No, this is not another shameless reflection on a certain National Championship basketball team. However, if you are a fan, feel free to insert those superstars in this scenario. Consider two major teams in basketball are playing a back-and-forth game. Scoring in this game will quickly escalate to triple digits for both teams. However, the scoreboard is broken, and it does not show the score, the time remaining, the foul situation, etc. The only indication of a play stoppage is the referee blowing the whistle for a foul or end of play. The teams continue to run back and forth, scoring and defending with little regard for how they are performing. The only feedback the teams receive is when the coach yells at them if they are losing or remains silent if they are winning.
This might be the worst game to watch as a spectator. Now, imagine being a player. If this were a game of baseball or football, there would be some equally quizzical looks about playing with no scoreboard, but the activity and scoring in football is a little less frenetic than a high-scoring basketball game. So, who would love to be a player in this environment? Any takers?
Yes, this is a far-fetched scenario, and no one is lining up for these “disaster shows.” However, think about construction organizations. How many organizations today send their best people into the field with little regard for the “score” of their game? If you went to one of your jobsites right now and asked about the individual labor performance on a work package or the overall score of the game, what would the response be? Furthering this misery, how many organizations drop the playbook in their people’s hands a mere moment before the game starts? Imagine the player introductions: “Introducing the starting center, 5-foot-10-inches out of Tampa, Florida, Gregg Schoppman” — only to have this player spill his 3-inch-thick playbook binder on the arena floor, scattering reams of scribbled plays.
Now consider your organization. What does the field see relative to their performance, whether it is on a specific labor code, general condition or overall project? Think of the following points relative to the score:
Strategy in Budgeting
- What is the baseline production rate that your team will use on a project?
- What is the basis for the production rate? Put another way, how do factors like weather/seasonality, spatial constraints and complexity factor into the rate calculations?
- Does your team have projects with more labor codes than actual labor hours?
- Contrarily, do you have basically two labor codes — i.e., “aboveground” and “below ground” — creating large pools
of labor hours that are difficult to track and status? - Lastly, does your team even believe in the labor budget, regardless of whether you have a million codes or two codes? Have you heard phrases like “There is NO way we can do it for that” or “I know the project manager is shuffling money around like a we’re running an illegal Ponzi scheme”?
Work-in-Progress Reporting
- What is the frequency of performance updates? How does the current score get conveyed?
- How is the scored visualized? Does the “performance story” get lost in a massive spreadsheets and variance reports?
- What is management’s reaction to the score? Is the immediate reaction to question why the team is failing, or is it focused on reclamation?
- Do your field leaders make strong fiscal decisions or push anything related to money to the office (i.e., “I’m just in charge of the field — don’t bring that money stuff in my trailer”)?
Best-of-class performance is grounded in more than points (or margin). Planning for success is critical; without a real strategy that is implemented well before the boots hit the ground, the scoreboard will end up as a work of fiction, lacking any semblance of reality or integrity. There are key elements of any labor cost feedback process that should be examined as well:
The Currency
One of the most important things to consider is the currency that the field sees on the budget and the performance updates. This is not to say we should translate labor codes into cryptocurrency or euros. Consider the two scenarios below:
- Scenario 1: “You and your team have $150,000 in this code to do this work.”
- Scenario 2: “You and your team have 1,250 hours to do the labor.”
Regardless of whether your team can do the heavy lifting to translate $150,000 into labor, materials, equipment, etc., teams have the ability to strategize around labor metrics. Why make it more complicated than it needs to be? There always seems to be reticence to share dollars with the field, simply for the fact that this data can fall into “the wrong hands.” Thinking in terms of an “hourly currency” creates less trepidation about sensitive information being viewed by bad actors.
The Visualization
More than likely, firms have migrated away from the dot-matrix printers that spool off pages of job cost reports with 20-plus columns and fonts that can only be seen with a magnifying glass. Field leaders are very smart, but it is baffling to have a scoreboard that requires advanced degrees to comprehend.
It gets more complicated when we introduce concepts like “variances” and explain that a negative variance is actually a positive, as if this is a bad round of golf. Realizing that every job cost software has nuances that complicate things, how do you present the scoreboard to your team? Is it a graphical visualization leveraging earned-value scorekeeping of labor in a fashion that is easy to read — and actionable?
Incentives
The incentives in this discussion are not related to bonuses. To be clear, this is related to the benefit that the team gains by having clear optics on the budget and ever-changing scoreboard. Referring to the basketball team analogy, consider the following:
- How does the team change performance without knowing the score?
- How do you motivate “high performers” if they don’t have a benchmark or status update?
One argument that many leaders have is this: “Shouldn’t they play/work hard regardless?” Of course, any superstar will play hard even when the scoreboard is off, but consider this:
- For teams that are losing, how do you adjust strategy if you don’t know how much time you have? Where do you begin?
- For teams that are winning, how would you adjust your play? Put another way, how do you keep the teams aggressive and communicate the larger picture within the firm?
- For all teams, how would you reward star performers?
There are certainly more aspects to creating a high-performance culture. Even with a great budget and scoreboard, projects will fail if the preconstruction strategy is poor and closeout is ineffective. The scoreboard just happens to be a tool that represents the embodiment of winning and losing. Hopefully, the score is easy to see, digestible and actionable for positive and proactive change.