Most businesses, especially construction businesses, acknowledge employee engagement as a crucial issue in the overall enterprise success. Nonetheless, employee engagement plays a specific important role in the construction sector. Today, there’s an ever-growing skilled labor shortage in the industry, and it is making it difficult for business owners to fill the current jobs. As a contractor, what can you expect in dealing with these issues?
The skills gap is the main reason why there is a labor shortage. It is your job to exert a concerted effort to address the current skills gap constantly. Otherwise, you will be most likely to pay the consequences in the future. For this blog, discover employee engagement and learn some tips that can help you increase it.
It All Begins with Employee Engagement
Like many other industries, the construction industry is constantly changing and evolving. Successful companies acknowledge industry-wide shifts as they always occur, and they react accordingly. In the meantime, those who fail to accomplish their organizational goals or see their bottom lines often suffer long-term.
Success is all in how you approach, and there’s only two ways for you to tackle employee engagement – as an opportunity to take and leveraged or a problem to be solved. While the consequences of the skilled labor shortage can be pretty challenging to retain your employees, doing so is not impossible for your company. In fact, if you are going to succeed at transforming your workforce as top-notch employees, your company is poised to win and thrive in the long run.
Profile of an Engaged Employee:
While you have a few too many employees today, be aware that not all your crews are similar to one another. Hence, do not expect engagement and involvement to look the same for each worker. You have to know that most of these characteristics are major proof of a highly motivated, determined, and engaged worker. A very engaged worker is:
- Frequently recognized due to their contributions to the team’s success.
- Willing to collaborate and get involved with the projects and team members.
- Happy, motivated and well-equipped to handle daily duties and tasks.
- Seeking not only a career but also development opportunities.
- Highly committed to the overall progress and quality of the projects.
And as your construction projects come and go, your workforce evolves and improves as well. These are the most common characteristics among your workforce, despite many manifest differently in every employee.
How Can You Increase Employee Engagement?
According to a Gallup poll, only 33% of workers in the U.S. are typically engaged at work. And this only means that 2 out of 3 of your workers are disengaged and disconnected from their work. For sure, as a business owner or contractor, you desire to have a workforce that is very actively engaged and committed to what they do. To accomplish your desire, you need to develop a very engaging environment and culture that produce excellent results.
Your workforce often works in a high-stress environment, and sometimes it gets too daunting and bad. So how can you increase employee engagement so that you can reduce the skill gap and make your workforce thrive at work? Here are some strategies you can apply to achieve the environment your employees are looking forward to working in – a fun, collaborative, and engaging workplace.
1. Make Your Workforce Feel Valued
Your workers desperately wanted to feel respected and valued. A study conducted at Harvard Business Review stated that the “No.1 thing that employees seemed to enjoy the most was the sense of feeling valued and respect. Acknowledgment, recognition, opportunities for learning and growth, and good feedback are nothing compare to respect and a sense of value.
To successfully implement this in your company, try to focus more on positive reinforcement:
- Express appreciation and gratitude to your workers for a job well done.
- Send a company-wide email outlining project successes and giving congratulations to specific workers.
- Emphasize safety to your employees.
Moreover, the latter, which emphasizes safety, is considered an effective way to value more of your employees. Safety is at the forefront of everything your company does. It might significantly impact your construction company, but it greatly affects your worker’s life outside of work. You should set up or prepare projects that prioritize safety, prioritizing your people and their well-being. Continue to be a part of how you build and develop your company culture.
2. Favor leadership, mentoring, and team spirit
On many occasions, construction companies lack formal management methods where task allocation, scheduling management, and other procedures are not well-structured and adequately documented. This constant lack of direction may cause errors and create confusion for your workers. Therefore, decreasing their productivity. Nevertheless, this lack of leadership does not only cause any productivity issues but also impacts other aspects like your worker’s performance. And without proper guidance, workers may feel lost and more likely to fail. Hence, motivation levels drop.
Mentor your employees if you want them to develop and progress. As a matter of fact, mentoring is another strategy that you can adapt to motivate and support your worker’s growth.
3. Boost Company Morale
As a business owner, how hands-on you are to your employees. Does your construction company continually check on the engagement employee? How did your company do it? What process or tools do you use? Today, tons of advanced strategies and cutting-edge techs for construction crew management can simplify things for everyone involved.
It is also highly suggested to consider factors that might hurt and affect the projects and the people involved. For instance, if the project is not progressing well, the first thing you can notice or question is the workers’ morale.
For the most part, when a project is struggling, the employee morale is relatively low. If this happens, make sure to find ways to fix the issues, and most importantly, to show support to your workers. The more you support your workers and become the voice of positivity to them, the better the results will be.
4. Promote Workplace Positivity
Does your construction company promote a positive work environment and culture? As a leader, you may set the tone. However, your workers also contribute to how the culture is being shaped. This positivity culture starts during recruitment. And while hiring new workers, you must pick the most confident, influential, and skilled team players.
People who are very pessimistic and do not want to work together are not suitable for your company or your current workforce. Be determined to recruit a positive team player who can work well with others while sharing a common goal!
And just as positivity is very contagious, the main opposition is true! If you hire happy-to-go lucky personality types, your overall employee engagement will improve. Over time, it can have a significant impact on your team and business.
5. Get involved outside the workplace
Another crucial factor for employee engagement is improving the time spent at work and getting involved outside of work. You have possibly heard about offices with fantastic table set-ups, unique interior designs, bright colored walls, and massage chairs. However, these things are not the ones employees are looking forward to. Instead, they are looking to expect a team of solid support always behind them.
It is crucial to do things apart from work that can establish lasting relationships and comradery.
6. Properly Compensate with competitive wages
And no matter how much you slice it, proper compensation is a very critical part of engaging your workforce. Make sure to offer wonderful benefits and competitive wages to your hardworking employees. However, money can solve this part of the problem. In this present time, people are always looking forward to more than what they’re expecting. Go beyond the mark by simply creating an appreciative and attractive culture.
If you give an unhappy worker a 10% raise, he will be happy for a particular moment. However, that happiness doesn’t last. Money doesn’t fix anything. It is really how you treat your workforce and work together as a team that can make a lot of progress.
Hence, always look for different ways to set yourself apart from others. In return, people will want to come and stay.
7. Offer necessary tools and equipment for smoother operations
Most of the time, employees are stressed and overcharged due to unattainable goals being set up by the companies. Is your company do the same thing too? This circumstance is exacerbated when equipment and tools given to the workforce are lacking in some aspects and not appropriate.
The extremely high standards that are being required in today’s industry put intense pressure on the workers. This circumstance, alongside the absence of the best modern tools like Pro Crew Schedule, a project management software, can seriously affect workers’ performance and morale. It even discourages excellence, resulting in low productivity.
Key Takeaways
In conclusion, employee engagement is a crucial issue for any construction company. Hence, organizations must not take it lightly as efforts to enhance and improve employee engagement levels can fix construction’s skill gap and even positively impact its productivity.
