“With ALICE Technologies, you can make the most of your resources, which will help address the labor problem, because you use your labor in most efficiently,”
Chief Marketing Officer, ALICE TechnologiesMisconceptions
If construction’s labor problem is also a public relations problem, then the construction industry has to come up with other solutions.
“Engagement is most critical,” says Mongeau. “When young people engage in multiple, hands-on, career-exploring activities, it generates interest, which will translate into a higher number of entrants. Our workforce desperately needs more qualified, skilled workers from multiple workforce development pipelines. To address this need, ABC developed a workforce development framework, which targets key entry points, such as veteran organizations, reentry programs, colleges, and high schools.”
And, although ABC has been a leader on this issue for years, Mongeau encourages individual companies to get the word out about the great career opportunities in construction. “Construction companies need to lead the charge and promote opportunities in the construction industry whenever possible. People don’t know what they don’t know, and becoming aware can make all the difference,” he says.
Although addressing misconceptions about the construction industry and making people aware of opportunities in the field is a noble task, that effort will take years to attract enough people into the construction workforce.
“We tried to turn Uber drivers into construction workers but, it’s a difficult task and really difficult to scale. People have a lot of reasons for wanting to not work in construction. Even if we go into high schools and direct students into construction, it’s going to take 10 to 20 years before we have enough laborers,” says Buchner.
Maximize your current workforce
Technology companies are seeing the skilled shortage as an opportunity for digital solutions.
Trunk Tools researched the labor shortage and came up with three possible solutions, each with a different timeline. The solution with the shortest timeline doesn’t involve recruiting new people to the industry; it involves making the current workforce more productive. Construction’s labor issue may actually be a productivity issue. Trunk Tools incentivizes productivity and safety with the existing workforce and aligns the project management team with shared cost savings.
“In construction, baseline productivity is between 20 and 30 percent,” says Buchner. “Our company helps clients incentivize output, so they can increase productivity. If a task is scheduled to be completed Friday, you can approach the crew working on it, and offer each person an additional sum of money for completing the job on Thursday.”
Consider the following scenario. A task takes five days for 10 employees to complete and you pay each employee $30/hour ($240/day). Completing the task in five days will cost you (10 employees x $240/day x 5 days =) $12,000 in labor. If you give each person a bonus of $100 for completing the task in four days, and they complete it in four days (and according to specification), then the labor cost for completing the task is (10 employees x $240/day x 4 days + $100 x 10 employees =) $10,600.
So, the company in the above scenario would save a little money on labor, and they would also shave a whole day off their schedule.
“We work with the project manager on site. They give us a data dump of project information and then we use our sophisticated algorithms to merge it all together. From there, we suggest daily targets and goals, taking into consideration the project budget,” says Buchner. “The project management team can then agree to implement the suggestions or not.”
Improve worker productivity
Construction companies can also enhance the productivity of their current workforce by improving scheduling.
Construction companies use the ALICE Technologies platform to improve the utilization of their workforce. They populate the platform with project data, so they can create multiple schedules and perform what-if analyses. They can ask questions, such as: If I add a second shift, how much faster would we build? And, is it worth the cost? How will speeding up one part of a project affect other parts?
“That exploration results in shorter build schedules and lower project costs, as well as maximize employee productivity,” says Carpenter.
If you have difficulty finding general laborers, for example, you could run a couple of scenarios using different pay grades to determine what is the ideal pay that will attract enough laborers and result in the job being completed at a low cost and on time. You could also run a scenario where you replace some labor with a machine.
“With ALICE Technologies, you can make the most of your resources, which will help address the labor problem, because you use your labor in most efficiently,” says Carpenter.