Your construction company certainly has its own set of priorities to go on to the next level. In many cases, determining what initiatives can make the most significant impact can be challenging. However, what makes your business thriving and unique from other companies isn’t the services or products it offers – it’s the people within it.
So how do you take care of your employees? Do you offer fun happy hours, or you’re more into giving bonuses? Any employees, regardless of their position, wanted to be genuinely recognized and appreciated. There are many ways to show appreciation to your employees and one of the best options today is to give support and commitment to their personal growth and professional advancement.
Employee development is a long-term initiative, yet it leads to prompt benefits such as improved performance, engagement, and increased loyalty. In this article, we highlighted the benefits of training and skill development to your workforce.
Skills Needed in the Construction Sector
It is very accurate that working and being involved in this industry need many industry-specific skills, such as worksite management, building code knowledge, and knowledge about quality control processes, pricing negotiation, and many more. Your workforce should need a wide range of skills to have all projects done within schedule and budget.
So here are the top skills that your workforce should possess that are essential in the construction business:
1. Leadership and Teamwork skills
The ability to work well within the workforce and leadership aptitudes are two of the most critical skills to nurture when working in this industry. Even if not everybody can and wanted to become a manager, such skills are essential in the well-running construction projects that typically require hundreds, if not thousands, of dealings and interactions between crews every day.
2. Strong interest in Technologies and drive to continue Learning
Technologies are significantly changing the blueprint for most industries. This is especially true in the construction sector as well. A proactive crew member has a hunger for knowledge and learning. These people should also be techy-savvy to learn and adopt specific computer programs and other applications quickly.
It’s your job to let your workforce be involved in training programs that encourage them to learn and thrive more, especially during these modern times.
3. Good memory, manual dexterity, and hand-eye coordination
You can’t afford your crew members to forget to place a screw in or secure a scaffolding safely. For such reasons, it’s necessary to hire people with excellent memory capabilities, an expert, and possessed hand-eye coordination precision.
4. Great Communication and Customer Service Skills
Despite the job role, proper communication between your workers and departments is crucial for solving issues, lowering risks, and preventing accidents associated with most construction projects. With that being said, customer service skills are very in-demand when hiring project leaders and managers responsible for dealing with any clients, prospects, and third-party providers.
5. Physical Skills
Your workforce has to possess excellent physical skills and endurance. They have to be someone who’s smart enough to use their strength and physical power. Also, proper movement is something they have to be equipped with because construction activities require tons of human strength.
6. Design and Planning
Whether it’s about designing, planning, and managing a construction project, your crew members must know how to read construction blueprints. It’s also essential that they can easily spot issues or mistakes since some blueprints contain errors. Every member of your team should be great in decision-making, especially when it comes to what materials to use and the proper way of scheduling various aspects of the projects.
It only shows that having a great understanding of the project’s design is critical to its success. On top of that, designing and planning projects also require you a construction scheduling app that can help you streamline projects seamlessly and efficiently.
Advantages of Training to Your Construction Workforce
1. Reduce the Skills Gap
Two of the main reasons why there’s a labor shortage are low numbers of Gen Z and Millennial workers who can fill the open positions and the Baby Boomer retirements happening simultaneously. It’s one of the significant contributors to the prevailing imbalance of open jobs vs. currently available workers.
Last February 2019, there’s a record of 7.4 million job openings in the U.S.
It’s also the 10th month in the row where the number of jobs surpasses the number of workers.
Because there’s this wide gap between the involvements of two generations, they differ in knowledge, training, and of course, experience. That is why it’s critical to implement a streamlined and systemized training process to build an efficient team and close the gap simultaneously.
2. Improved Risk Management
Nearly any construction company rightfully labeled “safety” as their business operation priority. However, without training your workforce, are you backing up that claim? The OSHA, a federal organization, most likely plays a significant role in your construction business. With federal and state combined, the organization conducted more than 80,000 inspections and its work made a considerable impact.
Improving risk management within your company begins with trading, continues with training, and ends with training as usual. The construction field you and your people belong to is such a higher-risk industry that OSHA has labeled four areas as the “Fatal Four” pertaining to workplace injuries.
- Being struck by an object
- Falls
- Electrocutions
- Crushed or caught by the equipment or machinery
With proper training and project management for construction, fatal risks can be significantly reduced. You can avail start availing modern project management tools and deploy them on your operations. It helps you know the performance, progress, and state of every crew in real-time.
3. Can be utilized as a Recruitment Tool
Recruiting becomes much easier when you offer great opportunities to your workers who will advance their professional skills. As a matter of fact, in today’s extremely competitive hiring environment, a quality training program can also be presented to recruits as a competitive benefit.
On-the-job training (OJT) for in-demand industries such as electricians, plumbing and masonry reduces entry barriers and encourages beginners to apply. This larger pool can give you a much wider range for hiring and focus on skills and personality fit more.
As your workforce grows, some of these young workers will be bound to designate for management or other leadership roles. And with your bigger pool of recruits, you’ll have a much better chance of having these ambitious personality types you need for your workforce.
4. Improves cross-departmental collaboration
A genuinely cohesive workforce excels when it comes to cross-departmental training. It can also help bridge the gap between existing cultures, allowing your employees to learn more and more about other parts of the business and further encourage more empathy across the board. However, be honest because most of the teams you have today aren’t natural collaborators. It’s beneficial if you’re aware of this because it will push you to find solutions.
Without the correct structures to help your workforce connect, some initiatives may run the risk of falling flat. Be mindful that collaboration issues can lead to more negative results.
You can improve your collaboration with your people using subcontractor scheduling software. With this leading-edge software tool, there will be no more restrictions on the flow of information within your workers or company. Instead, there’s more transparency and open communication.
5. Enhances Personal Development
Your employees aren’t existing in a professional way to serve you or your company. In fact, they are human beings too embodied with intellectual, physical, and emotional experiences. To let your workforce evolve and improve professionally and personally, employee development should be holistic. And this includes the following:
- Intellectual Growth
- Emotional Balance
- Physical Health
Prioritize Your Workforce Now and Invest in Construction Scheduling Software
Although it might seem like a no-brainer, workforce training and skill development are two of the most underrated areas of employee management in the construction industry. Sounds new and bizarre, right? However, only efficient businesses can indeed able to realize that training has a significant impact on all significant business goals like the below:
- Employee Retention
- Recruitment efforts
- Safety
- Workforce quality
- Bottom lines
Keep in mind that training shouldn’t be a one-time experience during the onboarding process but rather a continually evolving aspect of your employee’s career. Other than training, another thing to highly consider is investing in cutting-edge software solutions to improve all aspects of your business, including your workforce.
Pro Crew Schedule is the leading software solution in the market! This is the only software application you can deploy to help your whole workforce safe, well-informed, and connected all the time. Over time, you can witness significant changes in your crew’s progress and business performance with this tool!
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Key Takeaways
It’s worth noting that when employees are trained in advance with their careers and equipped with the right tools, the workforce will thrive even more and feel motivated to do the best work. And these plans you have for your workforce development may encourage the top candidates to join your company.
