Foreman - Four Sometimes Competing Responsibilities

No other position in the construction industry has a bigger impact on field productivity than the Foreman who is leading the crew on front-line.

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Field Productivity: Foreman - 4 Sometimes Competing Key Responsibilities. Safety, Production, Customer Satisfaction, and Quality.

There are four major responsibilities the foreman has that often seem to be competing with each other:

  1. Keep your team, yourself and others on the jobsite safe at all times. The foreman’s actions will dictate the safety culture.  No risk is worth someone not coming home to their families happy and healthy as Jennifer Medrano reminds us with safety hand prints.
  2. Delight your customer.  There are few things more profitable for a contractor than doing repeat business for a select group of customers.  The foreman is the field ambassador for the company with everyone they work with on the project. Professionalism matters as Dennis Thomas outlines in this video.
  3. Install with the level of quality that the customer expects.  Cutting corners never ends well in the long run.
  4. Meet the productivity goals in the budget and continually look for ways to improve the standard.  No amount of growth can overcome consistently poor productivity and without profitability the business is not sustainable hurting everyone on the team.

There are two things that will 100% align all four of these responsibilities - planning & people.  This is where the best foremen spend a lot of their time and where the industry has major gaps in training. 


Improving Labor Productivity Workshop

5 Minute Foreman - Excellent book by Mark Breslin


Foreman - Four Sometimes Competing Responsibilities
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Foreman - Four Sometimes Competing Responsibilities
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Planning is Useless
Planning how to build a project and planning how to build a contracting business are VERY different and must be approached with a different mindset. When planning ‘how’ to build a project the ‘what’ is mostly known.
006 - Job Descriptions for Construction Contractors
Clear job roles are vital for career and business success. Each growth stage raises the stakes. Describing a role is simple, integrating roles is complex. Get 3+ hours of examples and 50+ resources to build on prior modules and keep you growing.
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One-page summary that can be used with your team to align them around the why, what, and how of effective scoreboards and scorecards. Next steps include worksheets to inventory and evaluate your current state of scorekeeping and designing the future.