COVID-19 changed the world, and contractors were hit hard by the impact. Coronavirus, like other crises the industry has endured, required contractors to adapt to a rapidly shifting commercial landscape, develop new safety protocols and reinvent processes overnight. 

It’s more important than ever to have a digital platform for workforce management that is flexible and available when you need it. The pace of decision-making today requires you to have accurate, real-time information. LaborChart partners have discovered useful and innovative techniques for using our platform to help them navigate the staffing challenges raised during COVID-19. 

We invite you to explore some of their stories below. 

W. Bradley Electric: Working Without an Office

When stay-at-home orders were first issued in San Francisco, California, Liz Hartmann was faced with a unique challenge. The Vice President of Field Operations for W. Bradley Electric, Inc., had to manage her workforce without access to the office where projects were laid out on a pair of floor-to-ceiling whiteboards.

While the office team at WBE, an electrical contractor based in California, had shifted operations, there were still laborers and safety monitors working on critical projects. Hartmann needed a way to track where her teams were going to be on a daily basis. 

“If I was working at home without LaborChart, I couldn’t have done what I did,” Hartmann says. “I would have had to come into the office and that wasn’t possible at the time.” 

With LaborChart, she was able to get an overview of where manpower was located and export project schedules to Excel. She then issued a daily workforce report that could be sent to team members working office positions remotely and on job sites in the field. 

“It was literally changing day-to-day,” Hartmann says. “Project managers could log on each morning and get information about who was actually working and who wasn’t working. LaborChart has been huge for us during COVID-19.” 

Duro Electric: Keeping Employees Safe

At the start of COVID-19, Mark Stark discovered a potential workforce safety issue that he had never encountered in his 30-year engineering career. Stark, the Vice President of Operations for Duro Electric, a design-build contractor in Colorado, had to find a way to track and isolate employees who might have been exposed to COVID-19. 

While looking at projects in LaborChart, Stark realized the solution for keeping his employees and job sites safe was already on his computer. 

“I created a group to isolate folks in LaborChart,” Stark says. “It was very handy because it was a dynamic, moving thing where the situation was changing literally multiple times a day.” 

Stark not only relied on the group to get a daily snapshot of manpower -- a quick look he could share with others in the organization -- but he could plan for the future by knowing exactly which people, along with their relevant certifications and skills, would be coming back online when they no longer had to be quarantined. 

“Once the group was set up, I could plan for when people were coming out of isolation,” Stark says. “It worked out really, really well.” 

How has your world changed with COVID-19? Reach out and let us know. We know you’re still working and we’re here to help you get the job done safely.