The Construction Manager should ensure his team is accountable and responsible for the workplace quality, labour productivity and schedule execution. Empowering people means ensuring employees are answerable for these. A construction organization should put forward ways to bring out the best among their employees to improve business profitability and performance.
Performance Enablers: A construction organization should always drive for continuous improved performance and client satisfaction. There are software tools available to measure the construction performances of employees. However, to improve overall performance, various business and management processes need to be implemented.
1. Organization Culture
Contractors should try to push the decision-making process down the organization structure, to include the employees, and create flatter management structures. Contractors should restructure and reorganize their employees into self-managed and self-decision making teams. This process often requires considerable changes in an organizational culture that involves the re-training of the employees. This process of empowerment can be implemented by using software tools to communicate, capture and collaborate information easily. Adopting such software tools, make employee involvement easier, in which these self-managed teams takes lead for planning, organizing, and determining how work should be performed. This also encourages the employees to develop new technical abilities, along with the interpersonal skills and problem-solving abilities required to perform such tasks.
2. Training - eLearning
Though not a commonly thought tool in India, training is a big performance enabler.
Rapid changes in construction technology, construction methodologies, and material advances, there will be a dramatic effect on the construction industry’s future
Skill requirements. The construction business will only be in a position grow if they have better-educated employees, more highly skilled crafts, and in possession of detailed information about changes in technology, work practices, and management techniques. Producing and maintaining a highly trained, multi-skilled, self-managed workforce has traditionally involved considerable investment. However, eLearning tools help to achieve this challenge easily. Use online education tools, such as www.constructskills.com, to implement training programs.
3. Incentives
There are tools available to reduce the complexities involved in the implementation of empowerment. It deals with procedures and methodologies followed by the construction contractor during the construction and post-construction phases of the project. It concentrates on how a contractor organizes a typical Jobsite, along with planning, scheduling, cost - schedule - quality controls, and document management and information communication.
4. Project Management Leadership Skills
The Project is managed remotely from head office. Strong leadership is required to manage projects efficiently. The Vision of the entire project, along with what needs to be achieved, needs to be communicated. The insistence that the project meets safety, quality, financial, and schedule objectives should be spread across all parties involved in the project. The project manager should be able to understand various construction activity workflows, interdependencies among activities, and ways to motivate crews, as and when necessary. Maintaining relationships between various team members, across various parties such as architect design consultants, specialized agencies, and owner is important. A construction manage must realize, the timing of every decisions making is important, from purchasing to the allocation of resources, to mobilizing man-power
Reference: Andrew D. F. Price, Alan Bryman, And Andrew R. J. Dainty, Member, ASCE 2004 article on Leadership and Management
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