The UK construction workforce consists of around 3.1 million skilled, talented people.
That’s 9% of the total UK workforce operating day and night, come rain or shine.
The entire economy relies on what they do. They build our hospitals, homes, schools, roads, offices and wind farms.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the construction workforce or the extent of the good it does.
Historically, it’s been at the cutting edge of innovation. Adopting the technological advances of the industrial revolution, and even proving resilient to the enormous challenges of COVID.
However, the next ten years present the construction workforce with a series of challenges that are easily equal to COVID:
Challenge one: keeping and growing a skilled workforce.
A surge of investment into construction, combined with a decline in new entrants into the construction workforce alongside an ageing workforce, means that to keep delivering, the sector needs to find new ways to grow, retain and utilise its workforce.
Some examples:
- 96 billion in investment into water signed off for AMP8
- A government target for 5 million new homes
- An overhaul of the energy grid, including the construction of Hinkley Point and Sizewell C
No wonder CITB estimate an extra 251,500 workers are needed by 2028.
Challenge two: making the digital transformation work for the workforce.
According to a Sapient Insights report, the average organisation now deploys 16.24 workforce software solutions. This app overload feeds workforce frustration. These unconnected apps create stop-start user journeys, slow and error-prone manual processes and have resulted in the data fragmentation we now face. This makes it hard to plan for the future.
Challenge three: rising to new compliance requirements.
The UK’s workforce is among the safest in the world, and it is, in large part, driven by high standards of excellence across the construction sector. Clients, contractors and supply chains work together to put safety at the heart of everything whilst the government constantly raises standards. Most recently with the introduction of 2022’s Building Safety Act.
We should be proud of this culture of safety. But balancing compliance and productivity feels like a constant tug-of-war, where productivity is slowly but surely losing ground. The question then is how the sector can better manage its workforce so that it can not only maintain productivity for the future, but improve it.
How can it grow and better use its workforce? How can it turn the tide of digital fragmentation? How can it raise compliance standards and productivity at the same time?
To meet these challenges, we need the next great leap in workforce management technology.
Could digital worker ID be that much-needed step forward?
Causeway Technologies is the global leader when it comes to digital worker ID in construction.
Here are some of our key findings:
Digital ID drives efficiency
Advanced digital worker ID is a time-saving tool that helps get your workforce working. It can reduce onboarding time by 70% - 90% whilst simultaneously helping raise compliance standards.
It helps reduce unnecessary training. With clear and easily accessible data about every worker’s individual training record.
Digital ID can help ensure you’re sent the right workers with the right training. Boosting productivity and reducing the need to take operatives out of work to train them.
Digital ID provides powerful, useful data
CIPD report that the UK workforce is underused and over-skilled. In other words, we have more talent available than we know what to do with.
They found that a staggering 35% of construction workers could be doing more skilled work.
This is very likely a data visibility problem – without a clear view of who has what training, organisations are using their workers inefficiently. With an advanced digital ID scheme, you get the visibility you need, helping ensure workers are allocated so that they can put their training to the best use.
On the flip side, in the same report, CIPD found that 30% of the construction workforce has received no training in the past 12 months. If this is the case, then perhaps the biggest possible way for the sector to face the skills shortage is by upskilling the workforce it already has.
An advanced digital ID is essential to succeed:
- It can help you identify where training will give the biggest impact. For example, which workers would require the least training to be ready for a new job role?
- A huge amount of training takes place on site but is poorly recorded. This is due to on-site data fog. Data fog is everything that happens on site that doesn’t make its way into a usable record. This might be site-based paper records that get trapped in filing cabinets, or it might be activities that don’t get recorded at all. Digital ID can make the recording of on-site training easy.
- Lost or incomplete records. A new worker might state that they have received a training but they have no evidence and so can’t use it because of regulations. You need to then pay for them to repeat that training or else miss out on their valuable skills.
The visibility of data given by advanced digital ID can cut training costs by 20% whilst ensuring you get more value from the training you do deliver. This cost saving can be used to reduce your operating margin and build resilience into your organisation so that you are well-positioned to manage the projected increases to labour costs.
The verdict?
Digital ID is a tool that can help your organisation to thrive at a point when other organisations are struggling to source and make the best use of their workforce. The data it gives you, the efficiency it drives and the way it entirely streamlines compliance are a leap forward for workforce management.
This article is an extract from our most recent eBook: Is Digital worker ID the next great leap forward for construction workforce management?
