Steel contractors are greatly affected by labor shortages and other economic forces. Six out of ten steel contractors stated that the scarcity of skilled labor affected half of their work, resulting in quality issues, increased rework, and budget overruns. 

The best way to avoid or minimize such problems is to optimize your labor resources to perform existing and future jobs. If your company specializes in steel erection or fabrication, employing strategies to increase your crew’s productivity and do your work with greater efficiency is vital despite the labor shortage in the construction industry. 

Steel contractors can follow these four strategies to optimize their labor resources and expand their business amidst the challenging demands in the construction industry. 

Standardize Processes

There are tasks and processes in the construction industry that need to be standardized. Forty percent in the steel erection and fabrication service report that it is prevalent that workers spend an average time on low-productivity tasks, particularly in the administrative area. 

Your team can streamline workflow and improve work quality by implementing a standard process for common activities. Your field workers will be more efficient and effective in performing their respective tasks if they have a standard to follow. It is also true in office work where standardization is vital to ensure reliable and consistent data management. 

For example, you should standardize the production and submission of daily reports to ensure regularity and eliminate unreliable information. There are pieces of data such as out-of-scope tasks, change impacts, and movement of labor resources that should be disseminated according to a standard process. 

Processes in handling the project also require standardization to ensure every department and team member is utilizing the same scheduling, progress monitoring, and job-costing software without needing to access local servers or personal computers to obtain crucial information. 

You can allocate and deploy your labor resources without issues if your team observes a standard process. Standardization helps your crew to recognize where processes stand. It also fosters an environment that puts importance on efficiency and productivity. 

Get Rid of Manual Methods

Fewer workers but more work to perform. It is a common problem for steel contractors. Add to that the workers who spend time on low-productivity tasks using manual methods. In communication and documentation areas, workers spend a quarter of their time documenting information on paper or managing reports or drawings manually. 

It is time to eliminate outdated methods that do more harm than good. Tasks take more time to carry out, and you increase risks of miscommunication and error if you still use manual processes. 

A project will be behind schedule if your crew members wait around for updated drawings to be printed. This fact can create overtime and cost overrun, which can adversely impact the entirety of the project. 

Adopt Construction Management Technology

Steel contractors should invest in new technologies to boost productivity and efficiency. For example, investing in construction management technology can put your processes in order and establish a centralized system where crew members can communicate and collaborate to improve operations. 

Using technology can help steel contractors reduce errors and avoid margin erosion caused by missed changed orders, payment delays, and expensive rework. If you use construction management software, there will be no more manual processes and outdated documentation because you will now utilize cloud-based solutions that standardize your work. 

Real-time data from the field allows office staff to make informed decisions and vice versa. Actionable performance insights across the company can help teams enhance safety and quality standards.

You can use a separate workforce management software to ensure the right individuals are assigned the right tasks. It also helps monitor labor resources in real-time to ensure they do not get behind schedule. 

Increase Efforts to Retain Workers

Many of the workers in the steel fabrication and erection industry are retiring, and others are probably leaving to work in other industries. This fact can be detrimental to the industry given that there is already a labor shortage. So, it is crucial for steel contractors to boost their efforts to retain their skilled laborers. 

• Increasing safety and efficiency in the workplace by leveraging new technologies will help you keep your workers. 

• Standardized processes enable crew members to foster work-life balance without compromising projects. 

• Manual processes are tedious and cumbersome, and you can eliminate them using new technologies. This strategy will, in turn, boost efficiency and workers’ morale. 

Endnote

Labor scarcity is one of the challenges that steel contractors face that directly affects the success of their operations. It can be hard to expand your business predictably when there are so many market variables at play. Fortunately, there are measures to ensure you make the most of your labor resources and increase the productivity and efficiency of workers.