Coaching and Gamifying the Construction Job Site

Gamification in construction is a powerful tool that can drive the highest productivity out of your employees and subcontractors. But gamification can be a tricky and confusing process, and requires that the contract take on the role of head coach for their teams. But what does it mean to be the head coach and what does it take to gamify your job site and at the same time ensure you are keeping a successful and healthy workforce on task?

Our Host Mike Merrill invites gamification and HR expert Joe Rotella, Chief Value Officer at Delphia Consulting to discuss what gamification is, what it can do on your job site, the role of coach and how you can increase your overall productivity while making the job site a little more fun for everyone.

Key Takeaways:

1. Both coaching and gamifying the job site should be completely focused on motivation. Coaching and gamifying the job site have the ability to get out of hand without the right focus. Make sure that every time you are coaching and every time you are adding a game element for your crews that the main goal is to drive their motivation to another level and everything else will follow.
2. As a coach you need to lose the ego, be humble and be curious. It is easy for managers and employers to get into trouble when they forget what it takes to effectively lead their people. The good news is it starts and ends with three things: don’t fake it and be authentic, be humble and never decrease those around you and shut up, listen and learn from your employees and subcontractors.
3. To get good information out of your staff it takes 2-5 questions. You can ask a question, “How did it go today?” “Good.” “Okay.” And leave it there learning nothing. Instead, if the time is taken to dig a little deeper, with another 2, 3 or 4 questions, not the same one, but coming at it from different ways you’ll see your employees become more and more willing to open up. When you’ve done it long enough and built a culture without an ego, built on humility and continually curious your employees will want to be open about how it went and as a leader you can’t attack them for what they said. Instead focus on what they did and what are we going to do going forward to improve performance. You build that kind of culture. It’ll just keep growing. You’ll learn more. And a learning organization always does better than an organization that’s static.