A con­struc­tion firm designed a new way of work to enhance work-life balance

Key results

About the client 

Our client is a multi-services con­struc­tion com­pa­ny that oper­ates in the con­struc­tion of com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial build­ings, sport and leisure facil­i­ties, infra­struc­ture, envi­ron­ment, and marine-related projects 

The chal­lenge

The com­pa­ny organ­ised an engage­ment sur­vey with its employ­ees every two years to gauge how sat­is­fied they are with work. In one of these sur­veys, employ­ees com­plained about heavy work­loads and declin­ing well-being.​ Man­age­ment took this to heart and engaged us to improve the work-life bal­ance of employees.

What we did

The com­pa­ny had the chal­lenge to improve the work-life bal­ance of staff in an indus­try where clients expect six work­ing days per week to deliv­er projects on time.  Active super­vi­sion is required to ensure safe­ty, high work qual­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. To remain com­pet­i­tive, the com­pa­ny had to ensure that the cost of the new work­ing regimes would be absorbed in the over­all per­son­nel cost.

We imple­ment­ed the trans­for­ma­tion in two phas­es: Inthe Design Phase, we cre­at­ed improved work­ing regimes that bal­anced the client’s busi­ness real­i­ty with employ­ee work-life bal­ance. Some of the ini­tia­tives  included:

Research and analysis

We con­duct­ed an in-depth analy­sis and inter­views with stake­hold­ers to devel­op sce­nar­ios for improv­ing the work-life bal­ance. From there, we defined two types of work­ing regimes, site exe­cu­tion vs. non-site exe­cu­tion, and devel­oped instru­ments to bal­ance out the dif­fer­ence in work­ing regimes for the employees.

Finan­cial model

We built a robust finan­cial mod­el which enabled the man­age­ment to decide on the final work­ing regimes and to ensure that the dif­fer­ences in work­ing regimes were fair and bal­anced out.

In the Imple­men­ta­tion Phase we ran sev­er­al ini­tia­tives to embed the new work­ing regimes in the organisation:

Val­i­dat­ing the pro­posed solutions

Did the new way of work­ing suc­ceed? We active­ly sought the feed­back of key peo­ple, influ­encers and a sur­vey of a wide range of staff to val­i­date the assumptions.

Get­ting process­es ready

All poli­cies and pro­ce­dures were made ready for imple­men­ta­tion. Nec­es­sary changes were made to the IT sys­tem to accom­mo­date the changes, so that hol­i­day plan­ning and cor­rect salary pay­ment would hap­pen with­out prob­lems at the end of the first month of the implementation.

Inter­nal communications

A crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tor to the trans­for­ma­tion was to ensure that all staff received the cor­rect infor­ma­tion on how the changes would impact them per­son­al­ly. We pre­pared and exe­cut­ed a multi-country, multi-project com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan to inform all staff about the changes.

Results

The new work­ing regimes began smooth­ly, with no impact on the safe­ty, progress and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the company’s con­struc­tion projects.

Over­all, employ­ees were pos­i­tive about the new work­ing regimes, with many say­ing that man­age­ment had lis­tened to them. There was now an opti­mised hol­i­day pro­ce­dure to ensure that all staff can and will take their hol­i­days. Site exe­cu­tion staff also enjoyed bal­anced work­ing regimes with extra benefits.