How Daily Construction Checklists Keep Jobs Safer and On Track

On a construction site, staying on top of team focus and standards is crucial to the success of a project, as well as the safety of the labourers on-site. Human error and lack of focus, although unavoidable, get in the way of progress and can lead to accidents or missed deadlines.

Ongoing daily construction checklists and reports are a great way to reinforce safety and job standards, by keeping teams focused on all the details that need to get done.

However, despite the usefulness of these checks, labourers, foremen, and other site team members may look down on ongoing paperwork, and often rush to complete them – rather than using them as powerful tools to keep things on track. 

So how can you reinforce safety and job standards with daily checklists that actually means something to both you and your workers?

Replacing daily construction checklists and site paper reports with IntouchCheck mobile forms software is a great way to minimize these issues, and truly drive safety and job standards across teams. In this blog we’ll look at four key ways it helps your two core problems: keeping teams safe and keeping jobs on track.

1. Focus teams on standards daily
2. Strengthen the accountability of field teams
3. Improve visibility into the status of projects
4. React to on-site issues faster

1. Focus teams on standards daily

To ensure all tasks are completed and stay front-and-center for your field teams, they need to know exactly what to do. 

While workers may have a good understanding of what needs to get done, distractions, forgetfulness and rushing commonly cause ongoing procedural tasks to be missed. To eliminate these common issues, create daily checklists and reports as a  reminder of these ongoing tasks that team members can check off as they complete.

Paper checklists provide a reminder, but aren’t easy to manage. It becomes difficult to oversee operations with multiple sheets of paper for each site, team and process – every day.

With IntouchCheck checklist builder, you can build unlimited construction checklists for your entire daily processes so that nothing is forgotten. Complete and view all checks and results right from your mobile device.

Example 1 - Focusing Teams on Safety:

Create and enforce a daily process to ensure safety is at the forefront for all workers. Use IntouchCheck to create safety checks and tailgate forms for laborers every morning for proper checks of equipment, sites and laborers. Focusing teams on completing every single construction checklist item every morning consistently reinforces positive behaviour to keep workers safe. 

Example 2 - Staying on Track with Job Checklists:

Project managers can use IntouchCheck to create custom daily or weekly checkpoint checklists, for everything that needs to be completed each day/week to keep a job on track. This will ensure important things are not missed, allowing them to check things off as they go. 

2. Strengthen the accountability of site teams

In any workplace, what gets measured, gets done. Why? Because measurement is a way to drive accountability and delivery. 

Whether you're measuring ongoing safety procedures or tracking progress on a job, the more often checks are put in place, the more accountable people are to deliver them and also raise warnings when things begin to slip. This increased accountability and initiative leads to improved productivity and ability to react and adjust as needed.

If you're using paper checklists and forms to measure execution on job sites and not finding them effective, this is no surprise. The slow time frame of hand-delivering,  reviewing and interpreting reports, reduces accountability because people are less likely to view and react. 

With IntouchCheck, checks are submitted instantly giving all necessary office workers and site teams insight into the results. Managers are able to see when the report was completed, how long it took to complete, and require photos or comments for any items, adding even an additional layer of accountability into checklists and forms.

More importantly, any action items are instantly identified and can be sent to project managers for action, giving site teams the power to inform the office of what's going on onsite, and prevent issues from snowballing.  

Site workers can take the initiative to feed into project timelines and safety procedures, improving overall accountability and delivery. 

Example - Strengthening Accountability for Safety:

Drive accountability for completing daily safety checks by scheduling them for a certain time every day, and positively reinforce teams for consistent on-time delivery of checks. Add photo requirements for specific items, so that teams can report on actual onsite conditions and flag items that may be of concern. Be sure to react instantly if problems are identified.

If teams know they are accountable for completing safety checks and flagging problems, and that office teams will react to what they report on, they are more likely to take initiative to ensure the items on them are completed properly every day. 

Example - Drive Team Initiative and Accountability on Job Timelines:

Building an IntouchCheck daily/weekly checkpoint checklist for each job, is an easy and quick way to submit ongoing progress reports. The simpler and easier it is to report on job progress, the more often it can be measured, and the more accountable teams will be to stay on track.

Schedule your checks as often as needed, and require images, and signatures to verify what's being reported on.

When teams have a constant reminder of what's expected to stay on track, they'll be more accountable for delivering those requirements. This also drives a reason to take initiative in solving problems onsite and flagging problems that may impact timelines, early. 

3. Improved visibility for office teams

With IntouchCheck construction checklists, not only will your site teams benefit from easier checks and improve productivity, your office teams will benefit with complete visibility into site projects on a real-time basis. 

Without visibility, it’s often left up to foremen and project managers to constantly check in on statuses and tasks across sites or sift through reports for notable updates. This can lead teams to feeling micro-managemed OR a lack of important information needed for decision making and client management. 

With ongoing job progress/safety reports feeding straight into IntouchCheck, project and client managers have an instant look into what's happening on sites at any given time and can action items, communicate to clients, and make changes to project plans to acccomodate. 

Project managers can see a list of open action plans for assigning, top problems and trends across sites, and compare progress across sites to better manage ongoing safety and job progress.

Example - A Window Into Onsite Safety:

Run a report to assess which sites missed their daily safety checklist, and send a reminder to the foreman or project managers with the click of a button. When safety problems are reported, view photos and conversation logs about the issue for a better understanding of what's going on and how it will impact. View reports over time to see top issues found, and put programs/training in place to address them proactively. 

Example - Real-time Pictures of Progress:

With ongoing daily checklists and reports being submitted, project managers can receive instant lists and action plans of what's been done, what hasn't and what needs attention, without back-and-forth and  follow up. This makes for easier tracking across sites, staying on top of project timelines and managing clients.

4. React to and prioritize onsite issues.

Even with all these checklists and reports in place, issues are unavoidable.

Often problems that occur can be fixed on-site, but when they can’t, project managers and site teams need to know right away what needs to be done to solve these problems and how it impacts timelines, costs and clients.

With IntouchCheck, teams can flag items for follow up so they instantly alert the right people. Action plans show you a list of all tasks that need to be acted on for specific sites, which can be assigned with due dates to team members, allowing you to prioritize and react to onsite problems in real time.

Site teams and project managers can discuss issue progress, so there's always a history of everything going on with a problem. No need to send follow up emails. 

Example - Solving Safety Problems:

If a problem is found on a morning safety check, instantly alert project managers and foremen, the moment the checklist is submitted. They can allocate resources for fixing the issue, set a due date, and adjust timelines and progress checks appropriately. At any point they can check in on what's happening with the problem. When issues have been solved teams can mark it as resolved to remove it from the action required list. 

Example -Don't Let Small Slips Turn to Large Ones:

With IntouchCheck action plans, project managers can instantly start to see where progress or execution is beginning to slip, and discuss why. They can then use the information to shift timelines and requirements with foremen to get things back on track or set more realistic updates with clients. These ongoing reactions prevent small slips in timelines, from snowballing into large ones. 

Conclusion

Using daily construction checklists help field teams complete jobs properly while maintaining company-wide focus on job delivery and safety. Don’t let the headache that is paperwork prevent valuable information and insights from being shared and collected on-site.

Start your free trial of IntouchCheck today to help enforce the safety of your labourers and keep jobs on track in four ways:

1.     Focus teams on standards daily
2.     Strengthen the accountability of field teams
3.     Improve visibility into the status of projects
4.     React to on-site issues faster