How to Structure and Manage Your Construction Team

What Makes an Effective Construction Team?

Trying to define what an effective construction team is like trying to define most scientific concepts: you can’t fully grasp its true essence unless you know its defining characteristics.

To that end, here are some characteristics of effective, high-quality construction teams:

• Effective communication: They interact transparently and form strong bonds, which promotes effective collaboration and the project’s success.

• Defined roles and responsibilities: All team members are aware of their role in ensuring the project's success and perform their responsibilities with professionalism.

• Efficient collaboration: The team members or construction workers see themselves as key players in the project’s success. They don’t compete, but rather collaborate on a shared commitment to achieving the project’s objectives.

• Accountability and task tracking: With defined roles and responsibilities, team members are accountable to delivery timelines and clear quality standards. This makes it easier for the construction manager to track progress and performance.

How to Structure a Construction Team for Success?

To structure your construction team for success, you need the right people with the right skills and expertise to perform specific roles on each project.

Here’s a general construction team structure to follow:

• Project Manager: Maintains close contact with clients and meets budgets, timelines, and specifications. They oversee the entire project and compile work-in-progress (WIP) reports delivered to customers. 

• Site Supervisor: Coordinates and supervises all team members on the construction site to ensure compliance with construction industry safety protocols and the project’s guidelines.

• Tradespeople and Technicians: Executes the project according to the client’s specifications.

• Subcontractors: Handles certain specialized aspects of the project delegated to them by the general contractor and submits daily reports.

• Suppliers: Provides the materials required for each aspect of the construction process.

Another aspect of creating team structures is defining reporting lines and adapting the team structure to accommodate the project’s requirements.

Creating a functional hierarchy

Establishing reporting lines clarifies who reports to whom. It eases communication, accountability, and performance tracking.

To define reporting lines, develop an organizational chart. Then, create a separate document that specifies what each role does, their responsibilities, and direct reports. 

Consult this document whenever you’re writing job descriptions and give a copy to new employees.

Part of creating a functional hierarchy is empowering top-level team members with the right tools to efficiently manage people under their supervision. 

Such tools allow them to assign tasks, track their execution, and monitor progress against deadlines.

One such tool is ServiceTitan’s Dispatch Board, visualized in the image below:

The dashboard uses color codes that specify the stage technicians are in, their current tasks and location, and the daily activities assigned to each tech. 

The colors are also easy to understand; light blue represents scheduled jobs, dark blue stands for confirmed ones, purple indicates the technician has been dispatched, and so on.

Check out a detailed description of the dashboard’s icons

Users can configure the dashboard to divide technicians into teams, with a detailed profile of each member appearing when you hover over their profile picture or name. This makes it easier to track projects and know exactly who’s assigned to each task.

Another notable feature is Mass Reschedule, available through the add-on of Dispatch Pro.

When unexpected events occur, managers or dispatchers can use the feature to reschedule multiple jobs at once instead of manually changing the appointment dates one by one.

Even better, while scheduling jobs, ServiceTitan’s Job Value Predictor uses historical upsell and sales data to highlight the jobs that are most likely to generate revenue. 

Dispatch Pro automatically uses this information, along with the employee performance cards, to assign the best techs with the right skills to those jobs. If using Dispatch Assist, your dispatchers can still review that automated tech scheduling before approving.

Adapting team structures to project scope

Depending on the project's type, size, and scope, other stakeholders who perform specialized construction activities may also be present on the job site. 

For example, let's say you’re constructing a large building for a company with 5,000 workers. Because of the project’s size and complexity, chances are the project team includes extra roles, such as:

• Architects to ensure the project stays within the client’s vision.

• Structural engineers to ensure compliance with building codes and perform safety assessments.

• Interior designers to ensure the building’s interiors are aesthetically pleasing.

However, every extra role complicates the project manager's ability to manage the team. Before long, issues such as double booking, poor visibility into available resources, incorrectly sequenced tasks, and difficulty delegating tasks begin to emerge.

Fortunately, ServiceTitan’s Scheduling Pro platform helps you view all open time slots without calling a colleague or flipping through calendars. The platform lets you schedule a specific technician or an entire crew for the multi-day appointments associated with a large project months or weeks in advance.

This prevents double booking while reducing the time you and your team members spend creating job schedules.

How to Manage Tasks and Workflows in a Construction Team?

Projects are essentially a collection of little tasks that project managers must delegate to the right employees—people with the correct skill set, experience, and expertise to handle them. 

Streamlining task delegation

Project managers and general contractors are sometimes tempted to handle tasks independently, which can lead to burnout and derail the project. That’s why it's advisable to delegate or allocate tasks to team members.

However, you shouldn’t randomly assign jobs to team members. Otherwise, you’ll essentially be setting them up to fail. Instead, use this checklist to determine who is in the best position to handle a certain task:

• Capability: This refers to the expertise and experience that make the crew member fit to handle the task. If you’re familiar with the crew, leverage your experience working with them to assign tasks. If they’re new, rely on their resume and job interview.

• Current workload: To avoid burnout, give new tasks to team members based on their schedule for the day.

When delegating tasks, set clear expectations and objectives. Be ready to hold one-on-one meetings to clarify ambiguities and follow up for progress updates. You should also share standard operating procedure documents to save time and ensure the deliverable meets your expectations.

Using ServiceTitan's Task Management tool, you can streamline the entire task delegation process. This tool allows you to assign action items to specific team members, who get alerted and can see all their pending tasks on their tablets.

Additionally, the platform allows administrators to set priority levels and add descriptions to tasks, ensuring they’re executed in a sequence that doesn’t derail the project’s timeline.

This streamlines task management and helps project managers track tasks, all from one platform.

Tracking progress and meeting deadlines

Once a task has been assigned, the next step is to monitor its progress and ensure the team member is on course to meet the deadline.

To do that, hold regular meetings with team members. Assure them you're available if they need clarity, want to report challenges, and promptly communicate changes to the project scope.

A more practical approach is to utilize ServiceTitan’s tags and alerts for seamless progress tracking and deadline monitoring. You can tag jobs to notify you when the person you assigned a task exceeds the deadline by 10 minutes or more.

This allows you to monitor tasks and coordinate with team members lagging behind the preset deadline.

Managing change orders and process adherence

Regardless of how thoroughly a construction project is planned, the scopes are prone to change because of unexpected events. Owners can modify the original design, contractors may encounter an unexpected subsurface condition, or weather events delay the schedule.

Change orders must be used to document these changes to prevent payment disputes and delays. 

This document should also be shared with team members, so everyone can execute their assigned tasks according to the new guidelines. That’s part of transparent communication, essential to team building and preventing costly reworks.

The challenge to this, however, is updating team members about changes without a centralized repository for documenting change orders. As you know, paper documents and static PDF files can get lost, increasing errors and making it challenging to track revisions. You may also underestimate certain material costs and only discover the error midway into the project.

ServiceTitan addresses this problem by assisting businesses in generating change orders—either from scratch or by utilizing templates—to record adjustments to the project scope and anticipated costs.

Every change order generated is automatically uploaded to the associated project’s portfolio dashboard, which provides a comprehensive overview of the project.

Jade Vasun, ServiceTitan’s Senior Product Manager, explained the benefits of this in a recent webinar:

“With our solution, you’ll be able to easily access all of your projects from the top navigation with just one click. You’ll have the ability to customize your projects so you can see any data point you want. 

“Then, depending on your role, you might have different use cases, different data you need, different searches you have to run to do your job efficiently. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to reapply filters every single time? We're going to allow you to save your configurations.”

This feature enhancement ensures you and every team member know about the changes and have the information required to implement them.

Tools and Strategies for Monitoring Team Performance

A quote attributed to Peter Drucker says, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” The same can be said for team performance; it’s impossible to improve your team and recognize their efforts toward the project’s success when you don’t measure their performance.

Team performance monitoring involves identifying the right metrics and using the right tools to track them.

Performance metrics for construction teams

Performance metrics help project managers assess team efficiency and identify areas for improvement. 

Typically, they’re integrated into dashboards that managers and other stakeholders regularly review to make key decisions and judge progress against past performance and benchmarks.

Here are some team performance metrics used by contractors:

• Project schedule adherence: Percentage of tasks and subtasks completed within the planned deadline. It’s given by Actual Project Duration/Planned Project Duration.

• Cost performance index (CPI): Compares actual to budgeted costs. A CPI above one indicates that the project is still within budget. However, a CPI below one indicates a budget overrun, requiring immediate countermeasures. It’s given by Actual Costs/Budgeted Costs.

• Safety incident rate: Indicates the total number of safety issues that occur on the construction site. It’s given by the Number of Safety Incidents/Total Work Hours.

• Change order frequency: The number of times a change order is created to document changes to the scope, increasing the deadline and cost. It’s given by the Number of Change Orders/Total Number of Orders.

• Rework rate: The amount of work completed compared to the total number of reworks. It’s given by the Amount of Rework/Total Work Completed.

• Budget variance: Tracks the variance between the actual and budgeted costs. It’s given by Actual Project Costs−Estimated Project Costs/Estimated Project Costs.

• Subcontractor performance: Indicates how much progress the subcontractor has made on their assigned work scope. It’s given by the Subcontractor’s Completed Work Satisfaction/Total Subcontractor Assignments.

Monitoring productivity with technology

Another way to monitor productivity is to track the number of work hours each team member puts in. This signals resource underutilization, task completion efficiency, and areas that need more support.

ServiceTitan’s Timesheet Management software helps project managers track the number of hours each team member has logged in. The time tracker becomes active immediately after the technician is dispatched, and the project manager or technician can clock in and out from the office or mobile app.

Project managers and administrators can see the exact number of hours spent on the job, non-job events such as company meetings, and between jobs (idle time). Additionally, when an employee submits their timesheet, the app automatically cross-references it with the corresponding GPS data from Fleet Pro.

This saves employees the hassle of manually comparing data and prevents payroll fraud.

Two other features make the software indispensable to effective team performance monitoring: the master pay file and timesheet report. The former aggregates each worker's paid activities. While the latter showcases all work hours (paid and non-paid). 

This report shows each worker’s hourly and performance pay, which you can settle using ServiceTitan’s Payroll Management platform. The platform allows you to create unique payment structures that incentivize top performers and encourage others to do their best.

This keeps employees satisfied, so they don’t become part of the 46 percent of Americans who leave their company because they feel underappreciated.

Learn other ways to use ServiceTitan to manage your projects.

Checking in regularly with team members

Monitoring performance also involves giving employees feedback on their current accomplishments.

You need to hold regular one-on-one meetings with employees, where they can share pain points, wins, and blockers. Ask them what can be done to help them meet their milestones and track performance.

Lastly, hold a team meeting to speak collectively to everyone. Take the opportunity to assess their collective progress and set new goals for the coming week.

You can confirm their progress reports using data from ServiceTitan’s Project Plan feature. This feature lets users view all project tasks and subtasks and their due dates. It also allows users to create dependencies such that one task cannot commence until the previous one is completed.

By combining regular check-ins with real-time progress data, you can identify and address potential roadblocks before they escalate. This prevents costly delays and ensures projects stay on schedule.

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Construction Teams

Team members need to communicate with each other to function effectively. As a project manager or construction business owner, it's your responsibility to provide the most effective tools for communication.

Importance of clear communication

Clear communication is critical to the successful completion of construction projects. It’s also an indispensable aspect of effective team management, preventing costly issues from arising later.

Here are some benefits of clear communication:

• It defines who is responsible for each project stage, making it easy to evaluate team performance.

• It prevents mistakes such as poorly completed tasks, which can cause costly reworks and poor customer satisfaction.

• It keeps the project on schedule by preventing reworks caused by inaccurate or insufficient information.

• It strengthens relationships between team members.

• It provides team members with clear goals to achieve.

One cause of miscommunication is the disconnect that sometimes exists between office staff and field technicians. So, we created the Flyout Window in Dispatch Pro.

With this tool, dispatchers can message and call field technicians on the same interface they use to edit job summaries, call customers, and update job statuses.

Ashley Leege, Customer Service Manager at Althoff Home Services, says: 

“When the Job Flyout happened, it was amazing. Finding that information and being able to click on it right there from the board makes it so easy.” 

“This is going to give you a lot of information, from tags about equipment, addresses, customer information, and job details, and you can do all of that right from here without having to go all the way into a job every time.”

Collaboration tools for construction companies

To streamline communication, it’s advisable to use a digital platform to centralize all project-related conversations so everyone can access the same information. 

A good example of such a tool is ServiceTitan, which has a Dispatch Board that project managers can use to contact team members via SMS or phone calls. Clicking a technician’s name or profile picture opens a menu with methods for contacting team members.

Jessica Groat, Bill Howe's Chief Financial Officer, says: 

“This feature has helped the company manage its multiple projects and eliminate paper documents.

“We were still on paper invoices, carbon copies, legal size, and for a shop that had probably 180 employees at the time, probably 60% of those being field employees, we just had a hard time growing and scaling. 

“The real-time nature of ServiceTitan has an ability to scale your business probably well beyond what you think you can scale to. It has an ability, it has a potential, which we like.”

Want to join construction companies like Bill Howe Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning that use ServiceTitan to manage their teams and ensure project completion? Schedule a call today for a personalized walk-through of the software.

Over to You!

Team management is critical to your project’s success. Without it, your project is derailed, leading to unhappy customers that further impact your company’s ability to land more contracts.

Structure your team accordingly, implement strategies to strengthen their relationships, and regularly assess their performance.

Lastly, use ServiceTitan field management software to manage the entire team and empower them with the right tools to improve performance.

ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution that helps construction companies boost revenue and manage project teams. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and irrigation contractors across the country.