Same pressures, different sites
Crystel Robbins Rynne on why Irish contractors shouldn’t be solving HR problems alone
On 1 August, the minimum you can pay the trades and operatives on your site changes, again. Under the SEO, across every grade, rates rise along with pension contributions. It’s the second increase inside 12 months. None of it is optional, and it’s one more plate for HR to keep spinning.
If your firm is like most others, the person spinning those plates doesn’t have HR anywhere in their job title. If you’re the office manager, the contracts manager or the director who took the role on because ‘someone had to do it’, you’ll know the score. You’re already fielding payroll queries and sorting out an operative whose Safe Pass ran out on Friday. You’re also the one holding working time records, sick leave and auto-enrolment together. That’s a lot for one person to carry, especially with a penalty attached to getting any of it wrong.
What it does to the person carrying it
Our SME HR Report gives a sense of what that does to people. Almost everyone responsible for workforce management reports some level of burnout. Admin alone takes more than a day a week. Three-quarters believe they would fail a WRC inspection. More than half are thinking about leaving the role.
That last finding is the one I find hardest to read. In SMEs it usually means one person, and it’s the one who knows which subcontractors have documentation gaps and what was agreed with an operative three years ago. Construction and property has one of the highest voluntary turnover rates in the survey, and most of that knowledge walks out with them. There’s never been a spare hour to write it down. That puts burnout on the risk register rather than the wellbeing agenda.
Where construction is different
You know your own sites better than I do. You know what’s involved in reconciling dockets off four jobs, and how quickly hours turn into a dispute when the only record is a foreman’s memory. The figure that surprises people is the rework. More than seven in 10 construction and property firms enter the same employee data in more than one place and over half put their error-rework rate at 3% or higher. Against a live SEO obligation, small errors become underpayments. They surface in front of an inspector or at final account and neither is a good moment to find out.
The WRC ran more than 5,000 inspections in 2024 and found something wrong in two of every five. A full inspection runs to around 130 checks. One in four of the SMEs we surveyed say a full evidence pack would take four to seven days to assemble. You’ll normally get a fortnight’s notice, which only helps if the records already exist.
That’s for records that exist. Anything missing can’t be recreated in the time available. Construction and property runs more internal audits and mock WRC inspections than most sectors, yet even then only one in three firms had carried one out in the past year.
Your records can affect what you win
Main contractors ask hard questions of subcontractors at prequalification, and employment compliance can form part of that conversation rather than a safety exercise on its own. Evidence that your people are on the right SEO grades or that pension contributions are up to date is the kind of thing that can come up. Public work in particular expects the documentation to exist and to be produced on request. Firms that struggle to produce clean records can lose out without ever being told that was the reason.
The same problems, solved separately
Every contractor in the country is working through the same August change, the same duplicated paperwork and the same question of what an inspector would actually find. In most firms it lands on one person and most of them are working it out from scratch. On site, a better way to get the job done travels. Somebody works out a quicker way to strip and re-set formwork and it’s on the next job by the end of the week. But that instinct stops at the office door, which has always struck me as a waste.
The contracts manager on the job you finished last year has probably already worked out how to capture hours without chasing paper. An office manager down the road has subcontractor documentation in a state that survives an audit. Neither of them would think to bring it up and there’s no occasion to ask. Still, knowing how somebody actually did it beats another guide telling you what the law requires.That’s a fixable problem and the one our research kept pointing at. People wanted somewhere to put a question and get support from people who understand the pressure, without it turning into a formal engagement and without feeling foolish for asking it.
Where a dedicated community comes in
If you’ve been to an industry event, you’ll know the chats you grab afterwards can be worth just as much as the session itself. The expert tells you what you should be doing, but you learn how others have handled it over a quick drink. The trouble is, you get both twice a year if you can spare the day. Online, you get the same thing without the ticket price, the day off site or the calendar clash. That’s why we built the HRLocker Hub. It’s a free space for people responsible for HR in organisations across Ireland, kept clear of sales pitches. And there’s a growing number of members from the construction and trade sectors.
Most of what members get out of it is time, reassurance and support. You can check your understanding before diving in or ask if anyone has a template or checklist they can share, without paying for professional advice you may not need yet. Expert partners contribute alongside that, writing up the challenges that come up most often, running masterclasses and clinics.
Most contractors can work out what a change like the SEO increase means for their business on their own. But there’s no prize for doing it that way. If you’re the one spinning plates, you don’t have to carry HR alone. There’s a community for that. And the door’s always open.
If you’d like to see whether it would be useful to you, have a look at hrlocker.com/community-hub
Crystel Robbins Rynne is CEO at HRLocker
______________________________________________________________________________________
Michael McDonnell Managing Editor of Irish Construction Industry Magazine & Plan Magazine
