Rais­ing the Bar in the Con­struc­tion Indus­try with Inno­v­a­tive Work-Life Bal­ance Solutions

INTRODUCTION

Work-life bal­ance is an impor­tant aspect of employ­ee well-being and job sat­is­fac­tion, regard­less of the indus­try or loca­tion. The indus­try is known for its demand­ing and at times dan­ger­ous work envi­ron­ment. Large scale or inter­na­tion­al projects often require work­ers to stay away from home for long peri­ods of time, which can have an impact on men­tal health and over­all job satisfaction.

THE CHALLENGE

Our Client is a multi-services com­pa­ny that oper­ates in the con­struc­tion of com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial build­ings, sport and leisure facil­i­ties, infra­struc­ture, envi­ron­ment and marine-related projects with a work­force of 15,000 world­wide. They have built some of the most famous and largest projects in the world.

The com­pa­ny high­ly respects its employ­ees and its bi-annual engage­ment sur­vey clear­ly indi­cat­ed good scores on engage­ment and sat­is­fac­tion of employ­ees result­ing in a good score on the attrac­tive­ness as an employ­er. How­ev­er, pain points were sur­faced with regards to the well-being of the employ­ees includ­ing work­load and the sub­se­quent men­tal strain on workers.

With the aim of enhanc­ing employ­ee well-being, the man­age­ment team took the feed­back to heart and launched an ini­tia­tive to improve work-life bal­ance. To this end, they col­lab­o­rat­ed with Renoir to iden­ti­fy and imple­ment effec­tive solutions.

PROJECT APPROACH & OPPORTUNITY ANALYSIS

The project had two impor­tant phas­es: the design phase and the imple­men­ta­tion phase. The design phase defined the improved work­ing regimes that are in line with the busi­ness real­i­ty of the company:

1. The con­struc­tion indus­try is a high­ly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket in this loca­tion where clients expect 6 work­ing days dur­ing the week in order to deliv­er projects in time.
2. Active super­vi­sion and pres­ence of the man­age­ment is required to assure safe, qual­i­ty and pro­duc­tive exe­cu­tion of the work.
3. In order to remain com­pet­i­tive, the cost of new work­ing regimes should be absorbed in the over­all per­son­nel cost.

In-depth mar­ket analy­sis and inter­views with stake­hold­ers pro­vid­ed insights into poten­tial sce­nar­ios to improve the work-life bal­ance. Sub­se­quent­ly, two types of work­ing regimes were defined (site exe­cu­tion ver­sus non-site exe­cu­tion) togeth­er with instru­ments to bal­ance out the dif­fer­ence in work­ing regime for the employ­ees. A robust finan­cial mod­el enabled man­age­ment to decide on the final work­ing regimes, bal­anc­ing both the real­i­ties of the con­struc­tion indus­try and the desired work-life bal­ance for the employees.

“ Renoir helped great­ly in find­ing a real­is­tic bal­ance in the new work­ing regimes and was instru­men­tal in detail­ing the way for­ward for implementation. ” 

Direc­tor

IMPLEMENTATION

The imple­men­ta­tion phase con­sist­ed out of 3 impor­tant mile­stones. The first one was the val­i­da­tion of the pro­posed solu­tion. A final sense check of the pro­posed solu­tion was under­tak­en by the active use of a sound­ing board of key peo­ple and influ­encers in the com­pa­ny in com­bi­na­tion with a sur­vey to a wide range of staff. The for­mal val­i­da­tion of the new work­ing regimes was done by the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee and aimed to pre­pare for all pos­si­ble dis­cus­sions and chal­lenges dur­ing the implementation.

In par­al­lel, we com­menced prepa­ra­tion of all poli­cies and pro­ce­dures to ensure they were ready for imple­men­ta­tion. Also, the nec­es­sary changes for the IT sys­tem were made to accom­mo­date changes with regards to remu­ner­a­tion and pay­ment cycles. Final­ly, a crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tor for the work-life bal­ance project was the prepa­ra­tion and exe­cu­tion of a multi-country, multi-project com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan to ensure all staff were informed appro­pri­ate­ly and ques­tions answered.

“ The Man­age­ment team can be proud to have imple­ment­ed the new bal­anced work­ing regimes… they tru­ly impact the work-life bal­ance of our staff. ”

Chair­man

KEY RESULTS