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Workforce Quality or Management Quality?

I'm in Florida this week and was reading an interview with Stuart Graham, the CEO of Skanska, a construction company listed as 125 on the Fortune 500. They have construction projects worldwide so a natural interview question was:

QUESTION: Where in the world do you find the most productive workers with the best work ethic?

ANSWER: We have 12,000 projects, so I see vast differences in productivity. But I can't attribute it to a country or a culture. I attribute it to the management on a project. Productivity is not the willingness of the workers but how good and demanding the supervision is.

I haven't been on 12,000 projects but have been involved in a significant amount of project turnarounds and have NEVER had to replace the workforce in order to turn a bad project around. This is the fault of the industry, not the individual foreman, superintendent or project manager. There is a significant amount of craft training but very little management training.

Companies who are looking to succeed will be the ones who are building strong construction management and leadership training programs.

Posted by David on August 24, 2007 02:13 AM|Permalink

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