Construction companies often struggle to manage human resources. They must oversee multiple job sites with numerous employees. Their workforces often fluctuate and they must address turnover rates and a tight labor market. At the same time, a company must keep up with safety and compliance regulations. With the help of human capital management (HCM) software, these tasks become easier. What benefits come with making this investment?
Streamline HR Processes
HCM software brings many HR tasks together in one system. Doing so improves efficiency across the organization. In addition, workers find it easier to make decisions driven by data. The software centralizes the talent acquisition process with tools to post jobs, screen applicants, schedule interviews, make offers, and onboard new hires seamlessly. This eliminates paperwork and manual effort to coordinate recruiting across the organization.
Automated payroll through HCM eliminates manual calculation of hours, taxes, deductions, and net pay. Benefits enrollment and changes can be handled online, reducing HR workload. Integration with finance systems also enables smoother payroll processing.
HCM also provides templates for employees and managers to collaboratively set goals, check progress, and document performance reviews online instead of using paper forms. This facilitates more continuous feedback. Training content, assignments, tracking, and reporting can be standardized in the HCM system, ensuring consistent execution of development programs company-wide.
As all workforce information flows into a unified HCM database, reporting and analysis across recruitment, retention, diversity, compensation, and other areas is facilitated to extract key workforce insights. This enables better decision-making through analytics and benchmarks. Before purchasing a program for this purpose, however, come up with an HCM requirements gathering checklist.
Mobile Functionality
In recent years, HCM systems have increasingly incorporated mobile functionality. This feature allows employees and managers to access information and perform tasks remotely using smartphones and tablets. Benefits of mobile capabilities in HCM software include:
- Increased productivity – Employees can request time off, submit expenses, update profiles, and more on the go without desktop access. Managers can approve items faster. This saves time for all.
- Better accessibility – Mobile access enables employees working remotely or with non-traditional schedules to conveniently view pay info, company news, and training materials. Critical HCM functions are never out of reach.
- Enhanced employee experience – Mobile self-service allows workers more control in accessing their data and making appropriate updates anytime. This flexibility improves job satisfaction.
- Real-time data and feedback – With mobile functionality, managers can provide feedback on the spot. Employees can update profiles instantly. This enables faster personnel decisions using accurate, up-to-date data.
- Expanded analytics potential – As more employees use HCM software via mobile, more data is available to provide workforce insights. Trends around productivity, absenteeism, satisfaction, and more can be identified.
Improve Talent Management
Effective talent acquisition and retention is imperative with construction labor shortages and high turnover industry-wide. Specialized HCM recruitment modules tap wider talent networks to aid recruiting and hiring initiatives. They centralize job postings, facilitate candidate communication throughout the process, and compile applicant data in one database. Useful analytics track metrics like time-to-hire, source of top candidates by skillset, and retention rates. These inform better workforce decisions. Onboarding tools also speed new hire integration through automated workflows while self-service portals let workers manage their profiles.
Enhanced Workforce Visibility & Analytics
For project and workforce planning, construction leaders allocate staff, equipment, budgets, and other resources appropriately when they hold comprehensive data. HCM software compiles extensive data from across systems including worker profiles, job site locations, cost codes, schedules, payroll hours, training status, safety incidents, and more. Real-time dashboards and custom reports deliver actionable insights. When integrated with other construction management platforms, analytics grow deeper still. Improved visibility of the extended workforce enhances coordination, productivity, cost control, and risk reduction and aids long-term planning.
Promote Training & Safety
Human capital management (HCM) software includes features that can greatly improve training efforts and workplace safety. Its learning management functionality allows organizations to easily create, deliver, track, and manage employee training programs. Custom courses can be built and assigned to employees based on their roles, while analytics provide insight into training effectiveness.
Additionally, HCM systems centralize worker documentation like licenses, certifications, and training records, ensuring compliance visibility and prompting renewal reminders. Automated notifications can alert supervisors and workers alike when mandatory trainings come due. This helps guarantee staff members have completed necessary refreshers and have up-to-date knowledge. It also provides evidence of diligence in case of audits or incidents.
On the safety side, the software enables the enforcement of workplace rules and procedures. Checklists can ensure protocols are followed, while incident reporting tools facilitate fast and thorough reporting when accidents occur. The data also aids root cause analyses, helping continuously improve safety programs. Additionally, powerful HR analytics give visibility into leading indicators like employee engagement and satisfaction, which have been connected to higher incidence rates when low. Proactively addressing these issues can reduce organizational risk and hazard exposure.
Simplify Compliance
Numerous regulatory standards across agencies like OSHA and DOT demand strict adherence concerning worker safety, health, discrimination, pay, and more. Any misstep means steep fines or legal issues for construction companies. HCM software helps avoid this outcome in a few ways. It maintains accurate payroll records, controls access to sensitive employee data per regulations, retains all documentation necessary for compliance reporting, and assists with required health/safety management procedures like illness monitoring. Together this ensures construction firms stay compliant as regulations change.
Control Labor Costs
For optimal profit margins, construction firms must manage budgets tightly, not just on materials but also on workforce utilization on job sites. Specialized staff scheduling tools provide visibility and control over labor spending. Worker demand forecasts determine staffing needs to avoid under or over-allocation. Scheduling optimizes budgets by assigning those with appropriate pay rates and billable hours to each project phase. Crew managers can track hours against plans daily to contain costs. Some systems even integrate timecards, schedules, and payroll so data syncs seamlessly.
Purpose-built HCM technology addresses the major pain points of construction companies around managing HR, talent, safety, compliance, and labor utilization. Centralization, automation, advanced analytics, and mobile accessibility create a seamless human capital management environment tailored to construction workflows. The time and money invested in deploying HCM software delivers substantial ROI through improved workforce visibility, efficiencies, risk reduction, productivity, and planning. As technology innovations continue benefiting the construction industry, strong HCM capabilities and adoption will grow as a significant competitive edge.