With labor shortages, rising costs, and economic uncertainty plaguing the construction industry, it’s no surprise that construction managers the world over are dealing with frustrating project delays. While project delays are often caused by factors outside of your control, there are strategies you can employ to minimize delays or mitigate their impact. One of these is strategic, streamlined onboarding to reduce time to productivity. Bridge LMS can help. It’s an all-in-one training, onboarding, and employee development solution that empowers you to help new hires hit the ground running. We’ve laid it all out for you below.
Dealing With Disruption: Strategic Onboarding Can Reduce Project Delays
The ‘2025 Construction Outlook National Survey’ by the Associated General Contractors of America (ACG) shows that organizations are facing significant challenges with project delays. 42% of survey respondents say that they dealt with postponed and rescheduled projects in 2024.
The UK is facing similar challenges. Many organizations are struggling with an unpredictable labor market and similar challenges following Brexit. It’s estimated that the construction sector lost 5% of its total labor force in self-employed workers from the European Economic Area when Freedom of Movement ended in 2021. The labor market has been slow to recover and is just one of the factors causing frustrating delays across the UK.
Tackling the cause of project delays is extremely challenging, especially when the root of the issue isn’t clear, or when you don’t have control over the factors that caused it. One thing’s for certain, though: empowering skilled workers to do their best work as quickly as is safe and realistic is absolutely crucial. The last thing you need when you’re already dealing with stressful, expensive delays is a slow-moving labor force.
This is where strategic onboarding comes in. When your workers are empowered with everything they need from day one, they won’t need to waste time with confusing training modules or lengthy onboarding tasks. They’ll be more productive earlier on—which is equally beneficial for your business’s bottom line and employee’s job satisfaction.
MORE FROM THE BLOG | ‘Overcoming Construction Labor Shortages: How Bridge LMS Keeps Workers Skilled and Thriving’
Bridge Can Shorten the Time to Productivity
With the right platform, you can deliver a smooth, automated onboarding experience that helps construction workers excel from day one. If you’re looking to make the onboarding process as streamlined and productive as possible, Bridge’s all-in-one learning platform will be your best friend. You can take advantage of:
- Built-in safety training modules
- Intuitive scheduling features for 1-on-1s and training
- Tracking and reporting capabilities for managers and system administrators
- Skills validation features
Bridge Journeys is particularly useful for construction organizations. It guides new workers through an automated onboarding journey.
You can easily design their journey in a way that ensures they don’t get overwhelmed by pending tasks or lengthy learning content. You can lock courses or tasks behind dependencies, meaning workers won’t be able to skip any crucial steps. Choose from six different step types workers should complete in their journeys. These range from courses to live training to tasks like completing benefits enrollment. Separating everything into steps makes the onboarding process easy on your workers—everything they need to complete is available to them on one simple platform.
Bridge Journeys also lightens the load on admin and HR teams—by using automatic staging and defining dependencies you ensure crucial tasks won’t slip through the cracks or cause bottlenecks.
Tracking completion is a breeze too. Bridge’s analytics dashboard is a simple, intuitive platform, but it packs a punch when it comes to data insights. System administrators, HR, and managers can make sure new hires are completing their training and acquiring the skills they need to do their best work on your construction projects.
BRIDGE GAPS, FAST—DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY | ‘Skills Gap Analysis Template’
Keeping Skills Aligned With Project Needs
Focusing on specific skills can really help reduce time to productivity. You want your workers to get up to speed on specific project requirements as soon as possible rather than broadly educating them on your organization's needs. This can be easier said than done if you're dealing with software that isn't designed for the construction industry. Some platforms offer one-size-fits-all content and training steps or make it difficult for system administrators to segment workers into groups.
Bridge is ideal for the construction industry. You get granular control over onboarding and training. Easily design each onboarding journey to be delivered to specific groups or individuals of your choosing, so you don't have to slow workers down with unnecessary steps, training modules, or tasks. Instead, they can get straight to business—learning the specific skills they will need to focus on the projects they'll be working on. You can even build a skills feedback step directly into the journey, prompting workers to get their skills assessed by managers or peers.
Bridge also offers platform multi-tenancy. This means you can easily onboard and train people from outside of your organization while keeping them in a separate learning environment from that used by your internal teams. Educate contract workers on a specific project in no time or get consultants up to speed on your project requirements—all with the simplicity of a single learning platform.
Protecting Your Bottom Line With Onboarding That Empowers Workers
Onboarding can be one of the highest-investment periods of the employee lifecycle. Getting through this crucial time quickly and efficiently will protect your bottom line while cutting overall time to productivity.
Some crucial steps to prioritize during onboarding are:
- Delivering compliance training, including crucial safety courses
- Educating workers on the purpose, scope, and timeline of the project they’ll be working on
- Ensuring workers get to know their manager, team, and any workplace coaches or buddies
These steps are great for fostering a sense of belonging at work while helping employees feel confident and prepared to get started on projects. Your workers will be able to see that your organization values them and wants them to feel part of the team, mitigating the risk of attrition during this sensitive period.
Ready to See Your Organization's Productivity Skyrocket in No Time?
Don't let crucial onboarding drag on. Give your workers a positive, engaging experience that helps them be productive on construction projects as soon as possible.
Our onboarding experts can take you through a detailed custom demo to illustrate just how big a difference Bridge can make for construction organizations.
Book a demo with us below, and let’s get the conversation started.
