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Getting Your Players Off the Bench

In basketball, the term bench is most often used to refer to the reserve players on the team who do not start the game. In baseball, A bench player is a player who is not normally a starting player, while a bench warmer is slang for a player who rarely gets used in a game. And in politics, a backbencher is there but who cares? If the saying “Our people are our most important asset” is true at your company, why are so many of them underutilized, so many “sitting on the bench?”

Bridgit, a specialist in construction workforce technology, provides Bench Cost Tracking as a way to help general contractors have full workforce visibility. As one of many recent additions to Bridgit Bench, the Bench Cost module will help general contractors tie a dollar value to people who are sitting on the bench, or are underutilized, and make data-driven decisions about how to properly allocate staff.

During the early day of the COVID-19 pandemic, when jobs were being closed or postponed for health safety, workers were furloughed or reassigned to remote office-type work. Now that projects are back online, many of those workers have gone elsewhere and there is a serious labor shortage, especially in the skilled trades. That has led to an industrywide struggle to get enough of the right people to complete projects. It’s crucial now, more than ever, for general contractors to maximize the productivity of their current staff.

Yet, contractors continue to use spreadsheets or outdated legacy solutions. In doing so, they may be missing out on critical insights necessary to make the best decisions for their people. Bridgit Bench, with its forecasting features, enhanced by existing utilization and people capacity reports, can help.

Bridgit Bench is very simple, user friendly, and easy to use. It allows contractors to quickly update staffing changes common to the construction industry and provides accurate visualization tools for creating efficient, strategic, forward-looking workforce plans. Its user-friendly interface allows for the consolidation of multiple, error-prone spreadsheets commonly used for resource management.

Bridgit Bench helps to improve collaboration by providing unlimited users with controlled access to accurate, actionable project and allocation data via web-based or mobile applications. However, though common to subcontractors and self-performing companies, Bridgit Bench does not currently support hourly allocations to track craft worker allocations.

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