PCA Articles

• Having difficulty keeping top performers in your contracting business?
• Setup a bonus structure based on performance!
• Boy that sounds too easy, why haven’t I thought of that?

Perhaps your estimating and project management softwares are not managing the scope of work properly.

Any estimate that you do in the field should have some estimate of the overall scope of work, with the degree of difficulty which will lead to an approximate total number of hours needed to complete the project. The budget.

Once you have the budget, with your cost based estimate, now what?

The key to making this work properly is using the hours you based your proposal on throughout the rest of the project.

The hours will be used to schedule the crews for your business to know the commitment in man-power hours and work days. Now if you don’t use hours but perhaps use work days or crew days don’t worry as this concept all settles back to a common denominator, hours.

When the work begins, your team MUST be tracking hours against specific jobs to make this work. The use of the hours is critical for establishing the actual hours spent to compare against the budget and give you the over/under budget amount for the project giving you a simple basis to use to bonus your employees.

For example, let’s use an exterior painting project. In this example the exterior painting had 100 hours budgeted including the prep and painting for an exterior addition.

A painting crew of 2 employees was assigned this job and because it was your top crew they finished in 80 hours based on their timesheets. What happens with the 20 hours of labor this team was under the budgeted time?  This is where each of the 2 members of the crew is given a bonus for the equivalent of the time that they saved. For their high productivity work they each earn some percentage of 10 hours each for the 20 hours saved.

Now there can be mixed feelings on exposing the budgeted hours to the crew before the project starts. Perhaps doing that may not motivate the team to work quickly for the bonus but just enough to complete the project in the budgeted time. It’s OK because you have timesheets tracking time you know the people who are meeting versus exceeding the budgeted goals.

The key here is to make sure that at the end of the week, the productive team members are making more than they would have for a week in which they did not get the job done in less than the budget hours. That incentive will keep them finding new ways to be productive and constantly improving the operational efficiency of your company. Your team will be happy, your clients will be happy and your company will thrive.

Here is how Estimate Rocket can help you with this. Not only do we use the project hours when allowing you to schedule the jobs but we track the time for each of your employees against each job for you to quickly look at accountability reported for worked versus budgeted hours.

This is just one method for calculating incentive bonuses to reward your team for exceeding expectations. The bottom line is that companies that reward their teams for great performance and encourage them to keep improving, will far exceed their competition and will retain their team far longer than other companies.