the work we’ve been doing with Avature in terms of talent pooling and all the rest of it is that, 80% of the roles we hire for are within eight skill groups, you know, at the very like, you know, an engineer being one of them.
And that might be, you know, a graduate through to senior and all the rest of it, you know, mechanical fitters. And that’ll be, you know, they’ll have certain experience on certain types of rotating machinery or whatever it might be. But, yeah, 80% of our hires: eight skill groups. And so that’s such a powerful metric when it comes to, I think, what you’re talking about, because it lends itself to doing some really data-informed talent mapping and therefore talent pooling.
You know, there’s no point sort of headline. There’s, you know, a million, gazillion making mechy filters in the world. It is, you know. Right. So it’s, you know, brought down to that granularity in terms of so you can make some good decisions around it because that skills mix is so critical. Like, you mentioned the regulatory overview. Like anyone working on, we do a lot of overwater, like on wharfs and jetties and all the rest. So it’s still standard sort of work, but they all need to have a, a, I think it’s a miss Cod. Like they need to be approved to work in an area where there’s, you know, you know, border protection, all the rest of it.
So, you get to this point, all skills in the world, but I can’t, if for some reason I might be able to get it on the ground or on all these weird and wonderful certifications that they need. And every customer is slightly different. So that mapping and you do that well, you’re efficient and effective. You do that poorly, you are flat-footed, and you don’t meet business needs.
Dimitri
Right? Right. Let’s talk about your tech journey. How do you feel about where you’re going technically, right now? And secondly, what are you thinking about the use of artificial intelligence?
Dean Brajevic
Yeah. Might be the first bit. First, from a tech journey side of things. I couldn’t be happier. Not because I’m sitting here with you, but the progress we’re making with the Avature platform, the Avature application. The roadmap and, you know, being in lockstep with your team to build a long-term plan as to how we can best leverage that technology in a way that I’ve been at Monadelphous for 18 years and I’m so proud of the fact that, you know, little old humble HR team that’s no good with money, no good with numbers, no good with tech… We’re taking a lead, leading the charge.
It’s awesome. So, so. And again, it’s not I’m not saying it’s awesome because we’ve solved everything, but it’s awesome because we’ve got a really well-thought-out plan that’s in lockstep with yourselves as our partner. It’s in lockstep as the team that are using it. It’s not just something that I, you know, Miles the manager of recruitment performance has, it’s on everyone’s mousepad. It’s on the walls. There are metrics that are being shared on a regular, frequent basis. So, from that side of it and the progress that that’s driving, you know, the more recent implementation of parent-child changes to workflows that improve data quality, improve the ability to really target in terms of our campaign efforts and all the rest.
And that’s just going to, you know, increase in speed of adoption and trigger that like, you know, innovation breeds more and more and more, so awesome.
Dimitri
Well, so there was a point where I remember when you were implementing and when your team kind of got their hands around the workflow idea, that then it kind of took off, and then it became a lot of interesting workflows that we hadn’t actually seen before because, like you said, you’re very boots on the ground, very blue collar, very certification-driven.
Dean Brajevic
And it’s debunking a bit of the, you know, the unicorn sort of process flows or the unicorn issues, you know, and yeah, if you treat everything like a unicorn, you’re going to be so slow, you’re not going to have the agility that you need. And I think what we’ve, we’ve learned over this period is that, again, coming back to that metric, 80% of our hires are from eight different skills. And if you d on’t know that, you know, you look at 9,000 people and you know, a myriad of different things coming at you from all these different business units and all the rest of it. You think that everything’s a unicorn.
And I see that in that talent mapping sort of area, and that’s the second piece here is that, you know, you talent map and you get the absolute best data around those eight skill groups, and you design your campaigns and your planning all around that. You don’t design them around someone wants the left-footed, right-handed, blah blah blah. And you, you have two people that are spending three months trying to find this person that eventually go, “oh, that’s interesting.”
Dimitri
And you saw, I mean, that’s why we don’t try and create a pre-designed solution for an industry because, if you’re outside the industry, you might look at that and say, “Oh, yeah, there’s 9,000 of those things.” But then you are able to still distill that down and say, “No, really, these are really the value-added things that we do, and these are the things you must have in order to do that. We can organize our business that way.” Otherwise, we would be just building, you know, crazy stuff. And yes, there are similarities in the industry. Okay. We we understand that.
You’ve reached a level of maturity in your process design, I would say, at this point. So and that’s interesting because now you know, we’re introducing agentic workflow, right? So agents that can be placed inside the workflow from an agent library. What do you think of what you’re hearing so far about it?
Dean Brajevic
I mean, see, and I say, well, maybe the, in a way, like just just enormous opportunity. Enormous opportunity and and, and and it’s so important to be as curious as we possibly can be to increase the literacy so that we can understand what intuitively feels like where it can fit in. And then, you know, a plot, a pathway, you know, with yourselves to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward.
I think we’ve got to run harder at this than what we’re probably comfortable at this moment.
Dimitri
I think we maybe everybody feels a little bit like that. At the same time, I think that a lot of companies are still figuring out how to take the first few steps. And my case is always low risk, high value, basically efficiency inside workflows. It’s a very safe place to go. And, you know, if you take a workflow process that takes, you know, 16 days to get done and you get it done in 12 days, I think you’re an AI winner.
Dean Brajevic
Yeah, that’s right.
Dimitri
And that’s the winner you need to be right now, right? I mean.
Dean Brajevic
And just increase that understanding, that confidence. We still need to make sure that, you know, we’ve got where we’re at in entry-level roles, I’m talking within the recruitment professional sphere that we’re bringing along and upskilling and training future recruitment leaders and all the rest of it. So, it’s not a matter of trying to replace roles and people and all the rest. So, how can you inject in the right places and ensure it’s just not like, you know, a little sugar hit that people. You know, I think it’s a big funnel, whatever. It’s actually part it’s a business tool.
Dean Brajevic
It’s business traded as a business tool. And we do it in a controlled way. Those points in the process flow that are very clean and clear in terms of who’s doing it, you know, what’s being done, the whole points, the checks and balances.
AI gets spoken about in board meetings and some of those strategic planning sessions. But, there’s a lot of trepidation in terms of what might happen. But there’s also like, and I think, exactly what you were saying, green light, red lights flashing at the same time. You’ve got to go for it, but with a whole lot of controls.
Dimitri
We’re talking about a very controlled way that, if you’re a big brand, and you know, you need to move forward with AI, you can explain exactly what you’re doing, you know exactly where it’s been used every time, you know exactly who’s used it. And you can take some time to train up some people on things because, you know, users right now are not used to the idea of prompt and context, so, you know, you write a prompt and you know, it’s natural language. So there’s a lot of variation that you can have inside of a prompt itself. So, of course, we put the prompts in a library because then you can have somebody who gets better at it to write the prompts. Right? And you say, “Well, you know, you need to do your homework, practice prompts and see what responses are, and then you can construct them.”
But then the other area, of course, is the context, right? Which is what information goes in along with that context. You know, is it the certifications that the person has inside the record? And then is it a strict comparison between the certifications they entered in the record and the certifications required for the job?
And if you’re dropping three certifications, then the AI is making a very simple statement, which is non-controversial; a human would have done it. But it would have maybe taken a while to get to it. Busy day. And you know, being able to do that in a way that, you know, maybe there’s a little fuzziness in sort of the matching because AI is a little better when it gets a little fuzzy.
So, yeah, we’re trying to think about ways to do things like that, but we’re really interested in how that hits the ground in your deployments. You know, I mean, that’s where we, you know, there’s no answer yet. Nobody’s really done this yet.
The interesting thing will be seeing how you train up the people to use the tools, how you embed them in what you have, which is very distinct and I would say interesting workflows, you know, a very wide variety, and how it changes the throughput on those.
Dean Brajevic
You know, and that’s again, going back to the roadmap. And you know, deliberate, structured approach to continuous improvement and the AI stream within that, you know, needs to be, exploratory to start with and I think the clear places are those workflows. Do it in controlled environment so, it builds, you know, that confidence and the ones where, you know, the cliche early adopters and all the rest of it. And then scale it. But I think there’s, you know, in those, I mean, it’s got to be more than writing bits of ads and bits and pieces like that.
Dean Brajevic
I mean, that’s cool, but it’s in terms of those, you know, the skills matching, the verification of all of those, you know, the myriad of documents that go with all the skills, the certs and all the rest of it.
We have the work we do for our, you know, variety of customers. They all have a different, they say a skill often in a slightly different way. And that was a big win with our implementation, with the whole, you know, training needs analysis to move what we had to a resource portal, that was a monster of a job, a monster of a job. But we’ve come so far and you can almost say, if we were doing it today, I imagine they would have been, you know, a real focus on how can an AI process do what probably took eight months in maybe a few months iterative sort of support.
Dimitri
Well, the next generation will be looking back at us and saying, “Wow, it took them a long time to do what? Why did it take them so long?” It all happens like this.
Dean Brajevic
Yeah, but but there’s the, you know, without a shadow of a doubt, there is a rich vein to mine. There when it comes to how AI can support those parts of our entire TA processes.
Dimitri
It’ll be interesting also to see how the AI plays inside the workforce planning modeling. And I don’t think we’ve started to imagine that yet. We kind of focus on the modeling itself, because we want to be able to model with all the data, and we want to be able to allow you to build multiple models.
Dean Brajevic
Yeh I like that idea, there’s something there.
Dimitri
Well, you know, the copy instance feature allows you to just create multiple instances. So, you know, that and then the slicing and dicing based on the skills, of course, and any other parameters you add. So we can envision that, we can see what that’s like. But we haven’t actually started thinking about what happens to that when the AI maybe, I’ll say for the first time, builds the model for you.
Because if you got a 10,000-person workforce and 50 major projects and, you know, eight different categories, but ten different levels in each category, and you’ve got availability, you can see that from a human perspective that’s actually beyond our ability to keep in sort of our RAM as we try and think of an answer. But it’s not an overly difficult task for an AI neural network to do. Yeah. And I don’t know, we haven’t gotten there yet. It’ll be interesting.
Dean Brajevic
Say, for instance, our MD said, “Hey, you know, I need to get a full picture of our workforce plan, you know, built up across our entire project needs back into, you know, all that functional support and all the rest of it.” I could do that, probably take, you know, six plus months, and it’ll be out of date the second you hand it over and all the rest of it. But what I can, what I can envisage is, you know, that, exactly as you said, to process all of that in a relative, you know, in a timely manner.
But the bit that sort of and I’m just thinking out loud here that really excites me is that we talk about workforce planning with a high degree of granularity and, you know, it’s got length as well in terms of flight path projects and all these sorts of things. But what we often don’t take into account is the support structures and all of those other roles around all of that.
Now imagine if you’ve got a situation, you’ve got a whole-of-company workforce plan that’s built up from a project perspective. And then you’ve got some norms and some history in terms of what’s the supporting workforce that needs to be built around all of that. So then you can do the, the, you know, in those non-project areas, the workforce planning and you overlay like we’re we want to…
I’m always reluctant to say we’re good at something. I think you know the moment you think you’re good at something here I hope you know I think we’re we’re okay at the you know, we measure we have for a long time now our, you know, the basic things like our turnover and different cohorts and you know, we’re fairly stable organization at senior levels. We’ve got good data around all of that.
So in terms of, I imagine the ability to learn from all of that and have some predictive analysis going forward. And we can make, you know, we know what we need. You know, it tells us what we should know before we know it. I mean, that’d be awesome. You know, I could really see that.
Our people function, for instance, it’s, to support that level of activity, we’ve got 250 ish HR-related professionals, you know, across the business, recruiters, L&D people, IR people, HR people, the whole, you know… And just the ability to sort of shape that around the business requirements and also to shape that around, you know, we’ve got growth plans and adjacency in new markets.
Dimitri
It may change your market approach and what you bid on.
Dean Brajevic
Yeah. And again, the art of the possible. We can do all that analysis. But often to get to an answer it’s just a bit, you know, the moment past three months.
Dimitri
When we passed, I mean that’s That’s what we’re seeing with AI is that we’re seeing processes that in coding, you know, you make a change and then you have to make a change in 50 other places and the 50 other places takes you another two months, you know, and you figured out what to do, but it’s two months of, you know, and then in three months you’re done.
And with the AI, you tell it what you did and where else to do it. And, about two minutes later, it’s done. So, that’s the thing we’re looking at. And you’re right. And I think, yeah, it could change your appetite for project risk. It could change, you could move into more markets.
So, it’s going to be interesting. Yeah. I’m looking forward to, you know, working with you on understanding, you know, as we develop our solution, understanding what kind of things you guys do, because you’re very real-time planners. You’re very on the ground, boots on the ground. Some of our customers are a little more, it’s a little more abstract.
Of course, we’re talking to a variety of different organizations that we work with to sort of understand the scope of workforce planning.
Dean Brajevic
These are an ongoing process. You’ve always got to be, you know, keep that eye on the prize and continue to iterate it right, and refine and get better and better. But, yeah, the whole that whole strategic workforce planning side of it to take it up to that, you know, up to that really senior level.
One of the questions I think I’ll be getting asked is around, you know, are the questions you’re being asked in at an executive, a board level from a from a people perspective, from a sourcing perspective. And it’s just always, you know, “Can we get the people? Where are the people?” And to have data-informed answers to that as opposed to, you know, thumb-suck experience, “I think that we might, trust us, we’ve done it before.” All of that sort of stuff, you know, the power of what we’re talking about here, just, you know, changes the dynamic of that conversation.
Dimitri
It does. So it turns it into a strategic conversation instead of being on your back heel saying “Yeah, you know, hopefully the market will give us what we need.” Which is a tough one to sell.
Dean Brajevic
It is. And we’re, as a contractor. You know, I might say we’re a price setter: price taker in some, you know, when it comes to labor rates, I should say. We’re in lockstep with our customers to make informed outcomes. But, you know, if there was a slight bias, we’re more of a price taker than a setter, so that means often, you know, when it comes to those sourcing challenges, you dial up the rates of pay at your cost.
And so that’s not a lever you…
Dimitri
That’s not the lever you want to be pulling all the time.
Dean Brajevic
So, once again, that strategic workforce planning that takes into account, you know, the where, the how that all those sorts of things, you know, is a real risk mitigant to having to go there because it’s got a high degree of certainty around, well, you know, it’s a plan, that you can execute with the degree of certainty that you need to in tough and tight, constrained markets.
Dimitri
Constrained markets. Very tough skills. I mean, here in Australia, but you know, Europe, especially in the United States as well, you know, no welders. No welder problem in the United States, you can’t build submarines. Nobody’s teaching anybody how to weld either. So, there won’t be any new welders coming along.
So, yeah, problems like that have to be solved. Listen, it’s fantastic to work with you guys. Really, the teams get along great. We really appreciate you coming in and talking with us here. You know, we’re going to be talking a lot more about workforce planning. Hopefully, at some point, we’ll have you back telling us some of the things you’re doing with some new planning tools.
Dean Brajevic
Fantastic. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Dimitri
Yeah. Thank you so much.
