Built by builders

David Grigor spent twenty-five years in residential construction and ran his own building company. After a worker fell on one of his sites, he went looking for something that would stop a fall happening rather than catch it after it had happened. He could not find a solution he was happy with in NZ, so he started looking at options overseas.  

He started looking — first in New Zealand, and then overseas. In the United Kingdom he found that residential builders had been working from platform decking for years. It was not novel there. It was standard practice across the volume housebuilders, with a training framework and a competency card behind it.

The reason was regulatory. The UK Work at Height Regulations 2005 established a mandatory hierarchy of controls, with an explicit legislative priority for collective protection. Once the rules asked builders to prevent a fall before arresting one, the market found a way to do it.

Impressed with what he saw, he imported a container load of the UK decking systems for use on his own sites.

Being committed to doing things properly, David went back to the UK and completed the FASET platform decking course himself.

What worked in the UK did not transfer directly. New Zealand and Australian houses are built differently, stud heights are different, sites are different, and the climate is different.

So Workdek was redesigned here, engineered here, and is now manufactured here. It has been refined on New Zealand sites ever since — including changes suggested by installers using it, like redesigning the locking pins and rethinking the foot to add rubber bungs to stop slippage. The deck itself was reworked for greater UV protection, reduced in size to make it easier to handle, and strengthened.

Workdek operates in Auckland · Waikato · Taranaki · Wellington · Canterbury through a network of partners, with every other territory available and plans to enter Australia.

Many of New Zealand's leading construction companies have used Workdek on their sites, among them Golden Homes, G.J. Gardner Homes, Stonewood Homes, Signature Homes, Platinum Homes, Naylor Love, Maddren Homes and SIT Carpentry.

Workdek is also a very proud partner of SARNZ and works collaboratively with industry bodies to educate and inform the sector on the opportunity to drive health, safety and productivity improvements in the industry.

The simple argument has not changed since the beginning. Preventing the fall is better than catching it.

See the decks on site our work.

Two directors run the business. One came to it from the tools, the other from commercial leadership.

David Grigor — Founder and Director

Workdek's founder brings over 25 years of experience as a builder and construction business owner, having delivered hundreds of residential projects across New Zealand. He is FASET-trained in the United Kingdom and personally trains every installation partner. He's the heartbeat of Workdek's operations — training new installation partners, educating builders and industry partners, and supporting regional partners to build strong local relationships. He has been known to drive Workdek panels the length of the country to help get an installation completed.

Dave Simmons — Director

Workdek's commercial director brings a background in large-scale leadership across strategy, marketing, and technology. Dave leads the strategic direction of the business and oversees national partnerships.

Together, David and Dave offer the kind of wraparound support that's rare in the trades. They are deeply practical, highly professional, and 100% committed to supporting builders to Build Better.

Workdek is not imported and rebadged. It was engineered here for New Zealand conditions and New Zealand houses, and it is injection moulded in New Zealand.

It is refined on the sites it is used on. When installers find a better way to do something, it goes back into the tooling.

Materials, weights and load ratings how it works.

We are a supplier, but we also take part in the conversation about how this industry manages working at height. Rather than rely on our own claims, we have put the system in front of independent researchers and regulators.

• CHASNZ — research partnership on the ergonomic effects of working from stable internal platforms.
• DSC Consulting — independent quantitative assessment of productivity across five New Zealand projects.
• Materials & Testing Laboratories Ltd — independent destruction testing.
• Submission to the select committee on the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill, March 2026.
• Response to MBIE on international use of working platforms, May 2026.

What the research and testing found why it works.

• Safety platform research paper (April 2024)

  Research paper covering working at height platforms and their use on New Zealand residential sites.

  PDF · 953 KB

• DSC Consulting independent quantitative assessment

  Independent assessment of Workdek across five real New Zealand projects, reported as task duration and man-hours.

  PDF · 247 KB

Working at height is an industry-wide problem, so we sit alongside the organisations shaping the standards and training rather than working around them.

• SARNZ — Scaffolding, Access and Rigging New Zealand.
• FASET training completed in the United Kingdom by our founder.
• Site Safe New Zealand Health & Safety Awards 2026 — finalist, Safety Innovation.
• SafeGuard Awards entry with Golden Homes.

The quickest way to understand the system is to stand on it, so we regularly bring ministers, regulators, industry visitors and students onto live sites to see the deck in use.

• Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Michael Wood — Mt Roskill, Auckland, 2022.
• Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Brooke van Velden — 2024.
• Director-General — 2026.
• Southern Institute of Technology carpentry students — on a live site.