Workforce Visibility is a buzzword that remains constant and relevant in the construction industry. With so many construction firms shifting to a hybrid or mobile-first workforce, maintaining a competitive edge becomes crucial. While workforce visibility has its unique challenges, the response and movement from the tech industries have helped construction industries adapt to this new mobile-first working environment.
In this blog, we will get down to the nitty-gritty of construction workforce visibility, what it means for your business, and some helpful tips that can improve the visibility of your existing workforce.
What is Workforce Visibility in Construction?
Workforce Visibility is the ability to efficiently and effectively adapt to an ever-changing project pipeline with insights into skills, behaviors, attributes, skills locations, project needs, and more. Also, workforce visibility is mainly a function of human resources that plays a critical role.
So, providing visibility into your workforce and upcoming projects helps you in building stronger project teams, create more balanced workloads, and better understand what is lacking and what needs to be improved – whether they are about bids you are about to pursue or about your plans on implementing construction management software addons for better visibility.
Almost every single department is impacted by workforce visibility. See below:
- Pre-construction teams: Workforce visibility is expected to be present in your teams to prepare for the many things ahead.
- Human resources: This department will look at upcoming project’s needs to effectively create better recruitment strategies and leverage certifications to develop more top talents and A-players.
- Sales: Your sales team used workforce planning to ensure you will never be turning down construction projects due to the lack of availability.
- Executives and leadership: They have a big-picture view of how and where your people are being utilized.
The list goes on and on.
Ways on How You Can Enhance Your Workforce Visibility
1. Centralized your workforce data
When your project teams are being spread across different locations, a more centralized crew scheduling software can help you significantly improve your operational efficiency and effectiveness. This software serves as your open window to workforce information that is easily accessible anytime and anywhere.
This helps you to:
- Better understand the impact of your project changes and project delays.
- Better control your labor costs
- Quickly determine and resolve any issues
- Create informed decisions concerning your project teams and project bids.
Centralizing your construction workforce planning process helps you streamline how your data is captured and stored. In addition, it helps you and your team to become more adaptive and flexible with your workforce strategies.
2. Integrate your software stack
As a business leader, you want your construction teams to be in the same direction and use the same workforce information to inform each other. So, the software you will need should perform the same thing. With the information alongside the right software, operations can then be decided, as well as the projects to start with by your team members – which can all be communicated via the software.
Top construction scheduling software like Pro Crew Schedule helps you to create a seamless and modernized workforce planning experience. With its amazing features, including construction management and integration capabilities, you can experience better workforce planning.
Pro Crew Schedule is one of few construction software today that offers integration features. You can seamlessly integrate it into thousands of popular software and apps – helping you to automate all the labor-intensive work and have more time on what matters the most.
3. Use specialized software
We already mentioned the importance of using software tools, and we mean it. The construction industry is quickly evolving, so technology like spreadsheets is not the best option anymore. So, going from paper to an all-in-one approach is the first step. And only with specialized software like Pro Crew Schedule, as cited earlier, can you experience an accessible, collaborative platform specific to your business and the sector you belong to.
With this software, you can take the next steps and revolutionize how you plan your workforce. Pro Crew Schedule can help you in workforce planning in three key stages:
- Maintaining data: As this platform serves as your all-in-one location, exchanging data and maintaining its accuracy is easy. Hence, workforce visibility is maximized, and long-term planning is no challenge anymore.
- Managing effectively: You can easily capture accurate data and track everything using this software. Your data is more reliable, and your people can gain access to it anytime and anywhere.
- Mastering the process: You have a full project pipeline and respective allocations that should be visible to everyone involved. With this software, you can best inform your people of all updates and communicate them seamlessly. Also, you can build stronger project teams and stay ahead of project needs.
4. Share your workforce data
Communicating your workforce strategy to others is impossible if you are not using the right tool for this particular job. As the leader, you must learn to recognize that nearly every department in your company is highly dependent on your people and having consistent access to the right information.
You must aim to foster more real discussions and activate cross-functional collaboration. With today’s latest construction project management software extensions, you can greatly achieve more consistent cooperation from your people. Construction technologies are designed to help professionals and leaders reduce and resolve underlying issues accompanied by working with others and handling complex projects.
Here’s how a glimpse at how construction technologies help you inform your people:
- Operations teams will use workforce data and the latest analytics to create stronger project teams based on skills and experience.
- Executive teams now have a better holistic view of the workforce strategy and the project pipeline, and they can now easily determine any gaps in the pipeline.
- The human resources team focuses on project demands and compares them against the workforce capacity. By determining pinch points where demand is greater, the team creates more informed recruitment strategies and lessens last-minute hiring.
- Pre-construction teams are planning allocations and roles for the upcoming projects. This benefits the team in putting forward more thrilling bids and preventing late crew build-ups.
Benefits of Boosting Your Construction Workforce Visibility
Your workforce significantly affects every aspect of your company – client relations, retention, satisfaction, reputation, operational effectiveness, etc. Here are some of the benefits you will experience when you foster a more unified view of your whole workforce:
- Better workforce planning: Accurate visibility of your construction team’s experience, skills, and certifications combined with precise forecasting of your project needs provides you a greater opportunity to plan effectively.
- Effective scheduling: With better workforce visibility and the locations of your people, alongside their present and upcoming project assignments – you are better equipped to allocate your construction team based on the exact needs. This helps you save more time, resources and even money.
- Better decision making: Accurate workforce data help you create more informed decisions about your people and help you track the impact of these decisions. Having wide visibility of your project needs, locations, and start and end dates makes identifying trends and data analysis much easier.
- Cost reduction: One of the main costs of all construction projects is labor, and labor costs alone will account for up to 45% of total project costs. If workforce visibility becomes your focal point, expect to have increasing savings.
- Enhanced forecasting: In construction, most projects are not even completed on time, leading to more cost overruns. Consistent delays often cause the failure to complete your projects. But with workforce visibility practices put into place, your ability to improve forecasting tends to increase.
- Workforce retention: When your whole team is being accounted for and shared information about all projects, they become more and more engaged and collaborative over time.
Furthermore, boosting your workforce visibility helps you to determine any of your team members that want to move up the company ladder and are already ready to try on new experiences. Showing your construction team that you are interested in helping their career development helps you to reduce the possibilities of employee turnover. This makes your company even more attractive to other potential candidates.
Improve Workforce Visibility with Pro Crew Schedule
If you read this blog, improving your workforce visibility plays a significant role and has immense benefits when consistently improved. Overall, it impacts your construction crew and people who will soon be part of your team and company.
Ensure that you will have greater insights and visibility in your workforce that simply cannot be achieved using any manual processes. With Pro Crew Schedule integrated at the beginning, you can have the best project management solution that simplifies your workforce planning in the first place.
Pro Crew Schedule is the leading construction time tracking software in the construction space. It is the most comprehensive construction solution to date, with solutions for almost every professional in the sector. It has everything you need to streamline every aspect of your process. You will enhance HR management capacities, boost workforce visibility, and more – all of which will lead to greater forecasting accuracy, performance, and a stronger bottom line.
Learn more about this software by requesting a free demo today!
