Best Practices for Increasing Productivity on Construction Sites
The first step to improving productivity on a job site is knowing the areas where organizations often come up short. Not every company will experience all of these, but a unique combination of them.
- Poor organization of management teams that handle making decisions, procurement, and workers
- Failure to communicate between teams and roles in both timeliness and adequate information
- Poor planning for short-term schedules as work dynamics change
- Lack of sound risk management to identify long-term or severe hazards to the project
- Contract misunderstandings
- Failure to hire experts or invest in training workers to be qualified for tasks
With these shortcomings in mind, let us dive into some of the best practices you can implement to help boost productivity on your construction sites. Even a few basic improvements can have significant and long-lasting impacts.
1. Focus on Management Skills
If your leaders, schedulers, and site managers know what they are doing, it will make their work and everyone who relies on them much more straightforward. Each role requires a unique set of skills to complete their work. Invest in training and providing tools to help your management team excel at long-term and short-term decisions and work.
Communication is essential on worksites to complete work safely and correctly. But communication needs to occur not only between workers completing construction tasks, but across groups and management levels. A core responsibility of management and site supervisors should be to make sure information is being shared about risks and delays as soon as a problem is noticed.
2. Put Emphasis on Planning
The start of any project is a plan, and the better you can make that plan from the outset, the more productive the rest of your work will be.
- Research the type of project you will be undertaking
- Analyze client requirements, goals, and timelines
- Track your companies resources and worker schedules
- Do upfront risk analysis for safety and potential delays or cost increases
As we touched on above, documentation should be thorough and communicated effectively to all stakeholders within your organization, sub-contractors, and clients. Management software can be a valuable tool in helping manage all of this data.
3. Emphasize Safety
From the start, your plan should take into account difficult parts of the construction project. As the site work begins and evolves, your management team should be vigilant daily to notice and address site safety hazards. By planning for safety, you help avoid potentially costly mistakes or damages. And the fewer mistakes made, the better you can stay on schedule.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is essential to any work site safety plan. PPE goes beyond making sure workers are wearing hard hats or appropriate footwear.
Environmental hazards like noise levels slowly become hazardous to workers, as do heavy loads and lifting. Ensure your personnel are provided with the appropriate PPE and are instructed on the proper use of PPE
4. Invest in Your Workers
Maintain and build your workforce across all levels by providing and promoting ongoing training and learning opportunities. Well-trained and experienced workers who know all they can about operating machines or doing a job will always be more productive.
After you have worked on training, make sure to support and protect your employees. Overwork in any job can lead to lowered productivity and increased mistakes. And on construction sites, both can be extreme safety hazards. Promote and provide a space for workers to take a few moments to rest their minds and body, especially when extreme heat or cold sets in on a job site.
5. Adapt to Changing Practices
Part of the training for workers and management should focus on adopting new technology and tools as they become available. Technology, software, and machinery developments can help you build better, faster, and safer. Strides have been made in pre assembly and fabrication offsite, which can be done regardless of the weather. This helps keep you on schedule and can reduce waste materials.
6. Know Your Limits
General contractors and site supervisors are responsible for ensuring a project stays on time, under budget, and safe, which is an expansive undertaking, whether for construction, civil infrastructure, or other general jobs. Be able to recognize and admit your own team's limits.
For the most expensive and technical equipment that is only situationally useful, it is often better to rent or subcontract the work to a specialized professional than to buy your own and expect a standard crew to know how it works.
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Even with a simple job, the right tool makes an enormous difference. Similarly, the right equipment, backed with experience and support, can make your construction project easier, safer, and more productive.
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Contact us today if you would like to discuss your needs and whether or not our services and equipment will work for your construction project. We provide free on-site quotes and evaluations.