SCHEDULING WORKERS EFFICIENTLY
Workforce intelligence solutions like Bridgit Bench help contractors surface key information when scheduling team members. With so many moving parts, keeping track of resources moving from one project to the next can be incredibly challenging. Workforce intelligence helps streamline the scheduling process by answering three very important questions:
- Who on your team is available or under-allocated (and costing you money)?
- Which projects currently need more people?
- How will your project opportunities impact your workforce strategy?
With this information, contractors can quickly create optimized workforce schedules and ensure they aren’t leaving any ‘money on the bench’.
HUMAN CAPITAL PLANNING
Human capital planning identifies organizational goals and whether or not the current pool of resources can meet them. From there, strategies can be developed to ensure the requirements are met to fulfill those goals.
Like scheduling workers, effective human capital planning relies on accurate data and will require consolidating the project, workforce, and pursuit of data to create informed strategies.
Workforce intelligence solutions help to surface this information and ensure all data is accurate and up-to-date. It also helps to identify resource shortcomings or skilled labor gaps that will prevent you from meeting organizational goals. With this information, contractors can improve recruitment strategies, better cultivate talent aligning with your company’s vision, and budget for potential human capital issues. For more information about the human capital planning process, read this blog.
SCENARIO PLANNING
Understanding how project opportunities or pursuits impact your project and workforce strategies is critical to organizational success. Scenario planning with accurate data can help to inform which project opportunities should be pursued more aggressively and, equally importantly, which projects will be at risk because the resource demands don’t align with your team’s availability.
Workforce intelligence tools like Bridgit Bench provide forecasting dashboards, utilization insights, and strategic workforce planning reports. With these reports and dashboards, contractors can run scenarios to include specific project pursuits to understand better how it will impact their strategy at both the project and company levels.
MAINTAINING CONSISTENCY ACROSS YOUR COMPANY’S DATABASE
Construction projects have a lot of moving parts. The software can often be disconnected or lack integration tools. In this case, contractors will likely have different versions of important documents in different systems. This also increases the likelihood of having different data from one system to the next. This can lead to critical errors and projects being put at risk.
Fully integrated workforce intelligence solutions allow for a seamless flow of clean data between software and help make data-driven decisions. Bridgit Bench, the leading workforce intelligence solution for contractors, has taken integrated workflows in stride and has built several integrations with some of the leading systems being used in construction.
REDUCING CORPORATE SILOS
The people are the pulse of every construction company. As such, the data surrounding your workforce is foundational for nearly every department within the organization. When departments are siloed off, it can negatively impact your team’s engagement and cohesion. On top of that, when departmental data is kept private, it can damage the working relationship between teams and impact the team’s trust in the firm’s leadership.
Workforce intelligence isn’t just about providing data to help drive decision-making. Workforce intelligence helps to improve the visibility of workforce data and strategies. When it comes to workforce data specifically, by removing corporate silos, you’re ensuring your sales, marketing, human resources, and estimating teams have the information they need to inform their work.
Workforce intelligence solutions like Bridgit Bench allow you to control corporate transparency and create custom permissions for the larger team. These permission groups help provide access to critical workforce information without risking any unwanted changes or team members seeing information they shouldn’t.
MAKING DATA MORE DIGESTIBLE
Two of the key reasons that data will go unused in the construction industry are:
- There’s just too much of it to analyze efficiently
- It’s difficult to consolidate and communicate analysis effectively
Workforce intelligence was developed to help cut through the noise of multiple spreadsheet systems filled with data. Making construction operations more effective means consolidating relevant data and displaying the results of analysis in clear, concise reports and dashboards. Operations teams can then leverage this information to create an efficient and effective workforce strategy for their entire project pipeline.
FORECASTING YOUR WORKFORCE NEEDS
Accurately forecasting workforce needs into the coming months and years can be extremely difficult when dealing with spreadsheets or basic scheduling applications. As construction becomes fluid and dates shift, future projects are inevitably impacted.
Updating forecasted project demand and available team members manually can be time-consuming and increasingly difficult as project dates are shifted. One of the key benefits of workforce intelligence solutions is having project and workforce data updated throughout the tool whenever a change is made. By keeping all data current and reflected accurately in forecasting reports, contractors are better equipped to understand when their team is spread too thin and are at risk of burning out.
On the other hand, accurate forecasting data and insight into workforce utilization rates also help identify under-allocated team members and potentially cost you money.
REDUCING WORKFORCE PINCH POINTS
Pinch points can often have a few different definitions. In this case, we aren’t referring to areas in machinery where workers can get caught and potentially injured.
Regarding workforce management, a pinch point is where your project demand will start exceeding the available supply of workers or vice versa. Having an understanding of where these pinch points are helps to better prepare by either sourcing more work, or hiring more team members.
Workforce intelligence solutions like Bridgit Bench have strategic workforce planning reports that analyze current and upcoming project roles and compare them against your current team. This information is then reflected in a report in the dashboard to help easily identify and reduce potential pinch points.
Best practices for workforce intelligence
CHOOSE YOUR SOFTWARE WISELY
Choosing the right software can be tricky, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It’s important to distinguish between applications and features that make your processes more efficient and those that make your processes more effective. The best-case scenario is finding a software solution that can do both.
Don’t hesitate to ask about data analysis and how that is represented in potential solutions. Faster doesn’t always mean better. You want to find a solution to streamline workflows and help you make informed decisions regarding your workforce. Some criteria to keep in mind when evaluating workforce intelligence software include:
- Forecasting reports
- Workforce utilization rates
- Pursuit tracking
- Scenario running
- Skills/experience and project history
Most importantly, how is all of that information displayed? Could you send a report to your HR team and have them easily digest the information to create a recruitment strategy?
DON’T FORGET THE HUMAN (NON-AI) ELEMENTS OF WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT
Using artificial intelligence in the workforce planning process can certainly help create an optimal strategy, but there are still human elements of workforce management. After all, at the end of the day, it will still be a person making the final decision and real people impacted.
It’s important to consider this when creating a workforce strategy. Have any of your team members expressed an interest in experiential learning on a new project? Does your optimal workforce strategy consider the travel time and distance for your team members? Having your A-team on a priority project may seem like the perfect fit, but you may find your team disengaged with the work if they all need to drive 3 hours to get to the job.
Considering the human element of workforce management can help keep your team informed and engaged and help improve retention rates. Which is critical given the ongoing labor shortage in the industry.
USE CLOUD-BASED TOOLS
Cloud-based solutions should almost be the top priority when evaluating potential solutions. It’s increasingly important for construction software to speak the same language as the existing tech stack. Cloud-based tools are more likely to be fully integrated and allow for a seamless flow of information.
Cloud-based tools also help ensure everyone looks at the most up-to-date information regarding their projects and respective allocations. When a construction date gets shifted, everyone has instant visibility of what that means for the rest of the project pipeline.
