Labor shortages hit the construction industry hard in 2024. Projects keep coming, but finding and keeping skilled workers remains a persistent challenge. Smart contractors are turning to digital tools – not to replace workers, but to maximize the potential of their existing teams.

Traditional growth models fail when faced with budget constraints and talent scarcity. Manual spreadsheets create bottlenecks, and relying on single team members to manage complex data puts projects at risk. Growing companies need smarter ways to handle multiple job sites and increasingly complex projects.

Technology offers a path forward. Digital workforce solutions help companies do more with their current teams, cutting planning time while boosting on-site efficiency. Let’s explore five proven ways to grow your contracting business by optimizing your existing workforce.

1. Streamline Project Communication

Nothing kills productivity and scalability like fragmented communications. When relying on manual processes like spreadsheets or having single-person dependencies, communication often becomes the first casualty. To scale without hiring more people, there needs to be a clear, centralized communication protocol that ensures you’re working with your entire team as efficiently and effectively as possible.

This means ensuring everyone knows where they need to be and when, scheduling your workforce accordingly, and keeping all team members aligned. One of the first casualties of fragmented communication is stakeholder meetings. Too often, these meetings devolve into data entry sessions instead of focusing on strategic and proactive workforce management steps.

The solution starts with designating a single source of truth for all your project staffing communications to eliminate confusion across teams. This includes creating standardized communication protocols for project assignments and changes, ensuring everyone knows exactly how they’ll be informed of changes and how to check their current status.

Implementing automated assignment alerts and broadcasts for bulk updates is crucial. These tools keep people informed not just of their own responsibilities, but also of what others are doing, fostering greater team efficiency. The focus of regular workforce planning meetings should shift from data entry and spreadsheet review to strategy, addressing optimizations, and forecasting potential challenges.

Finally, deploying mobile-friendly communication tools ensures real-time updates can be accessed from any location or project site, keeping your entire team connected and informed regardless of where they’re working.

2. Master Workload Distribution

The hidden costs of unbalanced workloads in construction may not show up directly on your balance sheet, but their impact is significant. When staff sits idle waiting for contractors to finish dependencies, or when one project is overstaffed while others lack personnel, it leads to costly project overruns and inefficiencies. The key to scaling without hiring more people lies in creating sustainable capacity to handle project workloads without burning out your team or understaffing projects.

This is where having a centralized workforce planning system becomes essential. It helps establish standardized processes for evaluating team member utilization rates and provides a clear view of where contractors are and where they’re supposed to be. With this visibility, you can identify potential points of failure in your workforce planning, develop backup plans, and communicate these proactively rather than reactively.

Visualizations play a crucial role in keeping stakeholders and individuals aligned with the project plan. For example, using Gantt charts to visualize workloads across all team members helps ensure work is evenly distributed and aligns with your project schedule. Taking a data-driven approach to tracking utilization rates by role and project type not only helps you better staff and distribute workload for current projects but also feeds into predictive analytics for future projects.

Developing clear protocols for resource sharing between offices and regions is equally important. Regular workforce planning meetings become integral to this process, allowing you to understand the complete picture at a glance and develop effective communication strategies. This comprehensive approach to workload distribution ensures that your existing workforce can operate at maximum efficiency without overextension.

3. Leverage Real-Time Resource Tracking

Spreadsheets have served their purpose and remain useful in many contexts, but when it comes to workforce planning, they’ve become obsolete. One of the primary challenges with spreadsheet-based planning is that it creates a critical dependency on the individual who maintains it – they become the sole expert in the setup and data management. Moreover, the data remains static within the spreadsheet, with updates failing to trigger any real-time changes or automation.

To scale your contracting business without additional hires, implementing a workforce planning tool that enables real-time visibility and resource tracking is essential. Modern workforce planning software allows you to set up customized dashboards for different stakeholders, providing tailored data views for operations, leadership, and project managers. This system delivers real-time visibility into how project pursuits impact resource availability, while enabling a data-driven approach to establishing and consistently tracking KPIs for resource utilization.

With a centralized system, you can create automated reporting to monitor resource allocation across all projects. Clear visibility into resource availability windows allows you to intelligently assign your workforce to projects, ensuring optimal project assignments and minimal downtime.

An often overlooked but critical component is the automated tracking of certification expirations and renewals. Ensuring compliance and safety training requirements are met becomes much more manageable, especially when preparing for upcoming inspections. This proactive approach to certification management helps prevent last-minute scrambles and potential compliance issues that could delay projects or create safety risks.

4. Implement Strategic Forecasting

When it comes to workforce planning, being stuck in a reactive cycle limits your growth potential and ability to scale. Constantly arising unexpected conditions can wreak havoc on your well-laid plans. That’s why having a data-driven forecasting system is an essential piece of the puzzle when trying to scale your contracting business.

This approach has multiple angles. First, there’s the data collection aspect. Breaking free from spreadsheets and moving your data into a system that tracks utilization metrics and other operational KPIs allows you to build a historical dataset for analyzing trends and forecasting future needs. To scale your business without needing to hire more people, having this centralized workforce planning system in place is essential.

The system enables you to create standardized templates for project resource forecasting, so when a new project emerges, you have a ready-to-use template that covers all bases. You can then use your stakeholder meetings to fine-tune the details. It also allows you to implement scenario planning tools for different project possibilities. This proactive, data-augmented approach helps establish leading indicators to anticipate resource demands well ahead of events that would otherwise require reactive responses.

In construction, there will invariably be variables you don’t control that pop up unexpectedly. The key is to control the variables you do know and have a plan in place for unexpected situations. The power of workforce planning extends beyond ensuring your job sites are properly staffed with contractors. It also enables integration between your sales pipeline and resources to create accurate forecasting.

This systematic approach helps you handle different forecasting variations and transforms your stakeholder meetings from reactive response sessions into proactive planning opportunities. By implementing strategic forecasting, you create a foundation for sustainable growth without constantly expanding your workforce.

5. Develop Scalable Training Systems

Training is an essential component of keeping your staff up to date with certifications and modern methodologies. Traditional training can create a bottleneck where you’re responding to situations reactively, pulling people off job sites to complete essential training before it expires. In order to scale your contracting business without hiring more people, you need to create a system that grows with your team and anticipates when training is essential.

To optimize timing and reduce downtime on sites, a centralized workforce planning solution enables you to create role-specific skill matrices for different positions, allowing you to tailor and personalize training for different contractors. Having a system for tracking digital certifications allows you to set up automated renewal reminders well ahead of time so you can plan accordingly.

Pulling people off a job site to complete safety training that’s about to expire can disrupt your schedule and increase costs. Handling this process in an automated way ensures you’re meeting compliance requirements while enabling proactive scheduling of training blocks. When you do need to hire more people or replace a role, having standardized onboarding processes helps streamline their integration into your business and allows you to quickly bring people up to speed so they can be effective on the job site.

Overall, you want to maintain a data-driven strategy when it comes to your training by developing clear metrics to measure training effectiveness and tracking certifications and expiry dates. This proactive approach to training management ensures that your workforce remains compliant and capable while minimizing disruptions to your projects.

Your Path to Sustainable Growth

In today’s construction industry, we’re constantly challenged to do more with less, while facing ongoing hurdles in hiring and onboarding the right personnel. The path to sustainable, scalable growth lies in leveraging workforce planning solutions that help you move from a reactive position to a proactive mindset.

Traditional methods of project management and workforce planning, such as manual processes and spreadsheets, often fall short when we need to communicate effectively and manage multiple projects across different locations. Even something as fundamental as ensuring your workforce complies with local safety regulations can become a significant hurdle to delivering projects on time.

Having a data-driven approach allows you to leverage modern tools like resource forecasting to ensure your projects are staffed with the right people at the right time. Bridgit, as a leader in workforce planning software, provides a centralized system that creates a single source of truth for workforce planning. This allows you to transform your stakeholder meetings into strategic, proactive sessions where you can drive efficiencies and operational effectiveness.