How can large commercial construction companies improve jobsite safety, productivity and crew coordination? It doesn’t always take the latest, most sophisticated piece of construction technology or software. The answer actually lies in a more analog piece of technology: the two-way radio. Sometimes, solving increasingly complex construction problems is about reinvigorating the simplest approach. Construction Executive sat down with Weavix CEO Kevin Turpin to discuss how the universal distribution of communications devices to all workers on a jobsite enhances safety and compliance, crew coordination and productivity, language and accessibility, return on investment and more.
For decades, two-way radios have largely been reserved for supervisors and foremen. Why has that model persisted, and where does it break down on today’s jobsites?
Money and habit. Radios used to cost enough that contractors bought only enough for the people in leadership positions who needed to make calls. This was typically a supervisor, foreman and maybe your safety lead, but few beyond that. Everybody else on the site had to get by without one or used their smartphone (a safety hazard) and that became the default. Nobody sat down and decided that was the right way to communicate on a jobsite. It’s similar to why many people still idle their cars on cold mornings. With most modern cars using fuel injection, that’s totally unnecessary.
On a large jobsite, you might have 300 to 1000 workers, including a dozen trade teams. There might be three or four different languages on the same site. When an organization distributes a few radios only to site leads, you might need to physically track down the one person with a radio to convey a specific message. So, on any given day onsite, a worker who sees an issue—like a hazard or a leak, or something that needs urgent attention—has to go find someone with a radio. That search costs money, and it reappears later as a slipped schedule or even an incident report when the delay is extended.
You’ve managed thousands of craft professionals yourself. What communication challenges did you experience firsthand that convinced you the traditional approach needed to change?
My brothers and I built a successful industrial services business, PK Companies, a fireproofing, inspection and staffing company that grew to 4,000 employees across 40 states and five countries. Managing people in one city is one skill, and managing crews spread across the Gulf Coast, the Midwest and half a dozen other regions at once is an entirely different challenge; often, the biggest challenge was always communication.
Many times I would hear about a problem on a jobsite days after it happened, passed up through two or three people, with half the details missing by the time it reached me. A crew running fireproofing on structural steel would hit something that required a fast decision, and the information moved slowly, typically after someone found a person with a radio onsite.
The moment that reframed the problem for me had little to do with a jobsite. My son races motocross and I was trying to coach him. I found a training tool out of Europe that mapped his lap times onto a color-coded heat map: green where he was fast; red where he was losing time; and he understood it instantly. He started adjusting on his own, without me saying a word. Watching that happen, I remember thinking about the 4,000 people working for me who had no equivalent, no way to see their own performance, no direct way to say what they were seeing on a job site. That question—what if every one of them had a tool built specifically for their job, the way my son had one built for his—is where Weavix started.
What operational improvements have contractors seen when communication tools are available to the entire workforce instead of just project leadership? Can you share any specific examples?
We have hundreds of large companies using our products today, and Malcolm Drilling is one of the many examples I point to. They run deep foundation work across the country. They had 13 jobsites across town alone. Before adopting our Walt smart radios, they used a few two-way radios per site, which were given only to supervisors and key personnel. When they switched over to Walt, 140 of them across the sites each carried one. The operational changes quickly followed, with crews coordinating directly rather than routing every question through a foreman who might be working at a different site entirely. Hazard information reached the whole crew at once, rather than traveling person to person or requiring an all-site briefing. A superintendent managing all 13 sites gained visibility into what was happening across them, rather than relying on secondhand information after the fact. Contractors who move to a universal communication device strategy have described the impact the same way: they finally see a version of their projects they never had access to before.
Construction companies are under constant pressure to improve productivity. How does broader jobsite communication affect coordination, scheduling, rework and overall project efficiency?
In my experience, productivity in construction rarely fails because of a single major breakdown; it erodes in small increments. Every time information that exists on a jobsite takes longer than it should to reach the person who needs it, it creates issues.
On a multitrade jobsite, work sequences depend on one crew finishing a task and passing information to the next, and when that handoff runs through a single supervisor who has to be tracked down, confirmed with and then relayed, every trade downstream inherits that delay whether they caused it or not. A superintendent running several concurrent sites feels that most directly, because coordinating across locations through a traditional radio setup means constant physical travel just to confirm what should have been a thirty-second conversation. It creates unnecessary bottlenecks, but hardly anyone stops to wonder if there’s a better way.
Safety is often cited as a major benefit of better communication. Beyond emergency response, how does giving every worker a voice contribute to a stronger safety culture?
The real shift happens long before anyone needs an emergency response, in what workers feel safe saying on a normal workday. When only supervisors carry a radio, many issues that should be reported go unreported because flagging one means stopping work to track someone down. Give every worker a direct way to communicate. Let them snap a photo or a quick video of whatever issue they spot, and reporting a hazard takes 10 seconds instead of a 10-minute walk across the site. Give it time and, I guarantee, you will see behavior change fast. Workers who know someone will hear them start speaking up sooner and more often, catching issues before they become real problems.
Language diversity continues to grow across the construction workforce. How are contractors using communication technology to bridge language barriers without creating additional complexity on the jobsite?
On many jobsites, you need someone to translate for workers if English isn’t a first language. Sometimes that person isn’t around, which can lead to delays. Our technology has built-in AI-enabled translation, removing the need for a human to translate for anyone.
Any worker who speaks Spanish can send a note to anyone else, and that person receives the message in their preferred language. If the foreman speaks English, they receive messages in English. Neither person has to stop, switch tools or wait on a bilingual coworker or translator to relay the message. Complexity is what kills adoption of new safety tech on a jobsite every time. Keeping translation inside a dedicated work-specific smart radio lets any crew member be included. We’ve heard of some pretty dramatic cultural shifts on jobsites where coworkers can communicate with one another for the first time.
Many contractors are investing heavily in digital tools—from project management platforms to wearables and AI. Where does jobsite communication fit within that broader technology ecosystem?
Communication is the foundation everything else depends on, and most technology roadmaps skip past it because it doesn’t look like a platform the way project management software or a wearable does. A scheduling tool coordinates tasks, a wearable tracks a body in a hazard zone and, increasingly, AI reviews design documents or predicts delays, but all of that assumes data from the site reaches those systems accurately and on time. On most jobs, that’s an issue.
A superintendent who has to physically track someone down to relay a schedule change is a bottleneck, no matter how good the software is. Getting communication right first means every other investment works as designed, because the data feeding those systems comes directly from workers rather than being filtered, delayed or lost on the way up.
Some contractors may worry that putting communication devices in every worker’s hands could create distractions or unnecessary costs. What concerns do you hear most often and how do you address them?
Cost comes up first, and it’s a fair question because rationing radios to supervisors was originally a cost decision. Our smart radios are sold on a per-worker subscription basis to companies, rather than as a large capital purchase, so a contractor ends up comparing a predictable monthly cost against what they are already losing to delays and rework. Distraction is the second concern and it usually stems from prior experiences with smartphone use. Our smart radios don’t have a browser, social apps or games. It’s built for one job, and that design removes the primary ways a smartphone becomes a distraction.
For contractors considering a broader investment in communication infrastructure, what factors should they evaluate before selecting a platform or changing their communication strategy?
Great question. One factor that doesn’t get enough attention is the unique data a fleet of smart radios generate directly from the jobsite. Our platform comes with backend software that shows where devices are deployed, how communication clusters around shift changes and which crews are talking to which. Every message is saved and timestamped too. A superintendent views a live picture of where people are on a site instead of relying on a headcount from that morning. This can change decisions in real time, whether to pull a crew from one area to help another or catch a shift-change gap before it turns into a coordination problem.
Connectivity is also an important consideration, because none of the rest matters if you have a dropped signal. Early-phase jobsites often have no WiFi and spotty cellular, so the better platforms run across whatever exists—WiFi, public cellular or a portable LTE unit brought in for the project and switch automatically as coverage changes. Some contractors set up a temporary private LTE network at a large or remote site so devices work on day one, rather than waiting for permanent infrastructure.
Next is customization, or the ability to create channels by trade or sub, with the ability to open one sitewide when something affects everyone. A framing crew doesn’t need every electrical conversation, but a safety alert should reach the whole site regardless of channel. It’s all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time in their preferred language.
Looking ahead, how do you see jobsite communication evolving over the next five years, and what role will it play in improving workforce productivity, safety and retention?
Five years out, selfishly speaking, I think every worker on a job carries a smart radio by default, just as everyone wears a hard hat now. What changes after that is what gets done with the record those conversations create. Right now, most of that intelligence still gets lost the moment it’s spoken. Once it’s captured, timestamped and searchable, contractors have something to work with instead of memory and gut instinct.
Productivity and safety improve together because they come from the same source: workers saying what they see in real time. Worker retention follows close behind because people stay where they feel heard, and a job that gives every worker a voice tends to keep more of them.
How do communication practices differ between large commercial contractors and smaller firms?
A smaller contractor running one or two crews on a single site might get by on personal cell phones and a group text, because the foreman can still see or hear most of what’s happening without a formal system standing between him and the crew.
That breaks down fast once a contractor is running multiple concurrent projects with hundreds of workers across trades and languages. At that size, informal communication becomes a liability rather than a shortcut, because nobody at the top has visibility into what’s happening on sites they aren’t physically at.
Larger firms have historically moved more slowly on communication policy. Smaller firms often move faster once pricing shifted from a capital purchase to a subscription, since there’s less internal process standing between them and just trying it. But we are seeing larger firms across the country reach out to us for help, because their current strategy is no longer feasible.
Are there certain project types—healthcare, data centers, manufacturing or infrastructure—where improved communication has the greatest impact?
Another good question. I’d say data centers—particularly by hyperscalers—stand out. The demand for computing capacity now, especially in the age of AI, has put enormous pressure on contractors to deliver computing space faster than we can keep up. Communication needs to be fast and accurate, and the industry is doubly strained by the shortage of skilled workers who communicate in different languages. The owners building AI infrastructure like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are racing to get compute capacity online for the frontier labs. Every month a facility isn’t live is a month of lost revenue and, more and more, a month behind their competition.
Security adds another layer of difficulty, as buildouts are extremely confidential and proprietary. Data center sites restrict movement between zones, so workers can’t freely walk to find a supervisor the way they might on an open commercial site. When access is controlled, having the ability to communicate with workers and managers in real time is essential, because physically tracking someone down may not even be allowed.
What metrics should contractors use to determine whether a communication investment is delivering ROI?
Response time is the first one I’d track. How long does it take for someone to spot a problem and for the right person to hear about it? That number should drop quickly once every worker can reach the right person directly instead of routing through one person.
After that, I’d look at rework and schedule slippage on a phase-by-phase basis, since those are where communication delays show up as real cost even when nobody can point to a single incident that caused them.
Near-miss reporting is worth watching too, and contractors sometimes read this one backward. If reported near misses increase after rollout, that’s often a sign the tool is working, because workers who couldn’t easily flag something before now have a way to do so.
Have you seen resistance from field leaders, and how did successful contractors overcome it?
Foremen are usually the ones who push back hardest. For years, being the person who carried the radio was one of the select few given to more senior site leaders, a mark of who was trusted and who made decisions onsite. On the surface, handing a radio to every laborer can feel like it’s diluting that role.
What tends to change their minds is realizing how much of their day was spent as a human relay, walking the site to answer questions unrelated to leading the crew. Once workers can reach each other and get basic answers directly, foremen get that time back and can focus on the parts of the job only they can do. We’re getting a ton of positive feedback directly from foremen that it’s making their jobs more efficient.
The contractors who have handled this well brought foremen in early, before rollout, and let them see the tool solve their own daily frustrations first. A foreman who is tired of being tracked down a dozen times per shift for something small becomes an advocate fast once that stops.
SEE ALSO: PREDICTIVE CONSTRUCTION SAFETY PROGRAMS GAIN MOMENTUM
