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Problems with Crew Scheduling and How You Can Avoid Them

September 23, 2022

Multiple crews on different sites, field workers shifting from one site to another, unpredictable rescheduling, unplanned sick days, etc. – all of these issues are completely normal and come with the workload increase. With mismanaging these challenges, on time project closing is practically impossible, and they can cost you money and reputation. We’ve covered some of the problems with crew scheduling and offer you a solution that should help you avoid them in the future.

Keeping up with multiple sites

If you’re in the Telco business and are experiencing strong ramp-upp, then you might be struggling with keeping up with dynamic shifts on multiple construction sites. You’re expected to manage your employees, keep up with safety compliance, and make sure your customer is updated with all new changes, all at the same time on multiple sites.

It’s complex, it’s time-consuming, and can be very stressful. And not only that – with so many things on your plate mistakes occur more than you would like to, and you may have to work longer, and the whole project could be delayed.

The solution?

Allow a crew scheduling software, or a fieldwork management software to help you.

In CloseOut, you can schedule employees, have live updates of who is where, and how much time they are spending traveling and onsite working, making authorized and unauthorized stops.

An additional useful feature we included in CloseOut is letting your employee know when and where they are being dispatched. Employee will get a notification and will be able to see his work scheduled in the app.

That way, you not only have a clear overview of the schedules on all sites, but your employees do too.

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Only certain employees have proper certification

When working with specialists on the site, you need to make sure that they have the certificates which are mandatory to perform the work. These workers may not be on the site at all times, so being able to schedule their hours on time will help with organization and site construction to be executed at a faster pace.

Certificates expire, the validity of each certificate is different and it became complex to maintain the certification of all employees. And with multiple sites, crews, and specialists you can only do so much to track the dates and react on time. Question is, why should you have to do it manually?

At CloseOut, we covered this part, so your certificate management will be a lot easier. You will see when certificates of your employees are expiring and with CloseOut scheduler, the app will warn you if you try to schedule an employee that doesn’t have proper certificates.

Last-minute no-shows

If these previous years have taught us anything, it’s that coming to work sick should not be an option. Unfortunately, this also means you could have last-minute no-shows at crucial times during your project.

How can you manage this with ease?

By having a precise overview of who works when and where. If it happens that you have someone call in sick or someone who is unable to show up at the site at the last minute, you’ll need to take just one look at the rest of your available crew and rearrange or appoint someone who is not supposed to work on that day.

This overview of your crews will come in handy in all of the mentioned situations, as you’ll always be on top of every project and every site – all at once.

Slow pace

Some employees may just be slower than others. That’s ok, but seeing a pattern of someone working slower or taking longer on certain (if not all) tasks could be a sign that you might need to check in with them and see what’s going on.

Sometimes, they might simply need some extra training or better organization skills. Sometimes, they are not supported properly by your backoffice staff, and material or equipment missing is preventing them to work efficiently.

With a tracking system, you are getting an honest view and a better grasp of how long it takes to complete a certain task, as well as recognizing those who are less productive (and those who are very productive).

Overworking

Time-tracking may sound scary to employees and might feel like you don’t trust them. We don’t like to frame it that way, though. We found that time-tracking and same day approval is useful for both employer and an employee.

With clocking every minute of work, you get a good idea of how much a certain worker has spent on tasks, and how long they have been working on a project or in the worksite. If you notice that some employee works faster or better than others, you can award them to motivate them (and others) to keep up the good work.

On the flip side, noticing that your workers are working long shifts or don’t have enough rest can mean burnout. Burnout and overworked crew are not only prone to more mistakes and injuries but you risk the quality of the project and the health of your employees.

Having a time-tracking solution prevents all this and gives you a warning that you might need to hire more people.

How to know if you need a fieldwork management solution?

Did you have enough of headaches over multiple schedules and inevitable issues that arise when you’re supposed to oversight many sites at the same time and manage large group of employees?

Are you tired of spending time on banal tasks such as sending emails about certifications, asking for timesheets, and telling people when they’re supposed to show up to the work site? Only to find out they went to the wrong one.

Is the thought of collecting needed information for closeout documentation giving you a headache?

If you answered “yes” to any or all of these, you might want to consider a fieldwork management SaaS solution.

At CloseOut, we offer you a clear dashboard that will make it easy for you to track everything that happens on all the Construction sites – all at the same time!

Why not go with a field crew scheduling software? It might solve some of these problems but not all – and not anything more.

But with CloseOut…

You’ll be able to see the workorders for every site, manage safety compliance, plan the shift for each employee, manage the hours worked, the quality of the work performed, overview of the tasks completed, with prepared as-built documentation automation that will make sure the your employees ,are working in a safe and controlled environment with the respect to quality standards that your customers are requesting.

Let us show you all of that live – book a demo here.

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