|
There are many demands on any firm in the AEC field today. As I meet more and more managers and owners of these firms I find that there are common problems throughout the industry. With the economy slow, there are fewer contracts being signed, and when the workload drops, the industry as a whole can feel it. As the number of firms continues to grow, the competition is getting tighter and the need to find a competitive edge grows as well. Combine these needs with the problem of finding and keeping the talent to get the work done and you can find your company in a difficult position.
When the workload gets thin, the opportunity of time presents itself. If you have gone through your backlog of work and need to keep your employees productive, even if it is not billable, downtime in workload is a good time for training. As long as utilization numbers are going to take a dip, and you plan on keeping the workforce for the next project in the pipeline, you might as well use that drop to cover a boost in employee knowledge. If you decide you want that training later you may wish you had taken advantage of those overhead hours that were taken. Timing is everything. This is also a great time to look into upgrading software and how it works so that knowledge is in place when you need it. Your team can then hit the ground running on the next project.
Downtime is investment time. One problem with finding talented employees is keeping them. An easy way to take care of this problem is to make them feel as though they are being invested in. Training can be that investment. Like any investment you must balance risk with reward. The risk is that your talented employee will take their new training and leave your firm. The reward is an employee who feels like part of a larger team that wants them to succeed. In fact, if you send a group to get training together, it can have the secondary effect of being a teambuilding experience.
The rewards have to be more than having a happy employee. The rewards also include finding that competitive edge to keep up with or go beyond the competition. By using the latest tools, and having the training to get the most out of them, your team can make a better product. If you want to know how training is going to make money for your company you have to look at the effect it can have on your team's efficiency. After all, if we are all designing the same thing, the one that can do it most efficiently will make the most money. By training your employees, you in effect shorten their learning curve and make them more efficient.
In any industry with heavy competition for work survival is what you do in you downtime. How you plan for it and take advantage of what it offers is the difference between limping through it and coming out ahead of where you started. It is a great time to invest in your employees in a way that benefits everyone, and it is a great time to increase your teams' knowledge. Stop wasting time. Rethink how things are done. Retool your team with new equipment. Rewind on a finished project and see how it could go better. |
