Communicating with your crew members is very important in a construction project. To secure multiple channels of communication from mobile to radio and building contractor software. These will make sure there’ll be no impediments when one method fails.
Communication is more than important in the construction industry. It is a major ingredient for the successful completion of a construction project. With good communication practices, it can enhance teamwork, productivity, and better project collaboration in the site.
Miscommunication has been one of the biggest problems in the construction industry. When the methods of communication aren’t properly planned, it later becomes a challenge for a project leads to relay instructions to his members or a member reporting progress or problem to the leader. Consequently, the project will suffer from delays and the team may face issues and misunderstandings that stop productivity.
This is why improving communication in the construction site should be practiced.
When communication issues arise, it usually takes a long time to fix which can be a waste of both time and money. This is why you need to use at least 3 channels where you can communicate with your whole team.
While mobile phones are convenient and quick, having a communication tool in the form of a building construction software can be more effective. Here, you can send important documents along with your message. And this is something you can’t don in phone calls.
Also, a software, which employees are obliged to use for daily reports, can be more efficient than emails. Members can ignore emails but they can’t avoid getting notified in software where they need to confirm their time logs.
There are more than you can do as a project manager to solidify communication within your team. And we made a rundown of some strategies on how you can do so.
8 Ways to Improve Communication in the Construction Site
1. Hold Meetings Regularly. It is important to regularly hold meetings with various employees every week, which will confirm the project’s plans and what is expected of staff onsite. It will also provide a space to develop meeting notes, which must be circulated to all members of staff.
2. Ensure All Employees. Can Understand You As we live in a multicultural society, not all your employees may speak English as their first language. Every employer has a responsibility to ensure staff onsite are safe and protected, which is why they must provide the appropriate bilingual signage and training. It might also be beneficial to hire an interpreter at work to translate instructions and health and safety warnings.
3. Be Clear Transparency is an important factor that allows people to understand that what you say is what you mean and aren’t that lets people know you mean what you say and that you’re honest. Be sure to make your words and actions match. This is also to build trust in your crew and also your clients.
4. Encourage Communication In addition to holding both formal and informal meetings, encourage employees to continually communicate with one another. For example, they should provide each other with updates on a project to remain on schedule; or state if they unexpectedly need to leave the site for a short or long period. As a result, it can create a more productive, safer environment for everyone.
5. Practice Equal Treatment Identify standards that define your beliefs and practices and uphold them while communicating with your crew. If you treat your staff differently or if you’re not consistently treating them, then people might talk and find out that wasn’t being fair. It differs in every situation, but issues like this can lead to lawsuits that make accusations of discriminatory practices in the workplace.
6. Talk to Each Team Member Talking to the members as a team is great as it encourages a collaborative spirit among the workers, but it is also important to set time for each member to guide them individually. There may be some things about specific team members that require a different approach to communication. An example of this would be having a worker who has hearing loss in one ear, so making the routine of approaching that worker to talk to him from the unaffected side and instruct the others to do the same is a good way to have clearer communication.
7. Have Training Let your crew enhance their skills and gain new ones by organizing continuous training on new equipment, software, apps, safety features, and regulation. This way it will not only benefit your crew but also your business and the flow of your projects as well. Following this tip will not only improve communication and strengthen the relationship between the company and the employees, but it will also lessen the chances of crew members resigning or leaving because they will feel like they are permanent for the position and that they are valued by the company. Investing in training employees may seem like an advantage for the company because they will have more skilled employees, but a company that offers training is something that employees see as an opportunity that they should not miss.
8. Choose the right method of communication In the construction industry, communication can be through signs, hand signals, drawings, meetings, and a lot more. Daily reports and photos are also compiled. It is vital to choose the right communication method that can simplify all these things while also making communication with everyone much clearer and easier.
What most construction companies do that is both effective and simple is using a software that allows the project manager to communicate with his team, upload photos, videos, documents, schedule tasks, track time, monitor tasks, and more.
These software and mobile applications are a great tool to communicate effectively and enhance productivity. Having software that becomes the point of communication for everyone will make it easier to send important documents, files, photos, videos, read work updates in real-time, and it can even save you a trip is coming to the site just to make a minor announcement.
Final Thoughts/ Conclusion
Communication is one of the key elements in ensuring a project’s success.
If proper communication is practiced consistently, it allows the team to talk to each other concisely, thus improving the quality of collaboration while avoiding issues such as misunderstanding or unclear instructions. Apart from that, the flow of the project becomes smoother if the team consistently communicates with each other.
We highly recommend the tips we offered above to improve the communication within the team. Encourage proper communication in the workplace by using building construction software that has features to ensure everything we just mentioned above.
One software that has all these qualities and is trusted by many is Pro Crew Schedule.
It offers a wide range of features for managing schedules and improving communication and efficiency. It increases productivity not only through effective communication, but it also has multitasking features for faster and better project delegation. The more important feature is it being on mobile.
Pro Crew is also available in a mobile app version, making communication readily available anytime, anywhere. Team members don’t have to buy expensive laptops just to check announcements, schedules, and messages as they can just check them on what’s already available with them – their phones.
If you want to improve communication and amplify productivity in the construction site, avail the Pro Crew Software and let it help you have clearer swifter communications.
