3 Ways You’re Failing at Optimizing Labor Output With Your Employee Time Tracking Solution
By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing
Labor is typically the biggest expense on projects. To make your projects profitable, you not only have to manage your labor hours, you also need to look at what your employees have completed on the job site. Managing your labor hours and what they’ve completed is even more challenging when you have a mobile workforce. With mobile employees, it’s difficult to get progress information as quickly as you need to keep your project on schedule and on budget.
If you’re not tracking production units with your mobile employee time tracking solution these 3 ways, you’re failing at optimizing your labor output:
Track and Measure Production By Employee – Do you suspect that one employee might be carrying the load on a crew and you might have some underperformers slowing down the whole crew? If you’re running multiple projects at the same time, it’s difficult to know if everyone is being as productive as they could be without being on the job site watching the employees all the time. If you’re tracking production units per employee, you can use it as a motivational tool by using historical averages of production units completed per employee on similar jobs and offer bonuses for the employees that are above average performers. Some construction projects have payouts or accelerator bonuses that are paid when projects hit milestones early or complete a project ahead of schedule. By tracking your production units from the employee, you can drive your employees’ behavior and get more done on a project each day. When you measure production units completed by each employee virtually in real time, you’re better able to manage your project to profitability.
Optimize Staffing Levels to Keep Project On Schedule – If you’re not tracking the production units in near real time with your employee time tracking solution, it’s difficult to know when you need to add additional temporary workers or pull employees from another job to keep your project on schedule. If you’re relying on spreadsheets or paper daily progress reports, you’re making future decisions based on old information. When you’re tracking production units in near real time, you know if you’re falling behind on the scheduled tasks for the day and can request additional workers to keep your project on schedule. You’re making decisions right now based on what’s happening right now. Your supervisors will know if they need to bring in additional employees to stay on schedule. If they’re ahead of the production schedule, they could also decide to cut the hours of some of the staff to reduce labor costs. By knowing what’s produced in near real time, supervisors can right-size their staffing levels to keep their projects on schedule.
Track and Measure Crew and Supervisor Performance – Your supervisors can track the production units completed by their crew each day or whenever his/her employees change their tasks or activities for the day. The supervisor can enter the crew’s production units in near real time so that everyone in the field and in the office knows what’s been accomplished. By tracking production units by crews, you can compare crews against other crews completing similar tasks to see how well your foremen or supervisors are managing their crews. Good friendly competition among the supervisors and crews can motivate staff to be even more productive and keep your projects profitable and on schedule. You might even see more projects come in under budget and completed before your project scheduled deadlines. You can also identify top performing supervisors and foreman and have them share their best practices to get your crews to accomplish more on the job site each day.
WorkMax TIME is the only cloud-based employee time tracking solution that makes it easy to track what’s being completed on the job site without being there from any mobile device anywhere. With WorkMax TIME, you can measure individual employee performance and the performance of your supervisors or foreman to make decisions virtually in real time as employees are completing tasks on the job site. By tracking production units by crew or employee, you can right-size your staffing and know your projects will be profitable before the project is completed.
I can’t get my employees to fill out paper forms – When you’re an employee that works in the office and has to collect the forms from your mobile or field employees, you don’t know what you don’t know. The employees and equipment are out in the field moving from job to job and it’s difficult to get all of your employees’ paperwork back to the office and easily track your assets. You probably provide safety training and Toolbox Talks to educate your employees about why it’s important to fill out safety checklists and to fill out your paper safety forms. You know they’ve received training about filling out a safety checklist of their work area, but most of the time you don’t receive the safety checklists back in the office. In the office, sometimes you don’t hear about safety issues until much later. Because you’re not getting your safety checklists back in the office, you end up being reactive instead of proactive with your safety program. If you hear about a safety issue and when you check the safety logs, you’ll often find that what you heard about in passing doesn’t have a corresponding safety or injury report. You are frequently requesting forms after the fact.
Employees don’t fill out the RIGHT forms – Many times when employees are filling out paper forms for performance improvement plans, safety or injury reports, or safety checklists, it can require additional information to mitigate any risk for your company. For example, if you have an employee complete a daily log report and they answer yes when they are asked if there were any injuries on the job today. You might instruct them on the form that they need to call the Safety Manager and/or Workman’s Compensation manager to see if they need to fill out an additional report. They may not have any them on the form to fill out. If so, they would need to fill out an additional injury report and potentially fill out the OSHA 300 log depending on the injury. It might also require some Workman’s Compensation paperwork also. You also run into issues when employees fill out outdated forms which then require you additional phone calls, emails, and text messages to get the new information you’ve added to the current paper form. There are times when you need an employee to fill out more than one form, so even after you get the first injury report form, you have to send additional follow up forms.
Paper Forms are Late or Missing – Does your HR or payroll team always feel like they are behind the eight ball when it comes to getting new hire paperwork quickly from the field? Typically you’re rushing to manually enter the new hire paperwork into the HR or accounting system because you receive it after the new employee’s start date. This late paperwork compounds more of your headaches because you have to figure out how to get the employee’s hours entered correctly for the hours they worked before you even knew they existed. You also have to assign the job costs to the right projects and cost centers to get accurate job costing. This means that you have to call, email, or text the employee’s supervisor and ask him to send you the information to manually enter it into the accounting/payroll system. 
2. Carpel Tunnel and Tenosynovitis – I have carpal tunnel from typing so many emails to my mobile employees and Tenosynovitis from texting my field employees because I can’t read their handwriting. Whoever taught them penmanship should be fired. If I wasn’t in so much pain from all of this typing, texting, and mouse clicking, I’d send each school board member a letter that they need to do a better job teaching penmanship in schools. My field employees think I can read chicken scratch and hieroglyphics. Imagine that. They might as well also call me the all-knowing Wizard of Oz while they’re at it. I’m also about to lose my index finger because of all the mouse clicking to create job folders to save photos, scanned forms, and videos into the right folders on the server to keep all the documentation organized. Don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is that I have to first read chicken scratch and then I have to spend hours manually entering the employee time tracking information into the payroll and accounting systems. The several hours it takes for me to do manual data entry for the employee time tracking and payroll, doesn’t even include the hours I spent entering paper safety forms or other HR forms into other business applications. It’s 2018 and I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling for paper. We are not even in a love/hate relationship, I hate paper and manual processes and my poor hands can’t take it anymore.
MANY WAYS TO COLLECT TIME
MANY WAYS TO ASSIGN OR ALLOCATE TIME
