By Karen L. Edwards, RCS Editor.

From fun, to informative, to educational there’s an eBook or download on RoofersCoffeeShop® for you.

Did you know that RoofersCoffeeShop has an eBooks and downloads page that is filled with valuable resources for your business and for your customers? It’s becoming one of our more popular pages, so we decided to pull some analytics and see what the favorites are among our visitors in terms of the most downloaded.

One of the most popular downloads was an important white paper on overcoming the seasonality of roofing titled Giving New Meaning to Cold Applied. The white paper reviews the challenges of cold weather roofing applications using liquid-applied roofing products and systems while also examining the technologies that are creating opportunity for year-round, cold weather roofing applications.  It’s clear contractors in colder winter climates are seeking solutions that will keep their businesses operating year-round.

Also popular were the children’s coloring pages from Karen Cates’ children’s books, “Be Safe Rafe!” and “Is this a Roof?” This is a fun way to teach children about the importance of roofing as well as the need to always be mindful of safety while working. Her two books can be ordered on RCS and make great gifts around birthdays and holidays.

Another hit from the downloads page was CertainTeed’s “Straight Talk about Shingle Warranties.” This eBook demystifies warranties for your residential customers in a basic Q&A format. You’ll want to add this to your sales toolkit.

Here are some more of our most popular eBooks and downloads:

Using Aerial Mapping to Grow Your Business

Tremco Alpha Bio Colors Color Chart

Case Study: FiberTite Assists Tyson Foods with Complex Roofing Needs

Five Key Commercial Roofing Contract Provisions

Announcing TremPly® KEE and KEE FB

NORTHGATE® Designer Roofing Shingles by CertainTeed

The Importance of Employee Manuals

7 Tips to Choose the Best Roofing Software for Your Business

These are the eBooks that have generated the most downloads, but there are so many more valuable resources on the site, and we continue to add more so you’ll want to check back on a regular basis.

Visit the RCS downloads page here.

By Karen L. Cates, PhD

In a psychologically safe workplace, employees feel confident that no one on their team will embarrass or punish anyone else for pointing out a mistake or asking a question

In the past, I’ve written about the need to get into the mind and the heart of the roofing worker to drive safety at work.  Training is important, but so is the emotional connection that makes safety feel like it’s the right thing to do – especially when workers find themselves making decisions on site in the midst of competing goals or demands.

Enter Amy Edmonson, a Harvard Business School researcher, who is pioneering a concept called “psychological safety” – in roofing, this is the perception a worker has of the consequences of pointing out a potential safety hazard or violation.  How this plays out on the job site is critical to driving safety.  Will he be perceived as ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive? Or can he communicate freely in the knowledge that others will listen to him and address his concern or observation? Will the team back him up and address the problem?  Or is he going to be ignored, subject to rolled eyeballs, ridicule or worse?

In a psychologically safe workplace, employees feel confident that no one on their team will embarrass or punish anyone else for pointing out a mistake or asking a question. It all starts with leadership. How can contractors, superintendents and foreman foster the communication channels needed to identify and address safety concerns before they become a problem?  Edmonson has a number of recommendations:

• Welcome Curiosity: Promote a culture of learning and inquiry where questions are seen as an important opportunity to teach and develop. Does the phrase, “There are no bad questions” ring true in your organization?
• Encourage Healthy Conflict: Teach all employees the art of asking questions that don’t convey judgement or blame, but instead invite responsiveness and discussion. Instead of asking, “Who’s the idiot who ran the cord across this work area?” (a possible tripping hazard), consider asking the team, “What’s wrong with this picture, and what do we need to do about it?”
• Give Employees a Voice: Make sure that employees can communicate up the chain of command and provide means and opportunities for them to do so. Many companies engage in shop meetings and other strategies for conveying information.  Do you also have meetings with the teams on the roofs, where you ask for their input?
• Promote Effectiveness, Not Efficiency: When leaders free the workplace from threats of ridicule from co-workers and encourage upward communication, workers are actually more engaged and productive in protecting the organization from threats, which might include safety violations.  In these companies, doing it fast doesn’t trump doing it right.

Driving safety into the minds and hearts of your workers is a long game that benefits workers, contractors and the industry.  There may be short term gains for cutting corners on safety, but the costs can be catastrophic.  By creating a psychologically safe workplace, contractors can help mitigate the risk of safety violations by making it a part of “the way we do business” for employees to call it when they see it, reaping long-term benefits for all.

Order Karen's Children's Books on Roofing and Safety. 

Get more news and information like this delivered right to your inbox when you sign up for the RCS Week-in-Review e-newsletter. 

By Karen L. Cates, PhD

The roofing industry is no different than others with its good intentions around mentoring programs. 

Pairing a seasoned leader with a new or emerging manager, can result in a “student-teacher” relationship that is satisfying for both. Strong mentoring programs provide guidelines and structures to support mentors and mentees to drive organizational goals. When they work, these relationships can accelerate careers and improve organizational performance.

These relationships can hit obstacles, however.  Mentors may not have the skills needed to mentor effectively.  And mentees are not always open to the mentoring process or even to asking for help. A relationship that started with good intentions can fall to the wayside, a victim of neglect.

There is another way to mentor that has great upside potential for roofing professionals:  peer-to-peer mentoring, where both people give advice and learn from each other.  In these relationships, peers often share the same or similar type of job and can come from within or outside your organization.  The key is to find a partner who is willing to meet regularly, give honest feedback, and share candidly.  By building trust, peer mentors can share goals, dreams, ideals, roadblocks and opportunities.  Peer-to-peer mentoring can also expand access to resources through your partner’s networks. 

To get started, ask a potential peer mentor to lunch and share the concept with them.  If they seem open to the idea of peer mentoring, suggest you talk about your career goals and what you have been doing so far to meet them. What has been working?  What has been challenging? Through this initial conversation, you can mutually decide if you think a peer mentoring relationship might work.  If there is a good fit and the conversation flows easily, suggest setting another lunch date in a month or two to talk about a specific goal or anticipated experience or event. Be sure that you set the next date at the end of every meeting to maintain momentum. And if it doesn’t feel quite right, you can tell the other person that you are still forming ideas about what peer mentoring will mean to you and that it was great to meet them.  Leave the lunch on a positive note. At the least, you have just expanded your network.

If you want to take peer-to-peer mentoring to another level, consider setting up a group or “round table” of peers in the same job who work at different companies – or people in the same job in different industries (like estimators in area electrical, plumbing and mechanical firms).  This is not to share company secrets.  The idea is to simply broaden the peer mentoring network to share goals, what has been working and what has not with people who have a similar work experience to your own.  Many industry leaders do this frequently, keeping a keen eye on confidentiality, but sharing the goals and challenges that face them in their leadership functions or roles.  For complex issues, a round table of peers might even invite an expert to contribute an informed opinion about any number of topics like marketing, finance or law.

Peer mentors do not need to replace traditional ones.  Often traditional mentors can give advice on how to make the most of a peer mentor relationship.  Whether one-on-one or in a group, the key is to meet regularly, create a vision or topic for each meeting, and hold each other accountable for contributing to an energized conversation. That flow of ideas and support is certain to energize you, your job and ultimately your career.

See more articles from Karen Cates.

By Karen Cates.

Every business benefits from the continuous learning of its leaders.

Going back to school doesn’t have to mean a full-time commitment and a six-figure price tag.  But the very nature of our fast-moving economic and labor environment means we can never sit back, kick up our feet, and say, “OK, now I know everything I need to know.”  Whether you take online courses, read books, or have regular meetings with people who do the same job as you, continuous learning is a personal mission. It’s a business necessity. It’s a way of life.

Before you go shopping for educational opportunities, you might ask yourself a few questions:

1. Where am I going in my career? Where do I want to go?  Are you satisfied to stay in your current position; do you like the hours and the nature of the work?  Do you want to ready yourself for promotion?  Are you a part of a succession plan and want to get ready for new responsibilities? Regardless of your answers to the above, there are training and educational programs that will help you stay at the top of your game. As you begin shopping for options, remember, some programs are just too short or superficial to make a difference.  Others may require more commitment than you are willing to make at this time.
2. What do you hope to achieve by enrolling in an educational program? After over two decades teaching in and running executive education programs, I’ve heard every reason for being in the classroom.  Some folks genuinely want to learn the topics being presented.  Others are networking, seeking to meet new people who are at or above their professional level who might be future contacts or net them future opportunities. Still others frankly tell me they are just there to get the certificate, to be able to say they were there. The best educational offerings offer you all these things:  new skills or knowledge, new contacts, and a respected certificate or badge of completion.
3. What level of commitment are you willing to make to achieve your educational goals? One- or two-day seminars don’t require a lot of preparation or planning to build specific skills.  Certificate programs can help you maintain status in the market and within your organization.  Checking in during breaks should allow you to focus on programming and address skill gaps efficiently.

But gaining deeper insights into the workings of business will require a larger investment. At the Kellogg School of Management, we offer three-day to three-week programs designed to address specific and general needs of our executive participants.  The National Roofing Contractors Association’s Future Executives Institute (FEI) targets roofing business skills and challenges directly and requires a three-year commitment which includes the ability to attend two to four days of classes, once in the Spring and once in the Fall of each of those years.  For these longer programs, not only do participants need to make the commitment, but their employers (and sometimes their employees) need to commit, too.

If you are seeking to elevate your game, why not investigate the possibilities?  Do you want to learn specific skills or build your roster of certificates? Consider researching those seminars to help you get started.  If you are seeking more generally to expand your business knowledge, it’s never too early to research your options.  Offerings will be fewer and further between for in-depth programs, and you may need to make the business case to others in your organization concerning the financial and time resources required.

Continuous learning isn’t just good for business.  It’s good for you.  As the saying goes, “When is the last time you did something for the first time?” Maybe that time is now.

Karen is an Academic Director and Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at the Kellogg School of Management.  She has been an instructor in NRCA’s Future Executives Institute since its inception in 2002; she teaches the human resources management track. Applications for the next FEI class in the Fall of 2020 will be accepted beginning in March 2020.  For questions about the FEI program, please contact Tom Shanahan, NRCA's vice president of enterprise risk management and executive education, at tshanahan@nrca.net or (800) 323-9545, ext. 7538; or Janice Davis, director of NRCA University, at jdavis@nrca.net or (800) 323-9545, Ext. 7505.Elevating Your Game:  Why Training Isn’t Just for Field Employees

Learn more about her and the books here.

Photo credit: Pixabay.

By Karen Cates.

OSHA’s Safe + Sound week is coming up August 13-19.  Why is it that despite the best intention and prevention, people still get hurt or worse while on the job?

This question was the premise for a consulting engagement several years ago. My client had asked, “How do we make safety top of mind for all our employees, all the time?”  I was at corporate headquarters with my notebook and a list of questions – doing my research on the company, its leaders, and their safety message.

I met with the COO and the Chief Logistics Officer. But when I had finally made my way to the Chief Safety Officer’s office, I was stunned by its neat, minimalist appearance.  I expected a command center with phones ringing and reports strewn on all the surfaces.  Instead I found a quiet man sitting behind his desk, not a piece of paper in sight.  The computer was tucked at the far end of the L-shaped desk, and the screen was off.  The only other things on the desk were a book about St. Katherine of Alexandria and a crystal ball set on a metal base shaped like a dragon.

I stopped short in the doorway. “Well,” I said. “I had a list of questions to ask you, but obviously we need to talk about this instead.”  And I playfully closed my notebook and put my papers away.  Pointing to the objects on the desk, “Please tell me about these.”

He explained how proud he was of the company’s safety statistics, measured in incidents per mile.  The company consistently beat the industry average.  “But,” he said, “this isn’t good enough.  We are striving for zero incidents.  Period.”

The CSO told me he felt that they had done all they could with traditional means to put safety into the minds and hearts of their people.  They appealed to them through their families: “We want everyone to go home safely every day.”  They created incentive programs and communication pathways to help the company identify unsafe practices, situations or events.  Safety had become an integral part of the strategy for operations.  All these things drove their better-than-industry-average incident rate.

So why the book about Saint Katherine? “I needed to take our whole approach to the next level, think WAY outside the box,” the CSO told me.  The book was a hagiography – a special type of biography designed to reveal a saint’s miracles and influence people toward faith.  “How does this apply to safety?” I asked.  The CSO replied that being in the minds and hearts of their people isn’t enough, “We need to find ways to help our people believe in safety, that not being safe is unthinkable.”  He knew others might not understand. But taking a hagiographic approach seemed like a new way to appeal to employees. He planned to break new ground with a completely different type of communication aimed at embracing the spirit of safety.

“And what about the crystal ball?” I asked.

He explained that both the objects were reminders to move away from conventional thinking and communications about safety.  His staff had the basics down.  But it was his job to go beyond. With a wink, he told me, “I’m open to anything that will help us bring our incidents to zero….I don’t want to miss any opportunity, even if it involves a little magic.”

Karen Cates has been a consultant to the roofing industry for over twenty years. She has written two children’s books including Be Safe, Rafe which was written for roofing workers to take home after safety training to read to their children and reinforce important total safety messages.

Learn more about her and the books here.

By Karen Cates.

Learn how the gifts that you incorporate into your employees’ lives can really make an impact – especially when it’s something that enables parents to share their experiences with their children.

When I’m not consulting, coaching, or writing children’s books about roofing, I am an Academic Director at the Kellogg School of Management. This means twice a year for the past 15 years, I lead a team of experts, academics and event planners to put on what I call a “three-day show”.  In fact, our event coordinator used to be a stage manager, and she uses every bit of her know-how gleaned from a career in Chicago theater to help us create a unique and engaging executive education experience.

I hire best-in-class experts to teach, and we engage our participants in a tightly scheduled, well-choreographed gauntlet of education, exhilaration, and revelation. The aha moments we plan are only exceeded by the ones our participants bring to our three days together.  We become co-conspirators as each iteration of the program takes on its own direction and personality.

I am convinced that one of key elements of our success are the “gifts” that participants walk away with at the end of the program.  The gifts serve a number of purposes.  For the most part, they are intended to be tangible reminders of a positive visit to our campus.  They also have our logos emblazoned on them, so our marketing folks check their branding boxes.  But most importantly, they serve as a tool of reciprocity.  Let me explain.

The opening volley is mine.  Instead of offering a mere pencil and pad of paper to jot notes during the educational sessions, we place a bound journal and a Kellogg, executive gel-ink pen at every seat. The message I hope to convey is that your notes are going to be important, so they should be recorded in a vessel worthy of that importance.  Not everyone used the pads of paper.  Now everyone uses the journal.  The ball comes back into my court.

On day two, we hand out the Kellogg athletic jacket.  We keep our classrooms a touch cold to help folks stay alert, especially after lunch.  The jacket is another gift.  Everyone puts it on when it is received, and most continue to wear it throughout the program.  They are Kellogg people now.  Last serve….

On day three, every participant receives their certificate of completion.  Our intention is that not only will our people go back to the office and try some of the new things we shared during our time together.  We hope they will come back, and many times they do.

Reciprocity.  What are the gifts you incorporate into your workers’ lives?  Do they have an obvious reciprocal purpose like the journal or the jacket?  What gifts do you have at the ready for the second volley?

Karen highly recommends you consider her children’s roofing books as a gesture of reciprocity.  They reinforce the importance of family, providing a vehicle to share parents’ work with their children.  Be Safe, Rafe! reinforces the message of safety, sneaking in one more safety lesson as parents read the story before the kids go to bed.  Consider the gift of a children’s book to your workers for picnics and other events.  The ball’s in your court!

By Karen Cates.

Make safety more than a lesson, make it an emotional commitment.

Important messages don’t really stick the first time you share them with your workers.  Research has demonstrated that new information must be shared at least seven times for it to be fully processed and adopted. One roofing executive in NRCA’s Future Executive Institute, told the class one time, “Try seventeen times!” He wasn’t joking. And it is not just about the number of times you share, it is the variety of methods that count. Meetings, memos, training, and just casual talk in the shop – they all combine to drive the lesson home.

Workplace safety has its own challenges. With competing goals in the field, safety sometimes has to compete for priority. In the past 22 years I have been working with roofing contractors, however, I have seen safety go from a sometimes thing to an absolute value embedded in contractors’ cultures. My work in roofing and other industries has highlighted a sort of 80/20 rule in effect when it comes to safety. Workers want to be safe, and they achieve that eighty percent and more of the time, but they don’t always remember to think safety first. How can contractors cross that last bridge to total safety culture?

Strive to engage the head and the heart when encouraging safety (you need both!). Training programs, demonstrations, and refresher courses are all important ways to lay the foundation for safe behavior on the roof. But these are all “head” approaches aimed at teaching rules and appropriate behaviors.To also engage the “heart” requires emotion. Behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated that emotions often drive decision-making before the mind ever gets a chance to weigh the data. You don’t have to hug all your workers at the beginning of each day but bringing some emotion into the mix might do you some good.

Negative emotions can get your workers’ attention (no one wants to be around an angry or anxious boss), but positive emotions are what drive the message deep into the worker’s decision-making process. Some contractors understand the connection and are engaging their workers emotionally to think safety first. Some examples:

• Pride: keep track of zero incident days, comparing them to industry averages, and celebrating milestones
• Caring: encourage team members to look out for each other becomes a part of the narrative at crew meetings and an opportunity for recognition
• Gratitude: communicate thankful messages when everyone stays safe and finishes a project without incident
• Love: remind workers who waits for them to return home safely to their families every day

Workers are motivated by progress toward goals that matter. Put a little heart into yours and see the difference positive emotions can make in attitudes toward safety in the workplace.

Author’s note: Readers are encouraged to share examples of the positive emotions they spotlight in the shop and in the field.

Karen Cates has consulted to the roofing industry for over 20 years. An executive coach, leadership consultant, and adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, she advises professionals in a wide variety of businesses and settings. Karen is also a founding faculty member of NRCA's Future Executive Institute where she teaches future roofing industry executives.

By Karen Cates.

Children’s book encourages kids to consider a career in roofing.

Fire chiefs and ballet dancers are officially on notice. Children, ages three to twelve, are talking about doing much more when asked what they want to be when they grow up. According to one national survey, girls and boys as young as three-years old are expanding their options to include doctor, engineer, pro-athlete and even chef. A close look at the data reveals that the careers they are most exposed to (think how often kids see their doctors given rigorous vaccine schedules) are the ones they say they want to pursue. Of course, very young children also want to be kitty cats and dinosaurs when they grow up, so we need to manage our expectations here.

Even so, this is why I wrote Is This A Roof? and Be Safe, Rafe!. These two books intend to make roofing careers accessible to young children as pursuits that are interesting, satisfying and worthy of their attention. In Is This A Roof?, big brother Tucker takes his little sister, Talia, to look at different roofs around their neighborhood. He is knowledgeable and kind as he explains basic low- and steep-slope roof technologies.   In Be Safe, Rafe!, Grandpa Foxx owns a roofing company and his daughter, Isobel is the safety director --  she is also Rafe’s mom. Together they show Rafe how to be safe by following industry rules for safety and fall protection.

These roofing books are for children ages three- to nine-years old, and as fun reading, they are designed to encourage kids’ career curiosity about the roofing industry. Grammar school children may not be ready to choose a career, but they are already creating a map of possibilities for when the time comes. Whether you are a roofing professional, or simply want your child to have a broad swath of professions to choose from, engaging stories about roofing can expand their options.

In the next blog, I’ll discuss the importance of making what you do as a roofing professional more vivid to your children.

Karen Cates has consulted to the roofing industry for over 20 years. An executive coach, leadership consultant, and adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, she advises professionals in a wide variety of businesses and settings. Karen is also a founding faculty member of NRCA's Future Executive Institute where she teaches future roofing industry executives.

By Karen Cates.

Reinforce roofing safety with a book that workers can read to their children

Did you ever wonder, “What was that guy thinking?!” when you noticed a safety violation on the job? You just finished refresher training for the whole team, and their first day back in the field, someone is up on the roof without wearing safety goggles!

Chances are that guy wasn’t thinking about safety at all. He was thinking about his tools, whether he has the right materials with him, why one of his crew-mates is late – any number of things. Safety became an afterthought, and something slipped through the cracks. Safety, like a lot of other good things, needs to become a habit to be consistent. And one way to reinforce good habits is through repetition.

I wrote Be Safe, Rafe! (and the Spanish version, ¡Mantente Seguro, Arturo!) for just this purpose. In collaboration with Tom Shanahan, VP of Risk Management at NRCA, and with two roofing contractors – one largely commercial and one largely residential – I created a short, engaging story for four- to nine-year olds designed to reinforce roofing safety messages that are in compliance with industry standards. Sarah Larsen, a student at Montana State University, created the charming and appealing illustrations with a talent for including roofing details that was guided by our industry experts.

The story embraces diversity through colorfully animated animal-based characters. Rafe is a young fox visiting his grandpa’s company, Foxx Roofing, where his mom, Isobel, is the safety director. Rafe recently fell out of a tree and broke his wrist. Grandpa Foxx decides it’s time to teach Rafe about being safe when he is up high and outfits him with his own safety gear. With a little training about fall protection, Rafe gets a chance to try out his new gear on a roof made just for him.

Be Safe, Rafe! is the perfect Father’s Day gift for roofing workers. It provides an opportunity to repeat and reinforce safety messages via a book your workers can read to their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Not only does the dialogue conform to industry standards to encourage safety habits in your workers, but the book might also stimulate conversations with young ones about roofing careers and even family safety rules. See www.isthisaroof.com for details on how to order copies to reinforce your safety messages.

Karen Cates has consulted to the roofing industry for over 20 years. An executive coach, leadership consultant, and adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, she advises professionals in a wide variety of businesses and settings. Karen is also a founding faculty member of NRCA's Future Executive Institute where she teaches future roofing industry executives.

A focus on children is one more way to fill the pipeline of employees for the industry.

By Karen Cates.

For the 20 plus years of my involvement with the roofing industry, I have heard a common lament about the labor shortage in roofing. Advances have been made to attract new workers. For example, many contractors are making career paths in roofing more salient, shifting their cultures to elevate workplace dynamics and using new technologies to attract younger workers.

A focus on children is one more way to fill the pipeline of employees for the industry. In my earlier post, I discussed the need to bring children up to speed on roofing careers.  Research has demonstrated that as early as three-years old, they are already creating decision maps about what they want to be when they grow up. It’s time that roofing claimed a spot alongside fire chiefs and doctors. So how do we encourage children to become the roofing professionals of tomorrow?

What do your children know about your role as a roofing professional? You have an opportunity to impact children’s perceptions of the roofing industry.  Here are a few ideas:

• Bring your sons and daughters to work.  Not just to the office, but to the shop and the yard and the job site. Is it safe enough to bring them on a roof? Can you share the best parts of being up there? A great view? The sunrise or sunset? The pride you take in a job well done? Take some time to create an experience that conveys the way you feel about your work. Children map memories with their feelings. Are they excited, too? Or are they bored? Create moments that will last.
• Bring the roof to the children. Visit your son’s or daughter’s classroom and create a roofing experience for them. Can you bring plastic hardhats, goggles and day-glow vests so they are dressed for roofing success? Can you bring a worker dressed for roofing work including harness, boots, hardhat, tool belt and gloves? How about pictures of particularly interesting roofs? Be sure to tell stories and bring roofing tools or materials with you so they can touch them. Appeal to all the senses when you talk to children.
• Take it up a notch. Set up a career day and open house at the business and invite not only your workers, but potential workers and their families, too. Set up some model roofs low to the ground for the workers and their kids, maybe let them be a part of the presentations. Create a repelling demonstration or some other kind of cool, heroic roofing-related moment that makes the day special. Serve food and give away children’s roofing books. The event, if the focus remains on roofing and is a part of a larger recruiting effort, will be memorable not only for the workers, but for their kids, too.

These are just a few ideas, so please share your own experiences. What are you doing to ensure that children’s career curiosity will include roofing?

Karen Cates is an executive coach, consultant, adjunct professor at Northwestern University and teaches future roofing industry executives through the NRCA's Future Executive Institute.