The Associated General Contractors of America conducted a survey earlier this year and found that 80% of construction companies are unable to find enough qualified craft workers.
This construction worker shortage has led to two-thirds of companies increasing base pay rates for craft workers and 29% offering bonuses and incentives. To standout in this talent pool shortage, construction companies need to innovate to find better ways to engage their employees, retain them longer, and accelerate their productivity.
Modern onboarding is one of the best ways to combat this shortage. Here’s how:
Engage your employees
The backbone of modern onboarding is efficiency and making your new employees feel valued. This needs to start the moment they accept your offer, to ward off any lingering doubts or offers from competitors.
Think about your company’s mission, vision, and culture. Develop an engagement strategy around those pillars so your interactions with your employee, such as sending a welcome-to-the-team company branded hat and card, feel genuine to your company.
Onboarding technology enables you to automate this process, so it’s automatically triggered, and each new hire experience is consistent.
Retain them longer
Dedicate resources to developing your construction workers, providing on-site training programs, and supporting their ongoing growth. Demonstrate how invested you are in establishing long term relationships with your employees by including training possibilities and access in their onboarding. There could be training manuals, video modules, access to online training, and more.
Follow this up with ongoing conversations about their career – where they are today, where they want to go, and how the company can help them get there. Investing in the development of your people is one of the best ways to make them want to stay. As Richard Branson famously said, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t want to.”
Accelerate their productivity
Your bottom-line hinges on the productivity of your laborers. Each minute spent on onboarding paperwork their first day is time inefficiently spent. A standardized, structured process ensures that each of your new construction workers undergoes each step of onboarding – from paperwork to safety to training – and is fully prepared to start adding value on the job site.
Leverage onboarding technology that enables your new hires to complete their onboarding ‘paperwork’ from their phone before their first day. Automating this process enables you to scale and fully maximize the power of great onboarding.
Next Steps
The construction worker shortage empowers skilled workers to choose their employer. Be an employer of choice by providing a modern onboarding experience that’s rooted in engagement and dedicated to your employee’s ongoing support and development.
If you would like to learn more about overcoming the construction worker shortage with best-in-class onboarding we’d love to chat.
Our platform simplifies onboarding with a mobile-first hub that your team can access from anywhere. We work together to set up customized workflows and automated triggers, so you can impress your new workers with a personalized onboarding experience.
