Construction professionals lose 14 hours every week to inefficiencies like searching for project data, resolving conflicts, and chasing down information that should have been shared proactively. Across the U.S. construction industry, that adds up to over $177 billion in excess costs annually.
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The technical skills that make someone a good builder don’t automatically make them a good communicator. And on a construction site where superintendents, subcontractors, project engineers, and office staff all need to stay aligned, communication gaps show up fast. A missed update becomes a scheduling conflict. An unclear scope change becomes rework. A question that doesn’t reach the right person becomes a delay.
60% of general contractors report coordination and communication problems between teams. The challenge isn’t that people don’t want to communicate. It’s that the volume of information, the number of stakeholders, and the pace of changes make it hard to keep everyone on the same page.
These six practices won’t solve every communication problem on your projects. But they address the patterns that cause the most friction.
Establish a clear chain of communication
As a project manager, you can’t be the single point of contact for every question. You have too many competing priorities, and your time is better spent on problems that actually require your judgment.
A clear chain of communication helps team members know who to go to for what. When a site crew member needs clarification on a task, they go to the superintendent or project engineer, not directly to you. When a subcontractor has a scheduling conflict, there’s a defined path for escalation.
This isn’t about creating bureaucracy. It’s about making sure questions reach someone who can actually answer them quickly, rather than bouncing around until they land in your inbox three days later.
Document the chain for each project. Make it visible during kickoff meetings and post it where people can reference it. When someone asks you a question that should have gone to someone else, redirect them once and remind them of the structure. After a few weeks, the pattern sticks.
The goal is that you hear about problems that need your attention, not every problem. Your superintendent should be able to resolve site-level issues without waiting for you to check your phone between meetings. Your project engineer should be empowered to answer technical questions without routing everything through you first.
A clear chain also helps when you’re not available. If you’re stuck in an owner meeting for two hours, work doesn’t stop. People know who else can make decisions in your absence, and small issues get handled before they become schedule impacts.
Choose communication channels that actually work on site
Email works fine for office staff. It doesn’t work for someone standing on a scaffold with concrete dust on their hands.
Think about who needs to receive information and what they’ll be doing when it arrives. Field crews need something they can check quickly on a phone. Office staff can handle longer-form updates. Owners and stakeholders may need formal documentation.
Most projects benefit from separating channels by purpose:
- Real-time coordination: Group chat or radio for immediate site issues
- Daily updates: Short-form app or text for shift handoffs and progress notes
- Documentation: Email or project management software for RFIs, submittals, and formal records
- Decisions: Scheduled calls or in-person meetings for anything requiring discussion
The worst outcome is critical information getting lost in a channel nobody checks. If your safety updates go out via email but half your crew never opens email, you don’t have a communication system. You have a documentation trail that nobody reads.
Consistency matters as much as the channel itself. If you switch between texting and email randomly, people miss things. If urgent updates sometimes go in the group chat and sometimes go through the super, people stop trusting any single source. Pick a channel for each type of communication and stick to it.
Ask your field teams what actually works for them. The answer might surprise you. The app you assumed everyone uses might be sitting unopened on their phones while they coordinate through a group text you didn’t know existed.
Make communication two-way
Information flows down easily. Foremen tell crews what to do. PMs tell supers what’s coming. That part works.
The harder part is information flowing up. A crew member notices something off about the soil conditions. An apprentice spots a discrepancy between the drawings and what’s being built. A sub realizes their schedule assumption was wrong three days ago but hasn’t mentioned it.
The information exists. The question is whether it reaches someone who can act on it.
Two-way communication requires more than an open-door policy. It requires actively asking questions and making it safe to surface problems early. “What are you seeing that I’m not?” is a better question than “Any issues?” The first invites observation. The second invites “no.”
Weekly field walks where you ask questions and listen (rather than inspect and direct) build the habit. When someone does surface a problem early, thank them publicly. When problems get hidden until they’re emergencies, that’s a sign your culture is punishing honesty.
Toolbox talks and safety meetings can serve double duty here. They’re already a regular touchpoint. Adding a few minutes for open questions or observations turns a one-way briefing into a conversation. The crew member who mentions an awkward work sequence during a toolbox talk saves you from discovering it when productivity drops.
26% of construction rework comes from miscommunication, costing U.S. contractors roughly $17 billion annually. Most of that isn’t because people didn’t know something. It’s because someone knew and didn’t say anything, or said something that didn’t reach the right person.
Listen before you respond
When someone brings you a problem, the instinct is to solve it. Jump to a solution. Give direction. Move on.
That works when the problem is clear. It backfires when the real issue is different from the one being presented.
A superintendent tells you a subcontractor is behind schedule. Your instinct is to call the sub and push them. But if you listen for another minute, you might learn the sub is waiting on materials that were supposed to arrive last week, which traces back to an RFI that’s been sitting unanswered. The schedule problem isn’t effort. It’s a bottleneck upstream.
Listening means asking follow-up questions before proposing solutions. “What’s causing that?” and “How long has this been going on?” reveal context that changes the response. “What have you already tried?” respects the fact that your field team has probably already attempted obvious fixes before escalating to you.
It also means reading body language and tone. If someone says “it’s fine” but their face says otherwise, that’s information. People on construction sites don’t always feel comfortable pushing back on project managers directly. Your job is to create space for the real answer to come out.
The five-minute conversation you have now prevents the hour-long crisis management session next week. Most experienced PMs can point to a time when they wish they’d asked one more question before acting on incomplete information.
Keep communication clear and direct
Construction sites are noisy, busy, and full of people who have ten things on their mind. Your message competes with all of that.
Clear communication means:
- Specific rather than vague: “Pour starts at 6am Tuesday” not “pour is early next week”
- One topic per message: Mixing three updates in one email means two of them get missed
- Action-oriented: Who needs to do what, by when
- Confirmed receipt: For anything critical, verify it landed
The curse of expertise is assuming others know what you know. You’ve been thinking about the schedule change for three days. For the person receiving your message, it’s brand new information. Give context. State the change. Explain what it means for them specifically.
Written communication loses tone. Something that sounds fine in your head can read as curt or demanding in a text message. When stakes are high or emotions might be involved, pick up the phone or walk over. Two minutes of conversation prevents two days of misunderstanding.
Turn meetings into decisions, not updates
The weekly staffing meeting that runs 90 minutes but produces no decisions. The project coordination call where everyone gives updates but nothing gets resolved. These meetings feel productive because people are talking. They’re not productive because nothing changes as a result.
Effective meetings in construction do three things:
- Surface information people didn’t already have
- Discuss tradeoffs that require group input
- End with clear decisions and owners
If everyone already knows the information before the meeting, send a memo. If no decision needs to be made, cancel the meeting. If the meeting ends without clear next steps, it was a conversation, not a meeting.
“With Bridgit Bench, our meetings are less about getting the information into the system and more about strategy,” says Jeremy Moe, Operations Manager at The Boldt Company. “We strategize how to fill vacant roles on a project or where there might be pockets in our business where someone isn’t fully utilized.”
When teams share a centralized view of workforce assignments and availability, meetings shift from data reconciliation to decision-making. The information is already visible. The meeting becomes about what to do with it.
Making communication stick
Communication problems don’t get solved with a single initiative. They get solved by building habits across the team, modeling the behavior you want to see, and fixing the small breakdowns before they become big ones.
Start with one practice from this list. Get it working consistently. Then add another. The goal isn’t perfect communication. It’s communication that’s good enough that problems surface early, decisions get made with the right information, and people spend less time chasing each other down.
The project manager sets the tone. If you respond to every message instantly, your team will expect the same. If you ask good questions before making decisions, your superintendents will start doing the same with their crews. If you admit when you don’t have an answer, others will feel safer doing the same.
Teams with effective communication are 25% more productive. On a construction project with tight margins and fixed deadlines, that difference shows up in schedules that hold, budgets that track, and teams that want to work together again on the next one.
