How to track employee productivity for construction project

Why do we need to track? 

If you are a specialty or trade contractor who performs work on site and uses labor, you need to track your employees productivity. You have to understand where the weak links are, how to improve processes, how to make work easier, and so on. You always have to focus on the tasks where your employees spend the most time. Besides, this is what lean production teaches us. Look where your team is wasting time, find it, and fix it.

These tasks, where your team spends the most time, are bottlenecks. By fixing them, you will improve overall speed, reduce costs, and make your employees feel more motivated.

How to track

There are two ways to increase productivity: one is by using spreadsheets (which is not the best way), and the other is by using construction software.

Using spreadsheets for calculating employee productivity

There is no doubt this is the cheapest option; everyone has spreadsheets, whether in Word or Google Docs. Spreadsheets work well as long as you are managing one team and are the owner and user of the sheet. Once you start to share the sheets, there can be risks of data being deleted or lost, more revisions starting to appear, and you getting lost between them, among other typical problems with spreadsheets.

Using software for calculating employee productivity

We are in times when technology advancements are increasing our productivity. The same thing happens with construction software. They are designed to make your work easier and more productive. Construction software such as PlanUpPro is designed for specialty and trade contractors who are performing site work. With it, you can easily track your employees productivity. Let’s see how.

Daily reports

Same thing as you would do with daily reports, with PlanUpPro you also have to give data about daily performance. All you have to do is write down who worked on site, what tasks they did, how many hours they worked, and how much they did. PlanUpPro uses the latest advances in AI. He then uses this data to simulate different scenarios and give the best possible results. PlanUpPro has been trained on hundreds of different projects, and it has learned that on site, many things can happen that affect performance. So he will also learn from your daily performance, and he knows that anything can happen on site.

Employee productivity

We strongly suggest that after the first 10 days, once your team has performed work on site, You then can start to analyze these data. Below, you can see screenshots of what each employee’s productivity looks like between tasks. Anything above 1 is good and better than expected. This time you will have to focus on places where performance is below 1. You then can use these data and have discussions with a team of how to improve productivity, maybe there is something missing.

Conclusions

Margins in the construction industry are very low. Contractors can’t afford to make mistakes, and that is why for trade and specialty contractors employee productivity is a key metric. With construction software such as PlanUpPro, it is easy to track productivity and improve it well in advance. You saw for yourself how quickly and easily it is to get data. The best part is that everything is stored on the cloud, and you can have instant access to any of your projects from anywhere.

Besides construction industry hasn’t made any progress in the last decades. It is one of the last industries which is not adapting to the latest advancements in the tech and software industry. 

Author – Emil Berzins. Follow me on