One of the hardest balancing acts in construction is between short-term and long-term planning, especially when considering the workforce and when/where support is needed most. What makes it so difficult? Many projects can span a number of years, but workforce planning has been (and often needs to be) a reactive process.

Just because reactive planning has become the norm doesn’t make short-term planning any easier. Contractors still have to deal with numerous complex and dynamic variables, some of which include: 

• selecting the right kind of projects to bid on
• determining the profitability of a project
• mitigating risks
• predicting the cost of materials and labor
• finding reliable subcontractors for a job

 With so many variables, it’s expected that planning your people for the short term takes priority, with long-term, strategic workforce planning almost feeling like more of a luxury. However, your people are at the heart of project delivery, and if they’re not being allocated to projects with long-term goals in mind your project deliverability will inevitably begin to suffer. 

 Let’s look at some statistics that point to the fact that effective short and long-term planning of your workforce isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. In a survey done by Bridgit, 70% of contractors said they assign staff to projects less than two months in advance and almost half (46%) don’t have enough time to hire skilled labor as needed. In the same survey, 86% of respondents said they’ve bid on projects only to find they don’t have the available people to complete the job. 

 These statistics highlight a few things. First off, there’s the cost of being uninformed about labor before a project even starts. Whether it’s won or lost, bidding on a project comes at a cost and you’re bound to incur a lot more if you find that you don’t have enough available people when the project is actually underway.

 Second, the lack of proactive workforce planning in construction will continue to be a problem until the process evolves. The vast majority of contractors use dated systems like spreadsheets and whiteboards to plan their people. These manual tools can’t provide dynamic visibility into short and long-term scenarios regarding your people, forcing contractors to remain stuck in a reactive planning mode, almost by accident. 

 Lastly, ineffective workforce management compounds. As the work continues to pile up, contractors have to rush decisions, which can lead to mistakes like bad hires due to urgency or increased costs from project delays because labor is constantly being pulled from one job to another. Add the ever-present labor shortage into the mix and the costs and stress only intensify. 

Improving your planning is possible

It should be clear at this point that understanding the future impact of your short-term planning is a key variable in your long-term success, or at the very least, that reactive workforce planning makes it difficult to start your projects off on the right foot. 

 What can be done to fix this? The first step is understanding that your current tools for workforce planning have glaring limitations. The limitations around spreadsheets are: 

• No continuity. Collaboration is also difficult since one or two people own the process and don’t want their data tampered with. 
• Human error. Research from Raymond Panko, of the University of Hawaii, suggests that 88% of spreadsheets have significant errors and won’t indicate errors. In short, you could be using bad data to drive your decision-making without even realizing it’s bad. 
• Poor visibility of your people. You want to be able to use your workforce data to see where a new project can fit into the pipeline and how it’ll impact your workforce. You also want to see the impact of any changes you make with your active projects to see how they’ll affect day-to-day operations and staff allocations. 

These problems can be solved collectively by adopting a proper workforce management tool. A tool like Bridgit Bench, which was built for the complexity of construction and gives a comprehensive view of your workforce and its limitations in the short and long term.

 Short-term changes can be kept simple and all your people and project data are updated in real-time. It’s important to be agile in planning but it’s also important to make decisions based on accurate information. In a dedicated workforce planning tool, the data you’re using is adjusted in real-time and accurately, assuring quickness, quality, and the ability to see the long-term impact. 

Making better decisions long-term

We’ve outlined how short-term decision-making can improve, but the mystery in construction is if long-term people planning is even possible, and if it is, how effective and accurate can the process be with so many dynamic variables?

 You can think of long-term workforce planning in two ways: 

• Real project plans. These include two main activities: Pursuit planning and recruitment. 
• Long-term company vision for your people. This includes providing training so your people are challenged and evolving in their roles and filling skills gaps by creating development opportunities for your employees. 

REAL PROJECT PLANS

The right workforce management tools help to plan your workforce around project pursuits, something many contractors aren’t currently doing because the tools they use don’t allow it. Planning for your pursuits helps to predict if you’ll have enough capacity to take on a new project. This can help you save on bidding costs because you won’t go after projects you can’t take on. The inverse of that is true as well, you can see that you have additional capacity and can bid on projects more aggressively. 

 Planning for pursuits benefits your HR team as well. They can easily see where labor capacity is limited in terms of specific roles and projects. If they see that they need superintendents and carpenters for projects coming up a year from now, they’ll have ample time to create a strong recruitment strategy.

 Planning for the long term this way helps curtail the costs of poor project bids and employee turnover. The latter is a major cost in the construction industry according to Busy Busy, with turnover costs for complex jobs like engineers being 213% of their yearly salary. The construction industry already has low employee retention, so every dollar that can be saved goes a long way. 

LONG-TERM VISION

Every contractor should know where they’re going in the wider industry landscape. A key question in that wider purpose is where are the people in this company going. If you can answer that question, you can likely determine the long-term fate of your company. 

 Once your short and long-term workforce planning strategies are implemented, you can use those same tools to help your team create talent development programs so you know your people are evolving their skill sets. This can also help you mitigate against skilled labor shortages since you’ll be able to identify the exact skill shortage you’re facing. 

 With construction workforce management tools you can track the experience, certifications, education, and historical performance of individual employees. By tracking these employee attributes you can develop individualized plans for employee growth. 

 Employees can gain job skills by being paired with more senior team members. This way one can learn on-site skills and the other can sharpen their leadership capabilities. 

 You can even take this to the next level by using these insights to drive a culture of long-term growth at your company. Ryan Companies is an example of a construction firm attempting to make day-to-day training and long-term professional development a seamless experience. As this culture takes shape in your company, retaining and attracting employees will be easier. This is especially relevant as the aging construction workforce retires.