Dee Davis (00:25)
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm your host, Dee Davis. Today we are going to talk about the impacts of manpower changes on projects. If you've been doing this very long, you've probably seen the impact of manpower changes mid-project. Everything from trust to communication, tribal knowledge, and on-site rapport is impacted.
All of it eating your profit margin and impacting your ability to be productive and effective on the job. Think about the last time you started a new job and how long it took you to learn the ins and outs of how things worked in that organization. Then multiply that in construction because each project site is also its own organization.
With the increased speed and frequency of people changing jobs, the likelihood of this happening on your project is greater than ever. Let's talk about the details of these impacts and what you can do to prevent it. Everything is going great on your project. Construction's moving along, the trades, the GC, the designers are all getting along pretty well. It's kind of that sweet spot in the project. Maybe 20 to 50 % complete, then it happens. Maybe.
A superintendent or foreman tells you they're leaving the company. Maybe your boss tells you they're taking your best labor leader to another project. Or maybe one of your labor leaders asked to transfer to a job closer to their house because the commute is killing them. Maybe your project engineer or your project coordinator that's holding everything together for the whole project administratively leaves for another project or another opportunity.
However it happens, you are now facing a manpower change on your project. Ideally, we prevent this to the best of our ability, but that's not always possible, right? Let's talk about the commute. There seems to be an unspoken rule in construction that you're assigned to the project that is as far away from your house as possible. I spent years commuting 60 to 90 minutes each way.
Whether it's because of traffic or distance, it doesn't matter, it sucks. We all want the best people for our job and we all have our favorites. But sometimes that means an unruly commute for your people. long projects, can really wear on you. At the time of this recording, I am working closer to the project site than I ever have in my entire career. I am 15 minutes away.
It's not because someone decided to build something really close to my house. I gave up on that a long time ago. It's because I'm working out of town and I rented a place very close to the site, very deliberately.
The next thing that could be happening is your boss is reassigning assets. I saw this happen more than it ever should. There are many reasons why a labor superintendent or a project executive might want to play musical chairs with your people. Some of it is a crisis on another project, maybe a promise they made to a client. Believe it or not, I even had one boss that just thought it was fun to mix things up on project teams.
with no regard for the impacts of the said projects. If you ask me, it was more about having the power to play labor chess with company assets than it was about anything else. The other thing that can happen is someone leaving the company. There are so many reasons why somebody might leave and it's essential that you find out why they're leaving. It can be a little sticky sometimes because it's kind of personal.
But hopefully if you're a good leader, you have some kind of ongoing relationship with your people and this isn't too big of an issue. There may or may not be anything you can do to keep the person on the team. They might have a personal reason to leave, but you might also uncover a key issue on your team or within your organization that's impacting turnover. I've said it again and again, if the door to your project or your business is revolving.
then you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself why. You might not like what you see, but the only path to fixing it is acknowledging that you have a problem and addressing it. As we've discussed before, turnover can cost you more than 150 % of the salary of the person that leaves. That addresses productivity impacts just within your organization.
but on a construction site, it's multiplied because the ripple effect goes through the organization and out into the other organizations as well. A construction project is its own organization that is temporarily formed for the purpose of building a project. And it consists of many organizations, sometimes more than 50 individual companies,
and they are all dependent on one another for a period of time. What impacts one impacts many.
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So what do I do, Dee? Well, the answer always comes back to the same few things, leadership, communication, and people skills. Let's talk about leadership for a minute. What is leadership? It's someone to take charge for the benefit of all. A captain of the ship, if you will, to tell us clearly what are the mission and goals of the project.
As the captain, it's your job to get to know your crew, to communicate with them, and to have an open door policy where you can talk about things that would impact turnover. You don't have to be the top dog to be a leader, by the way. There's situational leadership. I love seeing when somebody who is a lower rank, so to speak, takes charge of the situation and just handles it.
You don't have to be the top dog to be a leader. Anyone can do this from any position.
Communication. The best vision or plan in the world is no good without clear and consistent communication to everyone. People tend to miss the mark on this in one of two ways.
They either don't communicate at all and think everyone can read their minds, or they say something one time to one person and thinks that everybody's just gonna know. My parents used to do this to me and my siblings all the time. They would tell one of us something and just assume that the rest of us would find out. Well, usually being the youngest, I would be the last to find out. It would drive me crazy. Saying something one time isn't enough.
Have you ever had a foreman or a PM that would get mad at you because you didn't follow the plan that they never told you about? People aren't mind readers. We have to use our words to communicate early and often.
Did you know that communication is the number one reason for schedule delays on construction projects? That goes from the top down all the way across the ranks and even trade to trade. We don't do our best work in a silo and come on guys, if we can chatter all day about fantasy football, we can talk about this stuff too.
People skills. Ignoring the people side of the business is absolute death sentence to your project. I've seen the most grumpy, crusty superintendents take the time to get to know the craft, thank them for their efforts, and get to know them as human beings. You don't have to be best friends or barbecue together on the weekends if you don't want to.
But being blindsided by somebody that is unhappy at work or exhausted from a long commute shouldn't happen. I recently did a project that had significant turnover in many of the organizations. The project was constantly in a state of chaos and disorganization because every time we seemed to get a groove going, somebody else would leave. This superintendent, that foreman, that engineer that had all the history.
It was like losing a limb every time it happened. And because there was no strong leadership providing the overall team a plan, a vision, and a strong sense of us, we're all in this together, it was a little bit of every man for himself. Without strong leadership, there's no good communication and the people skills fall apart.
Righting an off course ship like that is really hard work, but it can be done. And you might be thinking, hey, Dee, I'm not the CEO of the company or the ops manager or whatever. I can't control the organization. Okay, fair enough. But you can control your project, your environment and your space. I'm almost never in a position to make all the big decisions, but I can look at my team around me and provide the leadership
the communication and the people skills that they need to keep the ship going in the right direction, keep morale up and provide as clear of direction as I possibly can so that we can achieve our goals together. So the action for you is to look at yourself and say, hey, can I be a leader here? Can I be the communicator here? Can I provide the people skills so that
I don't have people unexpectedly walking out the door and leaving my project causing all this disruption knocking off my right hand, then my left hand, then my right foot. It's horrible. We can all do better with leadership, communication and people skills to prevent these things from happening to us on our projects. Thank you for joining us. Please like and share this episode with a friend.
and leave us a comment or a question. Thanks so much.
