Staffing costs represent the single largest expense for industrial companies. In fact, 70% of the average business budget is dedicated to staffing. Project managers can help reign in these costs by tracking these key employee metrics for optimized staffing.
1. Turnover rate
The hallmark of a healthy, thriving business is a low employee turnover rate. This metric refers to the percentage of employees who leave your company during a defined period of time such as a month, quarter, or year. This can be the result of quitting, firing, and even retiring. Anywhere between a 10% and 15% turnover rate is a solid goal for employers. It’s worth noting that industrial companies tend to have higher turnover rates due to the nature of the work when compared to other sectors. Make sure to keep note of the reasons employees leave to accurately track the causes of your company’s turnover rate.
2. Retention rate
Employee retention rate is the percentage of employees who stay with your business for a defined period of time. It’s essentially the flip side of the turnover rate, but it’s worth delving into. The reasons employees stay with your company can give you valuable insight when trying to reduce turnover rate. Different lengths of time will tell you different things when measuring retention rate. For example, the motivations of a craftsman who sticks with you for a handful of years might differ from those that keep an employee committed for decades. Keep this in mind when choosing the timeframe for measuring retention rate.
3. Job satisfaction
Want to know how craftsmen feel about working at your company? Ask them! Employee satisfaction is a fantastic way to gain an accurate understanding of the craftsman experience within your organization. While other staffing metrics focus on employee performance, job satisfaction shines a light on your performance. As a result, it provides insights other metrics simply can’t deliver. Anonymous surveys work perfectly for gathering a lot of info quickly while encouraging employees to be as honest as possible. The more consistently you run these surveys, the better you can visualize how job satisfaction changes over time.
Further Reading: How to Attract Construction Workers to Your Company
4. Absenteeism
Absenteeism is more than just missing a day of work. It’s a habitual failure to show up over an extended period of time without any good reason. Craftsmen going on vacation, taking sick leave, or partaking in any other planned absence from work doesn’t count. Absenteeism is a crucial metric for project managers because a single team member’s absence can throw an entire project off the rails. To calculate absenteeism, simply divide the number of missed days by the number of days in any defined period. Multiply that number by 100 to get the absenteeism percentage. Ideally, the rate falls around the workforce average of 3.6%.
5. Productivity
Another critical metric for optimizing staffing is productivity. This measures the amount of output resulting from a certain amount of input. Sound a little vague? That’s because there’s a lot of variability. You can measure the output per team or individual, the output can be defined in dollars or physical units, and the timeframe can be limited to a work hour or an entire work week. It all depends on what you want to measure. Just be sure to keep your equation consistent so you can accurately track how productivity is changing over time.
The Role of Software in Staffing Optimization
The thought of having to track all these extra metrics is enough to make even the most experienced project managers sweat. That’s where some of the top construction software can help! There are plenty of programs that keep track of these measurements automatically. All you have to do is set them up and – viola! You’ve made a monumental step towards optimizing your staffing.
Tracking the right metrics only gets you so far when building the perfect team. The real heavy lifting takes place in the hiring phase. For the past 35 years, Madden Craftsmen has helped leading industrial companies find highly qualified and talented craftsmen. Simply fill out a job order to start browsing through best-fit candidates.
