Manpower Issues for the Construction Industry
Yes, the database has been designed for construction, but Accelerate HR would also fit the bill for any business where some or all of the following conditions apply:
Most businesses have a fairly stable headcount - the number may change by a few percentage points a year, but not much more than that.
Not so for construction companies, particularly those who win large contracts. You have a project and a deadline. You need the people - some perhaps with specialist skills - to get the job finished on schedule. And then when the job's finished, you may not need them any more.
Planning for these fluctuating labor requirements is critical. You won the tender by offering a competitive price. Now, if you get your manpower costs wrong, there goes your profit, just as surely as if you buy or use too many materials.
The plan doesn't just need to be good. It needs to be used. Whenever you need more people you should be able to refer back to your plan and see immediately whether you're on target or not. Then you can make the right decisions. Do you need to sub-contract? Increase the overtime? Hire new people? Hire better people? And when the plan needs to change, the plan should give management a clear understanding of the implications of their decisions.
Where we live and work - in the Arab Gulf - most of the labor force is expatriate. It'll probably be some time before we can draw from a local pool of skilled labor.
This gives us a number of special problems. Almost everyone is going to need a residence permit and a work visa. And in Abu Dhabi, we've identified a 29-step process between making the initial job offer and an employee's arrival in the country. At each step, things can go wrong, causing delay. Our personnel admin tools need to track the process and minimize the delays, which may be project-critical.
Your business may hire its expertise from out-of-state rather than out-of-country, but the same principles apply: it's important to mobilize your teams quickly. If you're using outside recruitment agencies or consultants, you need to be able to see who's available right now, and whether they're prepared to move to a job. Then you need to get them on-site as quickly as you can. So we hope you'll find our hiring tools useful too.
HR departments in construction companies we've worked with seem to be very good at creating paperwork for other departments. Timesheets, vacation applications, overtime approvals, hiring requests, job transfer documents, and so on. Our aim is to simplify most of these processes, save everyone's time - and to Accelerate HR.
Let's take a simple example - a vacation application. In too many businesses it's like this. Employee fills in an application form. Department head checks the appication, and sends it to HR. HR checks the employees entitlement, often manually. HR may then send application to Finance, if there's a question of a salary advance (which in the Gulf is the norm - it's called a 'leave settlement'). Finance returns approved document to HR. HR enters details in a database and signs the document, then notifies the employee. The employee has changed the dates ...
At every step - in this and in all the other modules - there are always 5 critical questions.
These are the questions and principles on which Accelerate HR is based.
Critical to a reduction in the workload is an attendance management system that eliminates the requirement for managers to produce time-sheets and simplifies overtime and absence reporting. For example, in other businesses, overtime tends to be occasional. When someone puts in more hours than normal, the right question to ask is 'Did the manager pre-approve overtime?' But in construction, overtime is endemic, and a better question is "Tell me which of those people who worked longer yesterday were NOT doing overtime?" Why is it a better question? Because, in our circumstances, it'll cut down the administration.
A particular issue for construction in our area is when expatriate staff leave for extended vacations or periods of unpaid leave. Most businesses we know take these people off the payroll. Then they need to go through a series of complicated procedures when the people 'rejoin', recalculating vacation allowances, the number of days worked or not worked, the leaving entitlements. It doesn't need to be this complicated - if the attendance system is properly synchronised with the database to do the heavy lifting.
We've already discussed how an effective attendance system can save hours of work each month in maintaining staff records and preparing the payroll. But for our client there were some special requirements too:
Most of the staff were working out on a site which was spread over a 5 kilometer radius. There were no phone lines or internet connectivity on the site, and given the nature of the work, it was not practical to lay down cables. But mobile phones worked. So for communicating with the site, we needed a system where attendance data could be exchanged via SMS
It was important to track where people were actually working on the site, as they moved from location to location, so that we could get a employee accurate costing for each job.
The client used sub-contracted staff - and also hired people out to other businesses. The attendance tracking system needed to simplify the task of paying or billing sub-contractors, and elimate the possibility of mistakes or disputes.
But above all, it was all about eliminating paperwork and minimizing data entry - all those attendance sheets and shift-plans which took so much of the site managers' and foremen's time. We wanted them to be able to stay focused on their real jobs.