Employee development is critical to business growth, especially in the construction industry. Creating a strategy to provide your employees with opportunities and clear direction on how to increase their skills will not only advance their careers; it will also advance your business.
With more experience and training in their toolboxes, your skilled laborers and construction workers are better prepared to help your construction company take on more projects. They see the company’s success as parallel to their own.
At CCS Construction Staffing, we’ve worked with hundreds of contractors looking to boost the skills on their job sites. We’ve seen these companies change direction in a matter of months, because improving employee development also improves employee productivity. Here’s how:
Clarify Your Goals
The planning can be tedious, but this information is extremely valuable, especially to employees in the construction industry. Take the time to decide what you want your company to accomplish this year, next year, in five years and so on. Then, be sure your permanent and temporary employees understand these goals and how their positions fit into the bigger picture. Regular meetings, along with explanations of their individual employee responsibilities, will keep your project productive, your contractors moving forward and your job site accident free.
Reconcile Employment Needs
Take the time to get to know what your employees, both laborers and tradesmen, want out of their careers. Clarify the objectives and goals they have for themselves to figure out what kind of training they need to excel. You can even turn this into a peer training where some of your stronger workers can take on leadership roles. Then, you need to decide how their goals will benefit your construction company. Once you find the areas that cross over, give these workers a chance to develop into better employees for themselves and for you.
Create an Action Plan
How can you get a skilled laborer from point A to point B? Does he or she need additional, off-site training? Will more hands-on experience during this project be enough? After you determine the skills you want an employee to work on, you have to figure out how that work will happen. How will this training affect the flow and productivity on your current project? Consider bringing in outside trainers or temporary employees to help keep the job site running smoothly when you step back to focus on development.
Communicate Continuously
Don’t just train once and be done; your action plan should look ahead at future opportunities. If one of your skilled laborers shows promise as an HVAC tech, plan out the steps needed to earn that new certification. It won’t happen overnight. Development can also come in the form of weekly training sessions that focus on essential soft skills. Sessions on time management can help boost productivity, just as diversity training can facilitate a smoother, more harmonious work environment.
If your construction firm doesn’t emphasize employee development, then chances are your employees will eventually look elsewhere. Not only does training correlate directly with recruitment and retention, it also impacts productivity. Are your employees under-qualified or lacking the skills you need to bid for a new project? Give CCS Construction Staffing a call. We can help you meet the challenges that impact today’s changing construction workforce.