Some construction business owners dislike having a rigid schedule every week. When job problems arise or a customer calls, they want to have the flexibility to jump immediately on the issue and take care of it. Because some owners like to be in control and micromanage their people and projects, putting out fires becomes their way of doing business. They especially don’t want to schedule regular monthly or weekly meetings with their managers and supervisors. When they finally decide to put regular meetings on their calendar, owners often find urgent reasons to cancel or postpone these meetings until next week—or never.
Meetings Make Life Better
Top contractors have regularly scheduled management meetings that allow them to stay in touch with their estimators, project managers, field supervisors and foremen. Meetings allow managers to leverage their time and be the leader of their firm instead of the “make-every-decision” supervisor and full-time problem-solver. Meetings allow owners to delegate responsibilities and keep people accountable to achieve the results they want. By holding regular meetings with your team, you will be able to create a more successful company and free yourself to plan, strategize and focus on growing your revenue.
Meetings Maximize Bottom-Line Results
Can you imagine a baseball game without a scoreboard or player statistics to show which team is winning or who is the best player on the field? Without scorecards and weekly feedback, results don’t matter much to supervisors. The meeting leader must create a scorecard tracking system to record each attendee’s performance on every job for all to see each week. This will improve performance and allow your foremen and supervisors to know, track and hit their goals rather than work blindly without anything to aim at.
During regular field supervisor meetings, for example, each foreman and supervisor is challenged to achieve specific results, track progress, report on last week’s achievements versus the weekly target and discuss plans for the upcoming week. They report on their job schedule, crew hours, equipment hours, safety, quality of work and performance. Each attendee then commits in front of their peers to hit weekly goals. This teamwork approach creates a healthy competition among workers to be the best and to beat their project budget and targets.
Make Meetings Mandatory
In order to take control of your company’s success, the owner and management team must set a series of regular mandatory meetings. Schedule them at the same time each week or month, and never postpone or cancel them. When you cancel meetings, you communicate that they’re not a top priority and that it’s acceptable to miss them. When the owner can’t make a meeting, simply delegate the task of leading the meeting and handling the agenda to a key manager.
Carve out an allotted amount of time for each meeting, and start and end every meeting on time. This allows attendees to plan their calendar around these regular mandatory meetings. Use a written agenda or template to keep the meeting moving, and assign someone to take notes to document goals and responsibilities. If your company has projects in progress far from your office, use a conference call service or conferencing software such as gotomeeting.com to continue to hold meetings on the regular schedule.
Use the following mandatory meetings to get everyone on the same page and achieve your project and company goals.
Mandatory Annual Management Meetings
- Strategic Planning Session: Every year, your management team must take a day or two to plot out the strategy for the upcoming year. Engage a facilitator to help your team review the previous year’s results and identify areas for improvement. Set new goals and create implementation action plans to improve your company.
- All-Company Town Hall Meeting: At least once a year, gather your entire company together for a “state of the company” review session and discussion. Talk about your successes, failures, goals and plans for the future. Also use this time to hold training sessions and to recognize key people who have positively impacted your company’s performance. Facilitate roundtable group discussions on ways to improve certain areas of your business, including scheduling, communication, productivity, equipment use, estimating accuracy and customer retention.
Mandatory Monthly Management Meetings
- Monthly Company Strategy Session: Every month, owners and managers must meet to discuss their overall company strategy. Start by reviewing your strategic goals and action items. The agenda must include reviewing results and strategies for every aspect of your business, including revenue, cash flow, management, operations, safety, scheduling, productivity, technology, estimating, sales and marketing.
- Monthly Strategy Session: Creating a marketing and sales activity calendar will allow you to review your business development progress every month. Identify key markets and customers you want to work with, develop a plan to find and cultivate new customers, strategize how to improve customer relationships, look at ways to improve your bid-hit ratio, and explore how to increase your margins with better customers and less competition.
- Monthly Project Management Meeting: This “accountability time” allows each individual to present specific job results to the management team. Review every project’s job cost report, schedule updates, change order log, project receivable, problems and progress. This meeting will hold people accountable to follow the company systems, manage their projects properly and hit their targets.
Mandatory Weekly Management Meetings
- Sales, Proposal, Estimating and Bid Follow-Up: Every Monday morning, get your sales, marketing and estimating teams together to review your revenue stream, current and cumulative contract awards, sales activity, lead flow, customer relationship meetings, jobs bidding, follow-up required for jobs already bid, and strategies to improve your bid-hit ratio.
- Superintendent and Foreman Weekly Meeting: Get with all of your field foremen and superintendents to review their individual project progress, schedule, manpower, workload, equipment requirements, material needs, subcontractor performance, safety success and customer issues. Each person should report on his or her project and commit to hitting weekly goals. The group will collaborate to develop ideas to meet or beat schedule, budget, safety and productivity goals.
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