Five tips to help measure the performance of your construction business

3. Workplace culture

The construction industry is facing a labour shortage — and it is important to monitor your workplace culture and make adjustments to increase employee recruitment and retention. Assess what opportunities you offer your employees to learn, grow, and develop their careers and how you keep them meaningfully engaged.

This can help reduce the cost of hiring and training new employees by increasing recruitment and retention. It can also help prevent your company from losing important organizational knowledge. Asking yourself these questions can help you identify how effectively your current systems enable you to monitor your workplace culture:

• Can you accurately track the progress and outcomes of employee training and development?
• Do you have a complete picture of employee turnover?
• How do you measure and monitor employee engagement and productivity?
• Does your data provide actionable insights to improve workplace culture?

While there are many ways to assess and measure employee engagement within your company, systems are one way to help you understand the current context, set a baseline, and monitor and track your progress. This can help you make informed decisions to improve the employee experience within your business.

4. Scenario planning

Scenario planning can help you outline your next steps in the construction industry. If your goal is growth, it can help you evaluate your options and guide your decision making. If you determine growth by mergers and acquisitions is the best plan, scenario planning can help you understand what types of companies you should buy — and when to make those purchases.

It can also help you understand long-term risks to your construction business and make plans to mitigate those risks. What-if scenarios can analyze what might happen to your business if different variables change. Examples of these variables include a decrease in market demand for certain types of housing, an increase in the cost of concrete, or any other factor that might impact your business.

It can also help predict which trends will emerge in the industry and how those trends could impact your business. Scenario planning is a valuable tool to help you determine where to make investments and inform the strategy and future direction of your business.

5. Digital solutions

Digital solutions enable you to achieve business objectives such as monitoring your cashflow, evaluating your performance management metrics, or improving your workplace culture. Solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms can integrate with your financial system to provide timely, complete, and accurate financial reporting. This allows you to monitor your cashflow and make informed decisions for your business.

ERP platforms can also provide important insights into your workplace culture. HRIS modules and/or integrated third-party solutions can measure employee engagement and track the impact of learning and development programs. HRIS capabilities provide insights that allow you to improve the employee experience to increase employee recruitment and retention.  

Project management solutions can help you monitor the progress of each construction project and make data-driven decisions to optimize your performance. These tools can help you track when subcontractors are scheduled to arrive onsite or when an inspection is occurring, which allows projects to run smoothly and prevents delays in development.

As new technology such as AI emerges in the business landscape, it is important to assess the state of digital maturity within your business. AI has the potential to affect how businesses operate, perform, and measure performance — such as by predicting costs, supporting scheduling, or managing contracts.

Digital maturity is about how effectively your business implements digital solutions to enable its business objectives. Digital maturity should be measured across all the key dimensions of your business — including people, process, technology, governance, data, and cybersecurity.

Asking yourself these questions can help you assess your company’s state of digital maturity:

• How well does your digital strategy align with your overall business goals and objectives?
• What digital tools and core technologies are currently in use and how integrated are they within your company?
• To what extent have you digitized your workflows and processes and streamlined them across core operational functions?
• Is your company responsive and agile in adopting new technologies that align with its business objectives?
• How effectively do you manage change when implementing new digital solutions?
• Do your solutions deliver timely, accurate, and complete reports that enable you to make confident decisions?

Technology is continuing to evolve — and plays a crucial role in achieving your business objectives in today’s marketplace. Implementing digital solutions to support your goals and continuously monitoring your state of digital maturity can help your business remain agile and adapt to a changing landscape.

Take the next steps

Monitoring the performance of your business is necessary to remain competitive in the evolving construction landscape. These five key areas can help you understand how your business is performing and identify areas for improvement. However, is important to remember that digital maturity plays a vital role in achieving your business objectives — and investing in the right digital solutions can help you achieve your goals and remain competitive.

Contact us

To learn more about how to develop a strategy to improve the performance of your construction company, contact Nicole Asselin, Partner. 

To learn more about how to assess the state of digital maturity within your business and develop a digital strategy to achieve your business objectives, contact Dean Leesui, Partner.