Meetings have taken the working world in North America by storm. In fact, there are roughly 25 million meetings per day in the US alone. It’s estimated that more than $37 billion dollars are spent on unproductive meetings each year.

The construction industry stands alone in this category and averages significantly less meetings than most other industries. That means the meetings you do have need to hold significant value as there likely won’t be a follow-up. With manpower meetings only happening bi-weekly or once a month, it’s important that these hours are spent being as productive as possible.

The most common way meetings turn unproductive is multitasking – 92% of meeting attendees confess to multitasking during meetings, 41% of them admitting to doing it “all the time.” 49% of attendees admitted to doing other, unrelated tasks. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but multi-tasking is a myth. People have become very skilled at switching between tasks quickly, but no person is capable of doing multiple tasks at the same time. That means half of your teams aren’t paying attention because they are incapable of doing so while working on other things.

Being able to move through your meeting agendas quickly and seamlessly helps to keep everyone engaged and ensures costly meeting time isn’t being wasted. Construction workforce planning meetings have always been a struggle since, for the most part, attendees have to wait for information to be updated in spreadsheets or on whiteboards before moving on.

Bridgit Bench was built with construction manpower planning in mind – first we reduced the amount of time you spend in preparation of your meetings by streamlining data collection and management. Our goal is simple – to improve your meetings by creating a powerful Project Gantt, fit to house your workforce planning meetings from beginning to end. Some of our users have been able to cut their meeting times in half with Bridgit Bench, and we’re only making it more powerful.

After the launch of Bridgit Bench, the Project Gantt quickly became where many of our users expressed they’d like to spend more time during their workforce meetings. It’s a clear way to communicate and collaborate on project assignments while visualizing where each project is in its lifecycle.

The Bridgit team has created features to complement the Project Gantt and help streamline your construction workforce planning meetings. Less time spent navigating Bridgit Bench allows you to keep a high level of focus in your meetings.

There’s a lot to cover here, so let’s get right to it.

Manage all project roles and assignments

You can manage individual project roles and allocations directly from the expanded project gantt, allowing you to add, edit, and delete all project roles. You are also able to manage the person assigned to the role while staying fixed on the Project Gantt for your entire meeting, keeping it productive and cost-efficient.

Project panel

When you click on a project bar in the Project Gantt, a project panel will appear on the right of your screen. This panel will house all of your project details and target project and project phase dates. You are also able to make edits to details and shift project dates.

Filters

Filters can be an incredibly effective way to segment your projects during workforce planning meetings. You can apply filters to any project field directly from the Project Gantt, or apply them in the Project List view to have them carry over to the gantt so you can isolate projects to get through meetings more efficiently.

For step-by-step guides to Bridgit Bench and it’s features, visit our support page here.

Search

Looking for a specific project? The search bar atop your gantt view allows you to search all of your projects by name so you can find key projects quickly.

Sort

Sort your projects by name, start or end dates, or sort your Project List view by any project field to have it carry over to the Project Gantt.

Drag and drop dates

Need to extend a project or move an upcoming project up? Simply drag and drop the project bar within the Project Gantt to change project dates and all project roles, allocations, and phase dates along within it. It’s almost fun to delay a project with this feature.

“Game planning and coordination on the front end really win or lose a project. Before Bridgit Bench, everyone would leave personnel meetings exhausted… Now, everyone is more engaged.”
— David Diltz, Compass Construction

Bridgit agrees – that’s why we built a powerful Project Gantt that can house your workforce planning meetings from start to finish. Meetings have been getting a bad rap lately, but properly executed, efficient meetings will always yield positive results because they are the best time to collaborate as a team and create a workforce plan that will drive your company forward.

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