There’s a high cost associated with inefficient workforce management. Bottlenecks can cause costly delays, project overruns, and reduce your overall profitability. Traditional tools like spreadsheets and manual processes may be letting you down – they may be creating bottlenecks instead of efficiencies.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at the five steps to maximize construction workforce productivity.

Workforce Productivity Challenges in the Construction Industry

The construction industry is facing unique challenges and pressures. According to an ABC News report, the industry is experiencing a labor shortage and anticipating a need for at least 500,000 additional workers to meet project deadlines.

There’s also a generational transition, where the percentage of construction workers over 55 has almost doubled in recent years. This labor shortage represents a monumental challenge as firms and educators struggle to attract more young talent into the construction industry. They still face the challenges of meeting project deadlines, avoiding employee burnout, and remaining profitable.

At the same time, there’s a generational shift away from older technologies and processes, such as using spreadsheets and manual processes that have historically created bottlenecks. Software offers an opportunity to turn this challenge into an opportunity.

It’s evident that workers need to acquire new skills in areas like analytics, construction project management software, and even AI, all of which can impact the profitability and effectiveness of workforce productivity.

5 Steps to Maximize Construction Workforce Productivity

This begs the question: how are we going to meet these productivity challenges in the construction industry? Well, modern tools like construction project management software and workforce productivity software provide us with a new toolset to turn these challenges into opportunities. We’re going to outline five steps to maximize your construction workforce productivity.

1. Centralize Your Workforce Data
2. Establish Clear Resource Allocation Protocols
3. Implement Forward-Looking Planning Systems
4. Build Communication Workflows
5. Monitor and Optimize Performance

Step 1: Centralize Your Workforce Data

One of the main challenges of managing your workforce productivity is time-consuming data maintenance. Spreadsheets managed by a single person represent a point of failure. If that person is sick, if the spreadsheet is hard for others to understand, or if everyone is reviewing the spreadsheet trying to figure out what it all means, this can create a huge problem.

The challenge with spreadsheets is that they’re often limited in their ability to triangulate data from other data points. For instance, if you’re maintaining a sheet per project and trying to manage where your contractors are spending time, you may end up with blind spots.

The first step to maximizing construction workforce productivity is centralizing your workforce data. Moving your workforce information into a single accessible platform provides everybody with the data they need to make decisions. It provides an essential repository to access this information. So it’s no longer the job of a single person to manage a spreadsheet, but rather the responsibility of the organization.

A centralized platform allows you to:

• Document information like staff certifications and specializations
• Map out team member locations and project sites
• Create a standard system for tracking availability

Companies like Ryan Companies, which manage 14 offices and 1,500 employees, use a centralized solution to help them manage projects across 38 states efficiently.

Implementation Process

The process of centralizing your workforce data looks like this:

1. Start by consolidating employee data, certifications, roles, and experience levels
2. Import historical data to establish baselines for staffing patterns
3. Set up customized fields to track company-specific requirements

Software like Bridgit allows you to do forecasting and run analysis on this type of information.

Step 2: Establish Clear Resource Allocation Protocols

A common challenge in the construction industry is suboptimal staffing decisions and imbalanced workload distribution. These pain points can cause inefficiencies in your workforce productivity. As an example, every project requires a certain order of operations for various contractors to come in. If you’re waiting on a specific trade, it can cause project delays, even though you have the rest of your staff waiting there to be productive.

Being able to organize your staff across larger scale projects or if you’re operating in multiple different locations can be a real challenge. Spreadsheets often fail to represent these types of staffing decisions, as they are isolated data points. As we did in step one, having a centralized system allows us to see everything under one clear roof.

Establishing clear resource allocation means:

• Setting up a standardized process for assigning team members to projects
• Ensuring visibility into current and upcoming project needs
• Including forecasting elements to anticipate when specific contractors or trades will be needed on site
• Defining clear roles, responsibilities, and timelines for resource management

Implementation Process

For implementation, you want to focus on creating standardized criteria for project staffing requirements. Having templates or having a standard way to determine what resources are needed for each project type helps ensure consistency and efficiency in your resource allocation process.

Step 3: Implement Forward-Looking Planning Systems

A common challenge for maximizing construction workforce productivity is a lack of accurate forecasting data. This can cause a number of issues, such as understaffing during peak times, overstaffing one job site at the detriment to another site, or just general inefficiencies of not having your contractors and trades in the right place at the right time.

For this step, you want to:

• Create 30, 60, 90-day work forecasts
• Start tracking project pursuits separately from active projects
• Map out resource requirements for potential future work
• Collate between all different sites to ensure proper staff allocation

Having intelligence in your system allows you to manage these components effectively. Forecasting can help offset some of the risks of complex projects, especially if you’re experiencing labor shortages in your workforce and need to make sure that you utilize every contractor and trade accordingly. It can also help identify hiring needs based on project pipelines.

Sellen Construction, for example, helped transform their forecasting process from hours of spreadsheet work to having quick, accurate predictions nearly in real time.

Implementation Process

1. Set up regular forecasting reviews
2. Integrate pursuit tracking with current project loads
3. Create scenarios for different project win rates

Step 4: Build Communication Workflows

Workforce productivity is often a challenge of communication. Communicating assignments and providing real-time data for effective collaboration is a real hurdle in the world of construction. Making sure that people have the correct assignment at the correct time can be a game changer for running efficient, profitable projects.

Building communication workflows is about not just automation, but also manual processes. By having that centralized repository of workforce information, you also gain access to a communication hub. Setting up automated assignment notifications can help keep people in the loop without requiring you to manually email or call someone up, as well as creating standardized protocols for requesting resources, making sure that people know how to request resources so that they get what they need as part of a larger project pipeline.

Review meetings are a key component of this – establishing regular workforce planning review meetings is critical. This is one of the big benefits of moving away from spreadsheets and to a centralized repository or system. Where many stakeholder review meetings end up devolving into data entry sessions or lunch-and-learns about how a spreadsheet was set up, these meetings can be much more productive, focusing on the task at hand: assigning workforce and balancing resources across multiple projects.

For example, The Boldt Company’s meetings evolved from data entry sessions to strategic planning discussions after implementing proper communication workflows with Bridgit.

Implementation Process

• Establish standard notification protocols for assignments
• Create regular check-in points for resource updates
• Set up clear escalation paths for resource conflicts

Step 5: Monitor and Optimize Performance

One of the challenges around workforce productivity is limited access to historical data for planning or uncertainty in the financial impacts. One of the big drawbacks of spreadsheets or manual processes is that the data often gets lost in the ether, is done a little bit by gut feel, and running robust analyses can prove to be quite challenging when cobbling together dozens or even hundreds of different spreadsheets.

A centralized system provides a command and control structure for your workforce analytics and productivity metrics, which can be critical for helping to monitor and optimize your performance.

At this stage, you will want to track key utilization metrics. You can do so in real time as well as over time to see how workforce efficiency improves. Having those manual review processes where you look at workforce distribution and evaluating its effectiveness is another key point in this process. You can even start taking a look at analyzing commute times and geographical efficiencies to see what the best path is for workforce utilization. This will allow you to do things like adjusting resource allocation based on performance.

For example, Cauldwell Wingate uses this approach to maintain optimal roster sizes and to justify labor costs across their projects.

Remember, monitoring and optimization is a work in progress. You want to make sure that this is continually occurring as you build out your projects and as you collect better and more robust data.

Implementation Process

1. Set up regular performance review cycles
2. Track key metrics:
   • Utilization rates
   • Project satisfaction
   • Resource efficiency
3. Create feedback loops for continuous improvement

Transform Your Construction Workforce Planning Today

Maximizing your construction workforce productivity is non-negotiable. With the challenges facing the construction industry such as an aging workforce and the challenges of recruiting young talent to the industry, construction firms have no choice but to look to new and novel ways to improve productivity. The move away from spreadsheets to centralized workforce planning solutions is about efficiency, but it can also help to transform the way you operate.

As noted by GE Johnson Construction Company: “When we walk out of the workforce planning meeting with Bridgit Bench, everyone is clear on what is happening. The information gets put into Bridgit Bench – it’s the gospel – and we act on it that day.”

Proactive workforce planning will directly impact your bottom line through:

• Reduced project delays
• Balanced workloads
• Optimized resource allocation

The future of construction workforce productivity lies in data-driven decision making. A huge component of this is having the data in a centralized system and then having that system work with you to complete workforce forecasting and track efficiency metrics. Workforce planning tools like Bridgit are revolutionizing the way that construction firms approach workforce productivity.