In the construction industry, your crew members are one of the most critical resources. While a lot of advanced construction technology can help you streamline your operations and processes, the success, completion, and cost-effectiveness of projects mainly depend on how productive your construction team is.
Productivity is so vital in construction that it can make or break your project’s success. Many tools like time-tracking and construction management software have been used to help workers do their jobs better. Even though these strategies may work, the key to getting things done is to be motivated.
We are in an industry where getting things right the first time is essential. Motivating and increasing your workers’ productivity levels is vital when clients want their buildings and projects to be finished quickly. This is why it is critical to prioritize your crew’s well-being and prevent them from being burned out with the job.
What is Meant by an Employee’s Well-Being?
Employees’ well-being is how employees feel about different parts of their lives, like how they feel about their homes and their personal lives. You might be thinking that work and personal life should be kept separate, and however, anything that happens in their personal life can significantly affect how they feel about their day-to-day work and how they feel about the place where they work. Your employees’ health, motivation, and happiness are critical factors in your company’s long-term success and effectiveness.
There are four parts to an employee’s well-being, namely emotional health, physical health, social wellness, and environmental wellness.
Emotional or Mental Health
It is important to recognize mental health at work. A crew member might feel tired and burned out if they are overworked. Or they might feel like their career is going nowhere. Organizations should help their workers deal with problems and difficulties at work. This can be done by giving employees counseling sessions or encouraging them to take breaks or time off. You can also add skill development and training sessions to help make them with their career growth.
Physical Health
Like mental health, physical health is often ignored until an emergency arises. A construction worker is doing physically taxing jobs nearly every day. Sickness and injuries will happen, but you should push your employees to take better care of their bodies.
Social Wellness
Building and keeping good relationships is important because it makes employees feel like they are a part of the organization. You can improve the social health of your company by opening up lines of communication, encouraging open and honest conversation, and staying in touch with your team.
Environmental Wellness
The way you run your business has a significant impact on the health and happiness of your employees. A toxic work environment can make people unhappy and cause them to leave their jobs more often. In the case of a construction site, they might feel stressed if they think they are working in an unsafe environment, whether in a physical or emotional sense. Good work culture and environment can cause high innovation, engagement, and satisfaction levels.
The Importance of Prioritizing Your Crew’s Physical, Emotional, Social, And Environmental Well-Being
As stated earlier, employees are the most valuable part of any business, and the health and happiness of your staff are directly linked to your company’s success. Putting the health of your employees first makes the workplace a happier and more productive place to be. And with today’s skilled labor shortage in the industry, you can also give your company a competitive edge and help make yourself a desirable employer in today’s tough job market.
Promoting a culture of health and whole-person well-being should be a top business priority. Let us think in this scenario: say you do not do anything to improve the health and safety of your workplace. Your workers are more likely to be unhappy, unmotivated, and unproductive. Worst case, it would lead to your employees resigning, leaving you with a handful of vacancies and overworked employees who stayed. Whether you give your employees paid time off, flexible schedules, time off when they need it, or good health care, all these things can make the whole organization more productive.
10 Ways You Can Create a Healthy Work Culture and Motivate Your Construction Crew
Have you ever imagined a world without construction? There would be no roads, hospitals, homes, or other things. As important as this field is to everyday life, a lot can be done to improve it. So the real question is, how can you get your construction crew to work faster and safer?
Along with implementing an improvement in construction management, it is important to review safety measures carefully. Having the right tools and materials or highly skilled workers for a construction project to go well is not enough, and it would help if you ensured that your employees are happy and motivated enough to take charge of their assigned tasks. In this section, we have listed ten ways to promote a healthy work culture for your company.
Efficient Project Management System
Crew management is an integral part of construction management. This is because the best way to get the most out of workers is to manage them well while increasing employee engagement and retention. A sound management system is fundamental to making a site more productive. If you can lead with respect but are firm, your team will follow them. Managers help workers stay on task and work toward the company’s goals. They can also act as go-betweens for construction workers and upper management to communicate problems.
Increase Visibility Among Your Teams
From the beginning, make it clear what the big goal of the project is and what each person’s role will be in getting there. This would help your construction team focus on the project’s goals and give them a clear sense of what they are working toward.
However, remember that your workers are people with bodies and feelings. Give them tasks related to their scope, listen to their complaints, and above all, do not overwork your team because you are dealing with some delays.
Recognize and Honor Small Successes
Set attainable short-term and long-term goals and commemorate when you reach any of them. This does not mean you need to make a big deal. A simple routine of pausing, announcing, and applause is enough to make someone feel like their job is done.
Another way to motivate people is to recognize and reward good work. If someone on your team does a good job, let them know, and this would give the team members a reason to work harder and encourage other workers to do the same.
Keep Overtime in Check
Demand and deadlines are significant parts of the construction business. Crews are known to work long, odd hours, and so sometimes, doing overtime is inevitable. However, if overtime is not kept in check, it can make it hard for your team to get proper rest and recover. If a worker is tired and makes one careless mistake, it could be awful for them or their coworkers. This kind of confusion is dangerous for the crew’s health, and it can lead to mistakes in judgment and calculations that need to be fixed or redone, putting their schedule at risk.
You can use construction scheduling software to help you get a clear overview of your team’s schedules, what they are doing for the day, who is on leave, and who will work overtime.
Train Your New Employees
New employees can cost a company time and money in any field if they aren’t appropriately trained. When physical safety is considered, the stakes in construction are higher. The buddy system should be used to help the new worker get up to speed and keep them safe. This will make your construction crew more productive. Putting a new worker with a veteran crew member is helpful in more ways than one. As the new worker learns how to do things best, the veteran can ensure that work will not be redone and safety rules are followed.
Put Safety Practices and Measures in Place
This cannot be stressed enough, but construction is one of the most dangerous fields. Because of this, you must do everything you can to keep your construction team safe and healthy. It can be simple: giving your employees the appropriate training, high-quality PPE, and safety equipment or having a medical team on-site to take care of emergencies. Construction workers are aware of the risks they face, so not taking the proper steps to keep them safe can be very discouraging.
Skill Development and Training
Industry standards change constantly, and employees can always benefit from more training, no matter how long they have worked in their field. You can learn many hard and soft skills on the job but picking up bad habits is easy. Crew training is an excellent way to ensure everyone is on the same page about safety rules and how to get the most work done. This is beneficial for both you and your crew.
Manage Your Tasks and Activities
Even though it is the easiest to look at what a crew already does well and find ways to make it even better to make up for lousy work strategies, it is better to find the weak points in the process and find ways to make them better. So, they might have to change some things that were already working well, but they would have to look at the results of both options to figure out which would be better in the long run. Construction management devices can help keep your crew in check with a simple glance without micromanagement.
Construction Innovation
Feedback from the crew is a great way to find weak spots in their productivity or safety. Crew members may be able to spot problems that are not obvious to supervisors, and their ideas about how to fix them can be helpful. Also, letting employees use their creativity makes them aware of strategies that don’t work, and it lets them solve even more productivity or safety problems that might have been missed.
Convey Your Project’s End Goals
People are more likely to stay on task when they know what they are working toward. Put up pictures of the result around the site to remind the workers why they are performing. Construction is significant because it builds communities and gives people safe places to live and grow. Do not forget to tell your workers what their hard work has led.
