Most construction business owners often dislike having a rigid schedule each week. Are you like that? Whenever issues arise, or clients call, do you jump quickly on the issue and take care of it alone? Because some owners today prefer to be in complete control and micro-manage their projects and people, just handling business in a fast-paced way.
As the manager or business owner, you should know firsthand that meetings can make everything much better as you run and create a better company. With meetings, you allow yourself to be accessible on what you should necessarily do, and you have time to strategize, plan, sell and inwardly focus on becoming more profitable.
Meetings Make Everyone Accountable
Can you imagine a baseball game without player statistics and scoreboard to see who does the best out in the field and who is winning? Without weekly feedback and scorecards, results don’t matter much in some cases. Although, in construction, the meeting leader has to create a tracking plan (system), record all employee’s attendance and work performance on all jobs for all to see each week. It will then improve job performance. Whether you’re the contractor or project manager, you have to get informed about tracking and hitting your project goals rather than working carelessly without anything to aim at.
For instance, when you hold regular field meetings, the contractor is challenging to accomplish specific results, monitor progress, report every week’s improvement compared to the weekly target, and then further discuss plans for the upcoming week. There has to be a report on the crew hours, job schedule, safety, equipment hours, quality and performance.
Every crew is now then committed together with their peers in order to hit weekly goals. This teamwork approach often creates competition among peers to be outstanding and beat weekly targets and project budgets. To help you get started in setting up and improving your meetings, make use of subcontractor scheduling software. You can set up meetings, rearrange and reschedule it for a more suitable time. This construction tech allows you to inform and update everyone in your company in a much faster and more seamless way.
Mandatory Annual Management Meetings
1. Strategic Planning Session
Each year, the management team has to take a day or two to plan out the strategy for the year. Engage with a facilitator to help your construction team review the previous year’s results and determine areas needed to improve. Make sure to create implementation action plans and set new goals to improve your company.
2. All-Company Town Hall Meeting
At least once per year, gather your whole company together for a state of the company discussion and review season. Make sure to talk about your failures, success, plans, and goals for the future. You can also use the event to hold training sessions and acknowledge critical people who have significantly impacted your company’s performance.
Facilitate roundtable group discussions, significantly enhancing certain areas for your business, including communication, project scheduling, equipment use, estimating accuracy, customer retention, and productivity.
Mandatory Monthly Management Meetings
3. Monthly Strategy Session
Creating a sales and marketing activity calendar allows you to review your business development progress each month. From there, determine critical markets and clients you wanted to work with. Develop a plan to find and cultivate new clients, strategize how to enhance customer relationships, find ways to improve your bid-hit ratio, and explore how to increase your margins with less competition and better customers.
Here’s a complete list of the areas that need to review:
- Financials
- Overhead profit
- Revenues
- Receivables
- Cash flow
- Organizational chart
- Management
- People
- Operation
- Procedures and systems
- Project management for construction
- Workflow
- Supervision
- Quality
- Safety
- Scheduling
- Accounting
- Equipment
- Technology
- Estimating
- Sales and marketing
- Productivity
- Technology
4. Monthly Company Strategy Session
Every month, managers and owners should meet to discuss overall company strategy thoroughly. Start by reviewing your action items and strategic goals. The agenda should include reviewing strategy and results for every aspect of your construction business. This includes cash flow, revenue, management, safety, operations, productivity, scheduling, and technology, sales, estimating and marketing.
5. Monthly Project Management Meeting
This “accountability time” allows each person to present job results to the management team. Review each project’s job costs report, change order log, schedule, project receivable, progress, and problems. This particular meeting will hold all parties accountable for following the company systems, managing projects properly, and hitting the targets.
Mandatory Weekly Management Meetings
6. Contractor weekly meeting
Get with all of your field contractors to review their individual project development, workload, equipment requirements workload, material needs, subcontractor performance, customer issues, and safety issues. The group is going to collaborate to develop more ideas to meet and beat budget, schedule, and productivity goals.
7. Sales, Estimating, Proposal, and Bid Follow-up
Every Monday morning, make sure you get your marketing, sales, and estimating teams all together to review the following:
- Revenue stream
- Present and collective contract awards,
- Lead flow
- Sales activity
- Customer relationship meetings,
- Jobs bidding, and
- Strategies to improve the bid-hit ratio.
Benefits of Mandatory Company Meetings
Knowing that multiple issues may arise during the execution of the construction project, getting a walk-through with the major stakeholders involved in some particular processes will set your project up for success. So let’s get down to some benefits of mandatory meetings:
- Meetings are the best approach to completing a certain project.
- Providing information about all necessary and special requirements.
- The opportunity to go through all documents required by the country, company, city, state, or federal government.
- Setting performance and company goals and searching for ways to achieve those goals.
- The ability to determine conflicts in the project schedule and all other items. These are necessary for the smooth progress of the project.
- Building the construction project’s starting point and having it officially recorded.
- Giving the project owners the opportunity to tell share their expectations on the project. Also, it provides the framework for all project members, allowing them to inform the project’s progress on the project owner.
- A clearer understanding of how decisions are being handled, including the time frame and the people who have the authority to make certain decisions.
- A comprehensive payment schedule is showing a percentage of the contract cost for every task. It is very useful in preventing payment confusion and problems.
- The opportunity to have open discussions in any questions brought up by project leaders, field contractors, and other crew members.
- The avoidance of change orders and costly reworks for early dispute resolutions.
Several Questions that can be asked during Meetings
There’s no shortage of questions that are being asked during any construction meetings, but here’s a list of some of the most common questions generally asked during meetings:
- Who has the authority for various issues, and how can such problems be solved?
- Who is responsible for performing assurance procedures and quality control?
- How much will a project costs?
- How do you use technologies and embrace innovative practices?
- How will you seek to understand the design intent of such projects further?
- Is there any major construction outlined and planned for the next six months or year?
- How much has maintenance increased in the past year?
- Can you walk us through any drastic changes in the budget starting this year to last year?
There are various questions that can be asked during meetings. And while you can take the time to answer them during the construction process thoroughly, it’s much easier to address them before any work starts. Doing so will allow you to make the needed adjustments beforehand easily. If such meetings don’t occur and the changes are already requested, it will cost you more money and possibly take you additional time to complete a certain project.
Set-Up Every Company Meeting with the Best Construction Scheduling Software
Whether you enjoy meetings or the other way around, meetings are not going anywhere, anytime soon. And knowing this, meetings have to be optimized since time is very precious, and everybody has bound too tight schedules.
Hence, by selecting the best-specialized software to hold and stick around to your agenda, your people will feel more productive instead of making them feel like they’re wasting time. On top of that, finding out that meetings aren’t something your people dread is another personal milestone.
This is the right time to get started with task management programs. It helps you in tracking all of your projects to move them all forward with automated workflows. You can also track everything to help save time and money. With this specialized software, you can easily promote engagement and involvement throughout every phase of the project.
Key Takeaways
Use the mandatory meetings above to get everybody on the same page and achieve your company and project goals. The dynamics of holding regular meetings establish teamwork holds people responsible, creates accountability, and frees up management from having to visit onsite each day and make all decisions for every single one.
