Manpower Planning: What are the principles?
Manpower planning is an essential element of any construction company. Without properly allocated manpower, jobs won’t be done on time or workers with the right skills won’t be available. Manpower planning must be ongoing and deliberate in order to be successful. Here are some principles to manpower planning.
1. Stay Up to Date
Whether you’re having in person or remote meeting with your workers to organize projects or you’re communicating in some other way, it is imperative that the data you draw from remains up to date.
You need to know exactly who is available for projects and have information like coming vacations, retirement, or special skills available during project planning. The data that you’re using should have all upcoming projects that have been scheduled to date. Ideally, it will also tell you something about your resource availability.
2. Make Predictions
You can’t always predict what your workforce is going to do. After all, people can be unpredictable. There are lots of opportunities available for construction workers. Your workers could easily abandon your job for another that is higher paying than you can afford.
By making careful predictions based on the information that you do have, you can do more to plan successful projects and remain flexible to the changes in your workforce. Software can be very helpful in enabling you to make accurate predictions about your manpower.
- Capacity management. Find out how much your team can accomplish, then imagine that one or two members of your workforce were suddenly unavailable. Could your company recover and still achieve their goals? If not, how significant are delays likely to be?
- Forecasting. Extend trends out to help you make decisions about hiring that may need to be done, or when a raise to keep an employee who is considering leaving is appropriate.
- Staff calendar. Every vacation and time off event is important for your project planning. Your staff calendar should be responsive, consistently up to date, and easy to manipulate
- Skills and experience tracking. Every employee is different. Understanding the skills and experience of your workforce is the best way to allocate your manpower appropriately. After all, you don’t want two workers with similar skillsets to end up at the same site while another site is left without workers with that skillset.
- Full project history. Looking at the history of a project makes it easier for you to make accurate predictions about the future. You may remember aspects of a project inaccurately, but good tracking software will make the full, accurate history available to you.
How Can Efficient Manpower Planning Help Your Construction Company?
If your current manpower management is working well enough, you may wonder whether it is worth implementing new strategies such as software to optimize your manpower planning. Regardless of your current system, making revisions to integrate data collection and intelligent software is a good choice for your company.
- Cut meetings. Let’s face it, we all hate meetings. Meetings waste time that could be spent working. Too often, it’s difficult to keep them on track and everyone emerges from them without being sure what they were supposed to have learned. Great manpower planning using automated features will make it easier for everyone to see the information that they need without meetings
- Save on resource planning. When resource planning, including workforce planning, is properly automated, you’ll be able to spend a lot less time on it. Furthermore, the time that you do spend resource planning will be more productive.
- Avoid manual processes. If you are recording important information by having your employees enter int manually, you’re wasting employee time and taking a risk that data won’t be entered. Automating these processes is a safer and more time efficient option.
