Your Workforce: Doing More with Less

Doing more with less, may be a cliché, but clichés are often based on reality. At a time when so many contract-shop owners are too squeezed to hire more staff, they need to focus on maximizing their current human ‘assets.’ But how do you increase productivity without overstressing your employees?

Adapt the big-picture mindset. Small business owners sometimes fail to shift focus as they grow. Even if they have dozens of employees, they still operate as if they were a single shop. “These small business owners tend to work harder and not smarter,” says small-business coach Dan Murphy, president/founder of Cincinnati-based The Growth Coach. “They focus only on today and not tomorrow. ”

As a business grows, owners need to take a step back and act as the stewards of a broader vision. They need to examine everyday work processes and come up with a streamlined, systematic approach for each job. Then, employees need to be trained on each approach. A side effect of this planning is that productivity will increase, Murphy says. “When crews simply ‘wing it,’ it’s surely going to be an inefficient approach,” he says. “Job plans aren’t followed properly. Equipment isn’t on the site at the right time. Too few or too many people are on the job. A company plan for every job eliminates that, and owners need to come up with the same kind of plan for their sub-contractors.”

Reduce culture-driven inefficiencies. Many expanding small businesses retain counterproductive processes simply because they were in place from the beginning. To increase efficiency, business owners must take a hard look at work habits in order to trim the proverbial fat. “As an example, we worked with a company that had a supplier fax over purchase orders on a daily basis,” says business-efficiency expert Mark Crandall, founder/president of Orlando-based Point North Consulting. “We saw the opportunity to streamline by simply having the vendor export the purchase orders electronically. It saved the company four hours a day of manually entering purchase-order data.” The main takeaway is that owners need to be vigilant about efficiency throughout their operations. You may not need to automate every single process, but you have to ask yourself whether certain unproductive processes are really necessary, and eliminate them if they’re not useful.

Incentives are always good motivators. Businesses that share the spoils of success with employees are known to thrive, provided these incentives are clearly defined and of value to employees. If you’re attempting to do more with less, work crews and administrative-support teams won’t feel so stressed if they feel that they’re getting as much out of the hard work as you are. ReThink Rewards, for example, is an online program that employers launch to provide points to staff for exceeding expectations. Points can be used in product-purchase rewards from brands such as Callaway Golf, Canon, Bose, Sony, Weber and other top companies. Or, you could simply tie the incentive to something all employees understand and appreciate — additional income. “You must involve your employees in the success of the business,” says business-growth consultant/expert Steve Kaplan, author of Be the Elephant: Build a Bigger, Better Business. “This could be accomplished in the form of a profit-based bonus tied to efficiency.”

Get your employees involved. Although incentives work in many cases, some contract-shop owners simply don’t have the resources. But there are ways to motivate employees without providing rewards or monetary bonuses. “People will change if you give them the opportunity to create change,” says management consultant Craig Ross, president of Lakewood, Colo.-based Pathways to Leadership and co-author of the new book, Stomp the Elephant in the Office. “It’s the processes that are flawed. So invite and include your employees’ ideas into your productivity-improvement plan. Nothing motivates more than being invested in a strategy.”

Tools are out there to help. In today’s world, there are resources both on and offline that can help you be more productive. The Construction Communicator online construction management software, for example, was developed specifically to help contractors and other members of the construction team increase productivity without increasing workloads. Among other capabilities, the Web-based software helps contractors deal with requests for proposals and other contract documents.