Your Phoenix office is scrambling to staff a new $20 million healthcare project. Meanwhile, your Denver team has two senior project managers with significant healthcare experience who are wrapping up their current assignments and looking for what’s next.
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The $20 million project sits in limbo while Phoenix and Denver wait for their weekly sync-up meeting. By the time everyone connects, Phoenix has already started conversations with external recruiters. Denver’s PMs have been tentatively assigned elsewhere.
This coordination problem is playing out at construction companies across North America. 93% of construction leaders report labor shortages impacting their operations, with 42% citing reduced ability to take on new projects as a direct consequence.
It’s a challenge of scale and market pressure, not just about budget. You need the right processes and technology to support how your company actually works.
The realities of scaling construction workforce planning
Traditional methods of tracking workforce data don’t scale across multiple offices. Spreadsheets that worked perfectly when you had one location and 50 people become unmanageable when you’re coordinating across three states with 200+ team members.
But even when you move past spreadsheets to more sophisticated systems, you often lack the experiential tracking that makes the difference in winning a competitive healthcare bid or landing a repeat client. Knowing someone is “available” doesn’t tell you whether they have the specific market sector experience, client relationships, or delivery method expertise that a project actually needs.
Your regional offices and divisional leaders aren’t operating as independent kingdoms. They’re working toward their own objectives with the information they can access. The problem isn’t bad intentions. Nobody has a bird’s-eye view of capacity across all locations combined with the ability to coordinate effectively.
The clipboard-and-spreadsheet approach doesn’t let you quickly text everyone when a project timeline shifts or keep people synchronized without scheduling yet another meeting. As your projects multiply and locations expand, these constraints become bottlenecks that slow down decisions and eat into your margins.
What high-performing multi-location contractors actually do
The construction companies that manage multi-location teams most effectively aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated org charts. They’ve built systems that let them see their entire workforce clearly, make decisions quickly, and share resources efficiently across locations.
They create a single source of truth
Power Construction expanded into 14 states after acquiring a national design-build firm. Their previous approach (one person handling workforce planning through Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and phone calls) couldn’t scale.
Monthly leadership meetings became exercises in frustration. 80% of the time went to establishing basic facts: who was working where, which projects were active, whether the data was even current.
After implementing a centralized workforce planning platform, Power’s approach transformed into a cross-organizational effort where all leaders work from the same real-time data. “We would not be able to manage all of our work today without [a modern workforce planning platform] in place,” says Matthew Walsh, Senior Operations Technology Manager at Power Construction. The platform became their “source of truth” for construction schedules, locations, and staff data. Marketing, operations, pre-construction, and IT all access the same reliable information.
They track experience, not just availability
MYCON General Contractors faced 500% job growth in some divisions within a single year. Their Excel-based approach quickly became “a massive headache” characterized by outdated data, lack of transparency across locations, and massive time waste.
Switching to a purpose-built workforce planning platform gave them more than better organization. It gave them the ability to track team member experience across past projects.
This experiential data allows MYCON to assemble balanced teams that complement each other’s strengths and avoid redundant hiring by making better use of existing talent. “Bridgit has become the source of truth for anything related to people, location, and assignments,” notes Chris Martin, VP of Technology Services at MYCON.
This approach aligns with broader industry trends. Construction leaders overwhelmingly recognize that collective team experience drives project success, with 73% rating it as “very significant” in creating positive outcomes. When asked what factors contribute most to successful project teams, 59% cite build-type experience as the top consideration, followed closely by industry experience at 53%.
They shift from reactive to proactive
Queensland-based Mosaic Property Group recognized that as their portfolio expanded to over $2 billion AUD in projects, they needed to evolve beyond reactive hiring. By implementing workforce planning software that provided clear visibility into resource allocation, project timelines, and contract statuses, they gained the ability to forecast 12 months ahead.
“Bridgit has given us a level of insight into our workforce planning that we simply didn’t have before,” says Melissa Hockey, People and Culture Manager at Mosaic. “This visibility is now critical for making proactive decisions about resource allocation and future growth.”
The shift meant that significantly more meeting time could be spent planning for future projects rather than scrambling to address immediate staffing gaps.
Four decisions to help you scale workforce planning
As your construction company expands across multiple locations, you’ll need to make four key decisions about how workforce planning actually operates. These aren’t about choosing between rigid centralization or complete autonomy. They’re about building systems that work as you grow.
Who can see what workforce data?
The first decision is about visibility and permissions. Does everyone across all offices see all workforce data, or do you limit visibility to specific regions or divisions?
High-performing multi-location contractors typically lean toward broad visibility with smart permission structures. Operations leaders need to see availability across all locations to identify resource-sharing opportunities. Project teams need to see who’s worked with specific clients or on similar project types. Finance needs accurate labor allocation data for forecasting.
The key is making information accessible without creating information overload. Purpose-built workforce planning platforms allow you to set permissions so that team members see the information relevant to them. Regional managers might see their full division, while project managers focus on their specific teams.
Who decides on assignments?
This is often where multi-location workforce planning gets contentious.
The answer isn’t to have corporate dictate every assignment, nor to let each office operate in complete isolation. Instead, establish clear decision rights: Who makes the call when there’s competition for a senior PM between two projects? Who has authority to pull resources across regional boundaries?
Many successful multi-location contractors use a model where project assignments within a region stay local, but cross-regional resource sharing requires collaborative decision-making with visibility from operations leadership. The platform enables the conversation. Clear protocols determine the outcome.
How do you share resources across locations?
Create a process that makes cross-office staffing easy rather than exceptional. MYCON’s integration between their CRM and workforce planning platform means that opportunities are automatically pushed into the system, giving estimators and pre-construction teams immediate visibility into staffing across all locations.
Power Construction uses mapping features and automatic distance calculations to efficiently staff projects across multiple states, factoring in employee home locations and travel considerations.
When resource sharing is frictionless and data-driven, regional leaders are more willing to collaborate because they can see the business case clearly. When it requires endless email chains and negotiation, everyone defaults to working within their silo.
What data matters beyond availability?
This is where experience tracking becomes transformative. Survey data shows that 59% of construction leaders consider build-type experience the most important factor in assembling successful project teams, followed closely by industry experience (53%) and market-sector experience (50%). Yet many workforce planning systems only track whether someone is available, not whether they’re the right fit.
Track the experience data that drives your business decisions: market sectors, build types, client relationships, delivery methods, architect or engineering firm experience, regional expertise. This is the information that helps you win competitive bids and assemble teams positioned for success.
Using workforce planning software to scale across multiple offices
The companies that successfully manage teams across multiple locations aren’t just implementing better processes. They’re layering human judgment with technology systems that make those processes actually work.
A modern workforce planning platform serves as a central repository for all workforce information, breaking through the spreadsheet chaos and eliminating single points of failure in your knowledge systems. When Power Construction’s leaders were asked to quantify the time saved by their workforce planning platform, “they said it’s unquantifiable at this point.” MYCON reports saving “hundreds of hours a week” across the organization.
But time savings are just the beginning. The real value comes from matching experience to projects in ways that help you win more bids.
Power’s marketing team now relies on experience tracking when putting together proposals, while executive leadership uses forecasting capabilities to communicate strategic plans to the board. MYCON’s experience tracking allows them to assemble balanced teams and avoid redundant hiring.
Perhaps most importantly, the right platform shifts your staff meetings from tactical firefighting to strategic planning. When everyone starts the meeting knowing that all the data in the system is current and accurate, you can spend meeting time on decisions that actually matter: which projects to pursue, how to develop emerging talent, where to invest in new capabilities. You’re not just trying to establish basic facts.
The industry recognizes this shift. 98% of construction leaders intend to invest in workforce planning in the next 12 months, with 99% planning to invest at least $100,000. This isn’t aspirational spending. It’s recognition that modern workforce planning tools have become essential infrastructure for companies operating at scale.
Bridgit is purpose-built to solve these exact challenges for multi-location construction companies. With real-time workforce visibility across all offices, robust experience tracking, powerful forecasting tools, and seamless integrations with your existing tech stack, Bridgit helps you coordinate teams efficiently while maintaining the local autonomy that makes your regional offices successful.
Learn how Bridgit can help you manage teams across multiple locations
