Rebecca Askin and Alex Harris on the low cost fixes that decide who stays, and the Queensland rules that now sit behind them.

The interventions that keep good people in construction are mostly small, cheap and already inside a builder’s control. That was the through line of a recent Good Builder Podcast conversation with Bec Askin from Adapt Modular and Alex Harris from Wattyl, two operators who spend their working weeks at opposite ends of the same supply chain.

Neither of them argued for a program, a target or a campaign. Both kept returning to the same handful of things. Sort out the facilities. Keep the line open with the people you buy from and the people you sell to. Make sure the youngest person on site can tell that someone noticed they turned up.

None of that is expensive. Most of it is already required.

Why site amenities are a retention issue, not a comfort issue

Alex spent years in commercial and residential flooring before moving into decorative paint. She described a contractor on a large residential build who had to drive fifteen minutes each way, off site, to find a bathroom she could use. Bec has heard the same from other sites: no separate facilities, no sanitary provision, and an unspoken expectation that people will work around it.

The counterexample came from Bec’s own workplace. When she started at Campbell Construction Co, the People and Culture Manager, Jess Lancashire, had stocked a cabinet in the female bathroom with the things someone might need at short notice. Hair straighteners, deodorant, face wash, sanitary products. Bec had never seen it done in a career in the industry. She has since replicated it at her own site, and extended the same thinking to the men’s facilities.

It is just little things that can change your day, if you are having a not so good day.  Bec, Adapt Modular

Her point was not that a cabinet fixes culture. It was that the gap between a site people want to come back to and a site they quietly stop turning up to is often measured in items that cost less than an hour of labour.

What does Queensland require for female toilets on construction sites?

The part of that conversation worth checking against the rules is the facilities question, because in Queensland it stopped being discretionary some time ago.

Since 1 January 2025, the Work Health and Safety (Amenities for Construction Work) Amendment Regulation 2024 has required principal contractors to ensure toilets are reasonably available to every construction person on projects where the construction work costs more than $250,000. That includes access to designated female toilets and related amenities such as sanitary bins. A maximum penalty of $2,000 applies for failing to meet the duty.

The thresholds sit in Schedule 5A of the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011:

• On a small construction project, meaning work costing more than $250,000 and less than $7.5 million, at least one designated female toilet is required where there are more than 15 construction persons.
• On a large construction project, meaning work costing more than $7.5 million, at least one designated female toilet is required for each 100 or part of 100 construction persons.
• On a multilevel project of at least four levels above ground, there must be a toilet and a designated female toilet on the ground floor, the fourth level below ground, the fourth level above ground, and each third level after the fourth.

The specification matters as much as the count. A designated female toilet has to be reachable without walking through a block or room containing cubicles or urinals used by male construction persons. It has to be clearly signed, restricted in use, and fitted with a sanitary bin immediately adjacent, within reaching distance. The definition of a female construction person also captures visitors, so an architect or engineer attending site is covered.

Below $250,000 there is no designated female toilet requirement, but the general duty to provide adequate facilities under the Work Health and Safety Regulation still applies, as does the Managing the work environment and facilities Code of Practice.

For builders already running well set up sites, none of this changes practice. It changes what can be assumed. And these are Queensland settings. Other states handle construction amenities differently, so anyone working across borders should check the requirement in each jurisdiction rather than carrying the Queensland numbers across.

Capability first, and what that means in practice

Both guests were direct about how they want hiring to work, and both landed in the same place.

Hire me because I am the best choice, not because I am a female and you are trying to reach a gender percentage.  Bec, Adapt Modular

Alex made the companion point from the other side, that being visibly singled out on a site can create its own friction with the people you have to work alongside every day. Their shared position is that the fix is equal access and equal treatment, not special treatment: the same pathways in, the same standards applied, and facilities that assume a mixed workforce as a baseline.

It is worth noting that this is a contested method rather than a contested goal. Others in the industry argue that visible targets and reporting are precisely what shifted hiring behaviour in the first place, and that removing them too early stalls the progress that made a capability first conversation possible. Both positions want the same outcome. They disagree on how much scaffolding is still needed to get there.

The census question that landed the night before

The episode was recorded the morning after Census night, Tuesday 11 August 2026, and one question had stayed with both of them.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has asked everyone aged 15 and over about unpaid domestic work since 2006, and the question was unchanged for 2026. It asks whether a person spent time in the past week on housework, cooking, laundry, gardening, home maintenance, shopping, managing household finances, pet care and the travel that goes with all of it. The response bands are none, less than five hours, five to fourteen, fifteen to twenty nine, and thirty hours or more.

Alex’s reaction to filling it out was that the tally was larger than she would have guessed, and that most of it sits on top of a full working week. That is not only a domestic observation. For anyone rostering trades, scheduling site meetings or wondering why an experienced person is starting to look worn down, the hours a workforce carries outside the job are part of the capacity picture. A business that designs no slack into its program is assuming a workforce with none of that load.

Us versus the problem

Bec and Alex work together as customer and supplier, and both described the relationship in the same terms. Pick up the phone for the good news and the bad. Do not let a problem sit while someone works out whose fault it is.

It is not me versus you, it is us versus the problem.  Bec, Adapt Modular

Bec applies the same rule to suppliers and subcontractors across the business, and it is less soft than it sounds. In modular the program is unforgiving, because a module either leaves the factory on the day or it does not. Time spent allocating blame is time the schedule does not have.

The most instructive detail was a specification decision. When Bec briefed her paint requirements, the driver was low VOC coverage, and the reason was not the client or the finish. It was that painters would be working inside a sealed module for extended stretches. Alex confirmed the whole range Adapt uses was selected on that basis.

That is the sort of choice that never appears on a program or in a margin calculation, and it is one of the reasons good trades come back. It is also, in practice, one of the parts of running a building business that decides whether the same crew is available next quarter.

Apprentices, supervisors and the value gap

Az raised the money going into apprenticeships and what it is actually buying. The evidence is fairly settled on where the leakage is. Across the national survey work, the most common reason former apprentices give for withdrawing is an unsupportive manager, supervisor or workplace, ahead of pay.

Bec mentors a young man she first met working a supermarket checkout. She helped him into a job, then into an electrical apprenticeship. He is in his fourth and final year, has been through three employers, and is worried his apprenticeship was never properly registered. Her read on why he needed the support was blunt: he had spent the apprenticeship feeling like the business cared about its other staff and tolerated him.

Whether you are an apprentice, a supervisor or a general manager, everyone has a right to feel valued.  Bec, Adapt Modular

Both guests also raised mental health, and both pointed to the same practical answer, which is that support has to be visible before someone needs it rather than offered after. MATES in Construction and TIACS both operate in the sector and both publish numbers that can go straight into a site shed, an induction pack or an email signature.

Where the modular demand is actually coming from

Adapt is busier than it has been. The interesting part is where the work is.

Bec described the strongest inquiry coming from a corridor roughly an hour inland from the coast. Small towns where builders will not travel, trades will not go, and bringing a crew in for the duration blows out both the budget and the program. That is the gap a factory built home closes, because the cost of getting people to site stops being a line in the estimate.

Beyond that, she is seeing more developer interest in multiple dwelling work, including inquiries in flood zones, and Adapt recently won a QBuild contract for a property inland from Mackay with about 50 kilometres of dirt road and roughly twenty cattle grids between the highway and the site. On a recent job, the turnaround from a module leaving the factory to being installed on site was about five hours.

QBuild’s question during that process is the one worth noting. They asked about longevity, and specifically whether the building could be relocated rather than demolished if the need moved. It can be split and shipped. That is an argument for volumetric modular that has nothing to do with build speed, and it is showing up in procurement conversations.

The design conversation has moved as well. Bec is deliberately working away from the single rectangular box that shaped the sector’s reputation, using pitched roofs, alfresco areas, three module mid century layouts, and looking at a second storey option. Alex is separately watching the barndominium trend on the Sunshine Coast, with builders including Longhorn Barndominiums and Jacoby Construction releasing product, and made the practical observation that the darker roof colours the style favours will put real pressure on roof insulation in a Queensland climate.

For all of that, modular still accounts for around five per cent of Australian construction activity. Bec expects the split to keep moving toward a more even share over time while stopping short of predicting modular becomes the dominant methodology. Her view is that it wins decisively in remote, rural and regional work, where the alternative is often nothing being built at all.

Does the Queensland energy efficiency change mean modular homes only need five stars?

Bec raised a change to the energy efficiency rules for elevated homes. It is worth setting out precisely, because it is easy to hear as a modular concession and it is not one.

Version 1.16 of Queensland Development Code Mandatory Part 4.1, Sustainable buildings, commenced on 14 August 2026, replacing the version that had applied since 1 May 2024. It adds thermal performance pathways for two categories of class 1 building.

A building with raised floor construction, defined as a form where at least 50 per cent of the total floor area sits over unenclosed space, complies at a 6 star NatHERS rating. It can also comply at 5.5 stars with a half star nominal credit, or at 5 stars with a one star nominal credit.

Those nominal credits attach to a covered outdoor living area. Half a star where the area has an impervious roof with a total R value of at least 1.5 for downward heat flow. A full star where that roof is combined with at least one permanently installed ceiling fan with a speed controller serving the area.

Separately, a small home, defined as a detached class 1 building of 50 square metres or less, complies at 5 stars, with the same credit structure stepping the modelled rating down to 4.5 or 4 stars.

Two caveats do real work here. On both pathways the separate heating and cooling load limits no longer apply, but the total thermal energy load limit still does. And neither pathway touches the whole of home energy usage requirement, which has to be demonstrated separately in every case.

This is a Queensland variation delivered through the Queensland Development Code. The 7 star requirement under NCC 2022 is unchanged everywhere else. And the raised floor pathway is not tied to construction method. It applies to any class 1 building meeting the definition, which includes a traditional Queenslander as readily as an elevated module.

What this actually costs

Strip the conversation back and the arithmetic is uncomfortable in a useful way.

The two most expensive problems raised across the hour were losing an apprentice partway through and losing a trade who decides your jobs are not worth the trouble. Both carry real replacement cost, real program risk and real reputational drag.

The interventions that address them were a sanitary bin, a signed door, a phone call made before a problem hardened, and a paint specification chosen with the person applying it in mind. None of those need a budget line. All of them are decisions a builder can make on a Tuesday without asking anyone’s permission.

That is the useful part of this conversation. It is not a case for the industry being fixed by policy. It is a reminder that a meaningful share of the retention problem sits inside the fence line, where builders already have the authority to act.

Frequently asked questions

Listen to the full episode of The Good Builder Podcast for the complete conversation with Bec from Adapt Modular and Alex Harris from Wattyl.

This article is general information only and does not take account of your particular circumstances. Regulatory requirements change and vary between states and territories. Confirm current obligations with the relevant regulator or a qualified professional before acting.

Author: TGB Editorial