A great deal of what gets called community consultation on a construction project is a letterbox drop and an inbox nobody monitors. That’s notification. It satisfies a condition of consent and it changes nothing about how the community experiences the build.
Real consultation means somebody’s day gets altered because of what you heard. If nothing about your delivery changes, you didn’t consult. You announced.
Find out what the actual complaint will be
It’s almost never the thing in your environmental management plan.
It’s noise before seven. It’s a truck blocking a driveway on a school run. It’s dust on washing. It’s the portaloo somebody can see from their kitchen window. It’s tradesmen parking across the street the residents use.
None of that appears in your risk register. All of it produces the complaints, the councillor phone calls, and eventually the conditions that cost you real money.
The person your plan has no category for
Every consultation plan has objectors, businesses and councils in it. What it rarely has is the shift worker who sleeps from seven in the morning while your deliveries start at six.
People like that aren’t in any stakeholder category, they don’t attend sessions, and they don’t write submissions. Shifting a delivery window for them often costs close to nothing and turns the most affected person on a street into your most useful one.
Go and stand there
Walk the perimeter at the time of day your works will be loudest. Knock on the doors immediately adjacent. Not a session in a community hall at 6pm that eleven people attend, half of them from your own organisation.
Doorstep conversations produce information that no formal process will surface, because the people most affected are usually the least likely to attend a meeting or write a submission.
One name, one number, answered
Give the street a person. Same person for the duration. Answer the phone.
The biggest driver of escalation to councils and MPs is people feeling they have no route to you. A complaint that reaches a site manager and gets fixed on Tuesday never becomes a councillor’s problem on Friday.
A site manager’s mobile number on a laminated sign frequently does more for community relations than an entire engagement budget.
Say what will be bad
Don’t sell the finished thing. They can see the render. They want to know what the next eleven months are like.
“There will be four weeks of piling in March. It will be loud, between seven and three, and there’s no way to make it quiet. Here’s what we’re doing to limit it and here’s who to ring.” That’s a message people can plan around, and it buys enormous credit when the loud weeks arrive exactly as described.
Worth considering
On your current build, who’s the person most affected who has never once been contacted directly?
They exist. They usually turn out to be the one who decides how the street feels about you.
Part of a series on project messaging, which starts with knowing what the message actually is. Related: writing for the person who doesn’t care about your project.
Ben Webb is an Australian project delivery leader, AIPM Project Manager of the Year 2022 and an IPMA World Project Manager of the Year nominee 2023. He writes about project delivery, leadership and the difference between managing a project and actually delivering one.
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