To establish a great project schedule from scratch is exceptionally difficult. As someone leading a project and your people, you will agree that workload management is one of the hardest things to do perfectly and efficiently. Keeping everyone on the same page towards completing can also feel like an impossible task.
There are a lot of project management challenges that serve as contributing factors. However, at its core, inefficient workload management is to blame. And as a project leader, you can correct the mistakes by following the right approach to managing your construction team better.
Here in this blog post, we will show you eight ways to effectively perfect the process of your team’s heavy workload using the best workload management practices. Let’s dive in, but first, we should discuss workload management in your industry.
What is Workload Management in Construction?
The process of coordinating responsibilities to ensure fairness and efficiency is called workload management. In other words, it is the process of assigning work to your team in a way that delivers the load optimally and efficiently among the available resources.
Moreover, it considers your crew member’s strengths, capacity, availability, throughput, and anything else that may affect how much and what type of work your team member needs to be given. An effective team leader and project manager is equipped with workload management skills and can build a successful project schedule.
Sounds easy, right? And you will not be here if that is simple. Yet, the truth about construction workload management is that it is very difficult to perfect or make it right. Even if you say you are a very skillful project manager, there is still that possibility for your team members to be over-utilized or to get under.
Perfect Your Workload Management Process with these Practices
1. Evaluate the full workload across your company or construction team
Getting the real picture of all the work happening on your team or your company is one of the difficult parts of workload management. Even if you are, let’s say, following some of the traditional project management practices, it is still possible for untracked, invisible work to sneak in. And you must spot them instantly.
Start by looking at your past month’s tasks and work. Doing so will give you the idea of what a typical workload includes so you can start understanding what usually makes the sprint.
2. Adopt powerful construction management software for subcontractors
It is easier to suggest implementing the latest project management software. However, not tools are the same. In fact, a lot of the top choices today do not have the best built-in features. But guess what – Pro Crew Schedule sure does!
The project management features of this amazing software are top-tier! It helps every project aspect, particularly workload, to be organized and updated. You can quickly find every single one of your member and their workloads or list of tasks. The feature helps you determine who can take on new or additional work while making sure that none of them is overworked.
If you want to follow the right timeline and prioritize workloads to ensure the most crucial parts of the project are completed, then look no further. Pro Crew Schedule is the right construction scheduling tool for your business.
3. Prioritize time for crew members to focus on one single task and avoid multitasking
People love the idea of multitasking because they feel they are more in control of what they do and think they are productive. The thing is, it is simply just an illusion. Many studies have made it very clear – multitasking almost never works. When people multitask, they work more slowly and make many mistakes.
Make sure to change your and your team’s perspective on multitasking because it is necessary. Apart from working to change overall perceptions around multitasking, taking other crucial steps is essential. Prioritizing tasks and schedule-building should be on your top list. Overall, this is to keep your construction team focused on the right set of tasks at the right time.
4. Implement time tracking to learn realistic workloads
Balancing a workload for your team requires leadership skills to know the capacity of every crew and the time it takes to complete every task. And once you understand the average time of every task, workload management becomes much easier.
The only trouble here is that it can be incredibly difficult to measure in industry-related work, especially in the construction sector. Even repeatable tasks like “review and update the punch list” or “review the scope of the construction project” do not always take the same time. And over the long run, task lengths may average out. If you encounter this scenario, you must track how long your team spends on them.
But starting a time tracking program is another level to deal with this. And it is even greater and better to integrate your approach with sophisticated construction time tracking software. This guarantees you to only pay attention to what is actually done while tracking the overall performance of your team members.
5. Become a good example of a balanced workload on your team
You will risk burnout whenever your construction team feels they are consistently overworked. And despite your efforts to enhance workload management, it may be time for some introspection. So, are you and the other contractors at your company channeling healthy and balanced relationships to your work? Perhaps, you are leading by example towards a path full of work addiction, dealing with after-hours stress, and many more.
If you suspect the issue can be more than the actual overload, it is the perfect time to set a good example. A project manager like you should pave the way by demonstrating a healthy relationship with work.
And, of course, always strive to be a great example because leaders should see themselves find a way to prevent overworking.
6. Have some regular check-ins with your crew members
It is essentially important that construction managers should regularly check in every member of the team. Have you been cautious enough with the status of your members? How aware are you of their tasks, performance, and well-being? As the project leader, you must be thoughtful and mindful of the people you are working with.
Check them out over regular meetings, and conducting a periodic one-on-one check-in is better. Again, you need to show that you care for them and pay attention to their respective workloads.
Pro Tip: Take advantage of construction employee scheduling software to boost communication between parties. Not only can you communicate with your members seamlessly, but you can also clearly and proactively ask your team members about their workload.
7. Pay attention to your headcount and check your resources
In most cases, the problem is not time management, construction schedule, or poor project planning. Instead, it boils down to your available resources, most especially the number of actual people you have that are available to do the work. If you have already tried everything else and the other resources are still over-allocated, it is time to look at more drastic changes. Ask yourself if there is a need to increase the headcount, decrease the scope of the project, or add more resources and materials.
Inventory management software like Pro Crew Schedule is the best solution if you want access to all types of reports about your projects. Not only can you gain access to different types of reports, but also you can track people or headcount and assess your available resources. The advanced features will help you determine if you can work on your next projects based on your existing headcount and resources.
8. Make adjustments to your team workload
Making adjustments to the overall workload is necessary. So, this is the part where you have to factor in over and under-allocations. Begin with members who have too much work assigned to them. Split big tasks into little chunks. You can assign somebody else to help you stretch a particular task over a certain period.
If you are going to change a task in your budget planning, speak first to the people who are likely involved in this aspect. But the overall point here is to ensure everyone is kept informed on the adjustments and changes you are about to make.
Use Pro Crew Schedule to Manage Workload
It is impossible to effectively manage your construction team’s workload without perfecting the process and knowing their full capacity. Good thing that Pro Crew Schedule, a project management software for the construction industry, can streamline the overall process of gauging your construction workforce capacity in current and projected demands.
Pro Crew Schedule’s top-notch features enable you to balance the workload across your team. You can map out and detail tasks in phases and assign them to your members. Expect to have power and control regarding managing projects, teams, and workloads using this cloud-based software.
Start your free trial today. Learn more about its amazing features.
