TL;DR: An all-in-one workforce plan has to cover salaried staff and craft crews. Check individual experience and assignment dates for project leadership, and crew composition, qualifications and weekly demand for field work. Then agree on who can view and change each part of the plan.
Table of Contents
Is it even a workforce planning tool if it can’t support your entire workforce?
A shared workforce plan needs enough detail for the people using it. A project executive may be assessing a PM’s next assignment, while a labor coordinator is moving a recurring crew between jobs. Bring both decisions into the same plan.
What changes when you plan salaried staff and craft crews together?
The planning unit, the timing that matters and the people who maintain the plan all change. Project leadership is planned person by person against experience and commitments; field work is planned crew by crew against weekly labor demand.
| Planning question | Project leadership | Craft crews |
|---|---|---|
| Who is being assigned? | A named person with relevant project experience. | A crew with the required lead, trades and qualifications. |
| What timing needs attention? | Current commitments, handovers and the next assignment. | Work packages, weekly labor demand and movement between jobs. |
| Who maintains the plan? | The operations leads responsible for the assignment. | The field or labor leads responsible for the crew. |
Walk through these decisions with an upcoming job. Confirm who can make a change and who needs to see it.
One team. One tool. Seems obvious, right?
For specialty contractors, the planning unit is the crew: 91’s Crews feature lets you organize people into a crew and assign that crew to a project in one action. The specialty contractor planning tools also cover labor forecasting and qualifications.
For project leadership, ask how a proposed assignment reflects the person’s experience, existing commitments and the timing of the next job. Check how both groups appear in the plan and what each team is allowed to update.
Permissions
We’ve all been there before. We’ve all shared a document or spreadsheet with multiple people and thought, “view-only, or edit access… might as well just give full edit access to everyone, just in case”.
Full edit access is basically the modern-day Pandora’s Box. You know. We know it. We built careful permissions in Bench to ensure your other users can never open that box up.
While some of your people need to have access to everything in your workforce plan, there are also plenty of people whose focus should remain on their work, their teams, and their projects. 91 gives you complete control over the transparency of your workforce strategy.
Want your Field Ops team to plan, track, and manage your craft labor but not see the project management side? You got it.
Want your Operations Team to plan, track, and plan your project management team but not get distracted by the craft side? No sweat.
Tom and Debra over in HR need to see everything but don’t need to make any changes.
Tom, Debra, have at it.
91 can help ensure that everyone has the information they need to do their best work, but will always ensure you get the final say on their level of access.
People
When adding people to Bench, you can add them as an “hourly” or “salaried” profile.
Each profile type has its own customizable skill sets. They also have their own respective cost rates/role values, both of which will inform your different reports and forecasting. Those separate skill sets and rates keep salaried and hourly planning distinct in your reports. More on the reporting later.
An hourly profile in Bench.
A salaried profile in Bench.
It looks pretty similar, right? That’s the point. Time off, project resumes, certifications, attachments, notes, and contact information… work together. Catering to both sets of team members doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. It means understanding what needs to be different from project admins to field staff and then helping to draw clean lines between them to keep Pandora’s Box closed.
We also have our People Gantt view, where you can visualize your entire team and their respective utilization and/or assignments. From the People Gantt you can see team members available for work or, on the flip side, team members that might be spread too thin. The Gantt is customizable and great for creating reports for your project admin or field staff. Don’t need to see both? No problem; you can easily apply a filter and create the best view for you.
Let’s take a look at projects.
Projects
I was going to write a long section here about all the subtle differences you need to pay attention to when planning your projects with so many screenshots (so, so many). But in reality, planning either role type in Bench is so intuitive you’ll pick up on them instantly.
Here’s the gist of it.
Can you plan hourly craft workers and salaried admins on the same project? Yep.
Will you ever need to duplicate a project in Bench so your Ops and Field Ops can be kept separate? Nope. Not ever.
Can you control who has access to make changes? 100% yes. Give your operations team access to manage their people and your field ops team access to manage theirs. That way everyone has the access they need, and you still have a holistic view of your entire workforce whenever you need it.
Can you create custom views that only display your admins or craft workers? Look below. That’s the Project Gantt in Bench (I know, screenshot. I couldn’t help it). Using the Gantt settings, you can hide the craft/hourly staff to reduce the clutter during staffing meetings.
See this one below? These are all the roles on this project, but instead of having to scroll past all the admins when you’re talking about labor requests with Field Ops, they’re collapsed so you can keep the focus where it’s needed.
Reporting
Reporting is where the difference between salaried and craft planning shows up most. This is also one of the main reasons that contractors will use multiple tools to track one workforce. They need some of their team to roll up into one report, and some of their team to roll up into another. If the two groups aren’t kept distinct, everyone gets grouped together and the numbers stop describing either team.
The Hourly Workforce Report
The Hourly Workforce Report is where your field teams and labor data will roll up. This report gives you an overview of each project in your pipeline and the ability to look at the planned hours and cost of your people over the duration of the project. The report can be viewed in weekly or monthly intervals and will also let you know the remaining costs and hours on your projects.
Do you just want an overview of the people or the numbers for each role on your projects? Yeah, you can do that, too.
The Strategic Workforce Plan Report
The Strategic Workforce Plan Report is where data from your project admins and management will roll up. It will consider all of the roles you have on your projects and compare them directly against your supply of people. This report will include, but keep separate, any roles you’ve added to your pursuit projects (pictured below in purple). That way, you can get a sense of your upcoming project demands and even run scenarios with specific pursuits to see their impact.
Workforce planning for your entire workforce
The tech boom in construction is still in full swing. New solutions are popping up every day for problems that contractors never knew existed in the first place. In some cases, contractors have already started creating metrics around reducing or consolidating their tech. The tools they use can’t just be a one-trick pony anymore. They have to be versatile. They have to be flexible. They either have to solve multiple problems or they have to solve one problem for multiple teams.
Having to continue planning your workforce with multiple different tools is only solving half the problem and for only half of your people. There’s still the disconnect, still the silo, still the time-consuming manual work. With 91, we can help align your entire team in the same tool.
