Your time as a construction manager will undoubtedly be busy, with many projects to take on and a lot of people to manage. This means ensuring each of your workers is managing their own time wisely and are staying on-task, to make sure your projects meet their deadlines.
Maybe you’ve noticed recently that productivity has dropped among your ground crew and your project is lagging behind. Here are some ways you can keep track of what projects you’ve got on the go and who’s supposed to be doing what among your staff. Utilising these tips will hopefully help you get back on track with the job and get it completed on-time, while keeping your staff happy, but also making sure they’re working properly.
Collect Data on Where You’re Falling Down
One of the first things you’ll need to do before approaching any of your staff is identify where your problems are. If you notice that your productivity is down, or that your staff is struggling to stay on task, do some digging on why this might be. Using time and attendance software could help you see where things are going wrong on a peripheral level. Allowing you to react appropriately with the data you’ve collected.
Set Strategic Goals
Your next step in keeping track of your workers time-spent is making sure that they’re hitting pre-set goals for the project they’re working on. If you’ve got new projects coming up and you’re not sure what these goals are, in terms of that project, then spend some time thinking about the construction – what needs to get accomplished first – and who do you, for how much time, to make that happen? You need to make sure that, as a manager, you’re setting some goals that make sense for your workers to follow.
Analyse Internal Structure
This is where the rubber can meet the road in the industry, it’s where you’ll have to start making some decisions, if you’re to achieve your goals. Look at your employee shifts – does one employee have a few too many? Perhaps that’s making them more tired than they should be, maybe they’re pulling a double when they really need to be home? Maybe you don’t have enough employees and your workforce is overstretched and overtired? Analyse your hierarchy as well – are employees being duly rewarded for their hard work? Are they being offered promotions to different, better-suited job sites? Take the time to figure out what your internal structure looks like and how that might affect productivity.
Create an Action Plan
Now you’ve analysed your problems, set goals, and had a look inside, to see if there are problems that lie within that can be fixed, it’s time to create an action plan. This means meeting with the heads of your departments to get their input on how to proceed, seeing where you might need to make some hard decisions, and coming up with a solid plan that’s actionable easily – so you don’t create more headache for yourself in the long run.
Implement New Decisions
A plan is only as good as it’s enacting – as they say – they don’t, but you know what I mean. Once you’ve got your action plan, you’ll need to implement those new decisions created by that plan. Make sure you’re flexible enough to allow for changes as new problems arise, but be firm in your implementation, so you’ll achieve your goals.
An often overlooked way to help you manage your construction workflow is to use a time and attendance software to keep track of your worker’s time and attendance on a job site. Using software will provide accurate, trackable, real-time data to give you a much better picture of the overall functioning of the company.
