The skilled labor shortage is not a new issue facing the construction industry. A recent survey from the Associated Builders and Contractors found 80% of residential contractors had difficulty filling craft-worker positions in 2018. The immediate effect of the decreasing supply of new talent in the construction industry is a decrease in productivity. Solving the problems this creates is difficult, but one way to mitigate these issues could be HR technology, Nicolas De Bonis writes for HR Technologist.
Finding people is only one part of the challenge. In a tight market, retaining top talent is also of critical importance. Small business owners spend around 40% of their working hours on tasks that do not generate income, such as HR and payroll. Most contractors are overworked and simply don’t have the resources necessary to effectively attract and retain talent in such a competitive labor market.
According to a recent Capterra survey, 79% of construction small-to-midsize businesses will be using HR technology by 2020, and opined that “SMBs that continue to rely on manual methods in the face of increasing benefits from HR technology are setting themselves up to fail.”
The following processes that used to be tedious and error-prone are now being automated and simplified by technology:
- Worker onboarding & background checks: Software apps can help collect relevant information from new hires in a timely and secure manner.
- Time tracking: Workers can easily clock in and out with a tap in a simple app on their phone. Supervisors can monitor and approve hours while on-the-go.
- Overtime Compliance: Software is coded to automatically calculate the appropriate overtime rates.
- Payroll processing: Again, the software can fully handle payroll by intaking hours from the time tracking app and then sending the appropriate wages to each worker.
- Job costing: Using GPS technology available on today’s mobile phones, it’s possible to automatically create job cost allocation reports by marking project locations.
