In this modern age, stakeholder engagement is more important than ever, and it applies to any business type. As a construction business owner, you should know firsthand that stakeholder engagement is one critical part of a project. The stakeholders involved in your project play a critical role. In fact, the influence they have on your projects can be immense. So, if not managed properly, it may result in project delays, costly reworks, resource drain, or, worst, project termination.
Understanding and managing your existing stakeholders, accurate identification, and knowing their expectations and limitations can help you improve your capacity to reduce risks and deliver a successful construction project.
In this blog, learn about stakeholder engagement in construction, including its two types and key benefits. We also prepare some actionable tips on improving stakeholder engagement within your current team.
Let’s start.
What is Stakeholder Engagement?
The practice of determining and involving stakeholders in overall consultation throughout the project refers to stakeholder engagement. This ensures that both values and measurement methods are informed by those directly affected. It is also recognized as a process that involves mapping and prioritizing stakeholders to develop the best strategies for effective and much better communication while using available resources.
Stakeholder engagement helps construction companies actively consider the desires and needs of anyone with a stake in the organization, which fosters stronger connection, trust, and confidence in the company’s key initiatives.
When executed well, stakeholder engagement helps you mitigate potential conflicts and risks with your current stakeholder groups. However, the benefits of effective stakeholder engagement go far and beyond. In the next section, we will be going to discuss the many benefits it offers:
Key Benefits of Effective Stakeholder Engagement
1. Understanding the values of effects
Involving and engaging with stakeholders is crucial to gain insights into the perspective of people, including the environment in which they operate and other important areas. This significantly helps in understanding the value of effects and results.
2. Segmenting stakeholders
Engaging with and communicating with your construction stakeholders allows for more wide-ranging opinions and views. Therefore, stakeholder engagement helps define and categorize the market to refine services and products by tailoring them to different beneficiaries’ particular wants and needs.
3. Mitigating risks
A higher level of stakeholder engagement results in effective communication and greater stakeholder collaboration. This helps everyone focus on important factors and find possible risks, and it also makes it easier to take preventive steps to reduce risks like evidence and performance risks.
4. Making better decisions
Engaging with your stakeholders will give you a greater understanding of their experiences and needs. When you take account of the experiences and views of your stakeholders, it helps in making decisions and forming solutions.
Who are the Stakeholders Involved in the Construction Project?
Stakeholders are all the groups and parties interested in your construction projects. The list is long and usually comprises many contributors – clients, subcontractors, business owners around the site, and many more.
Stakeholders are generally divided into two main groups, direct and indirect or internal and external stakeholders.
- Direct/internal stakeholders: These are stakeholders that are directly involved and associated with your construction project. Your clients and sponsors are considered to be among the top direct stakeholders and the most important. It also includes the current project manager and his team, suppliers, consultants, subcontractors, and end users.
- Indirect/external stakeholders: These stakeholders are indirectly involved in your construction projects. The most common external stakeholders are local residents, the government, public utilities, and professional bodies.
How to Improve Your Stakeholder Engagement?
Determine and prioritize key stakeholder relationships
Identifying your key stakeholders properly is important. As stated earlier in the previous section, your stakeholders fall into two groups. What you need to do now is to organize them according to their impact and influence so that you can be able to develop a more tailored and effective stakeholder engagement strategy.
Your stakeholders are different. One group expects to be always in the loop no matter what, while the other group prefers to access highly specific details about the project. Overall, both want to have high-level insights into the projects and clear results.
Ensure that everyone is on the same page. If you are using the best online construction scheduling software, like Pro Crew Schedule, you can foster enhanced communication and collaboration. This top-tier construction software serves as a central hub where everyone connects and gains access to project details and updates anywhere and anytime.
Clearly communicate the project scope to your stakeholders
It is crucial to be transparent from day one. Acting with integrity and consistency toward your stakeholders establishes trust and boosts engagement, resulting in more productive relationships. You should tell your people about the process you will implement when communicating and sharing project information.
Be clear on their tasks and roles and the inputs they contribute to your construction project. Take note that people are more willing to get involved and be engaged when they fully understand their role and influence on your projects.
Leverage cloud construction scheduling software
It is crucial to reflect on the insights you receive from your existing stakeholder and properly store important conversations and information. This is why you need cloud-enabled construction software like Pro Crew Schedule that can help you store important information via the cloud.
Use this amazing software to your advantage and maximize its top features. Cloud storage is one of the best features to help you store important documents and organize them in real-time. Your team of stakeholders can easily share project documents and files via cloud access without the constraint of location. Indeed, the process is seamless!
Influence is the Key
We already mentioned the importance of knowing the influence of your stakeholders on your projects. So, understanding the different levels of influence allows you to make predictions, like how a stakeholder interacts directly with your team or others.
The range of possibilities is broad, from positive sentiments and full support to activism and genuine engagement of all members of your project. To effectively measure the influence and impact of your stakeholders, determine their level on a scale ranging from low, medium to high.
- High: This level indicates who has more power to impact decisions, outcomes, and timeframes.
- Medium: This indicates a particular stakeholder with a primary interest in the project. But, he/she may have a lower level of power to do some project changes or to simply influence.
- Low: This indicates a stakeholder with the minimum ability to change the outcomes of your construction projects.
Deploy trusted web-based construction scheduling software to keep track of the actions, impacts, and influences your stakeholders have, whether on your projects or business overall. With this software tool in place, accessibility and flexibility are immense.
Never avoid problems
Stakeholders wanted to be involved. Most of the time, these people prefer to be given an early view of issues and risks as they respect accountability. So, rather than keeping issues under the rug, you must address any problems proactively.
You do not need to share any single minor conflicts, and however, you must address major issues as soon as possible. Big issues have a major impact, and it is important that everyone has a solution in mind.
Proactive mitigations
When you reach this final part, we expect you to better understand your stakeholders, including their roles, their impact on your projects, and so many others. This final strategy details the risks you are bound to accept whether you like it or not.
As stated above, some things are non-negotiable. So, make sure to outline these non-negotiables and what is acceptable. This can be minor changes to the project alignment, differing construction techniques, or noise mitigation measures. Best to use online construction project management software to outline these important details and communicate them effectively to your stakeholders.
Working with your stakeholders, hand in hand with these matters improves project buy-in and builds credibility and project ownership.
Meet with the ones who are resistant to change
The thing is, in any group, opinions are divided. This is the same scenario with your stakeholders. While some will agree to some changes, several others do not support the change. Make sure you find a balance between these differing views.
Involving stakeholders in the decision-making process and constantly listening to their concerns empowers you to navigate the change process more efficiently. In an instance where your stakeholders are resistant to change, it is crucial to discuss and be clear about your project scope. Some things are non-negotiable, and you must show your stakeholders what impact they have on shaping the project.
Aiding your people to embrace change is a powerful way to manage stakeholder conflicts and establish meaningful relationships.
Boost Your Stakeholder Engagement Efficiency with Pro Crew Schedule
If stakeholder engagement becomes a priority for you, as it should be, you must look for a way to manage and execute the process properly. A great software solution will help you every step of the way.
Looking for the right software? Look no further than Pro Crew Schedule.
Pro Crew Schedule is among the leading web-based construction management software today. It is a perfect construction management tool that will help you establish and track relationships, keep tabs on how your stakeholders and groups feel about your plans and communicate them more effectively.
Pro Crew Schedule is like no other. It is easy to use, flexible and has all the right features you need to manage your people, projects, and overall construction business.
