30 minutes max: Streamlining progress meetings for GCs

For an industry that hinges on physically creating a tangible product on the jobsite, construction requires a lot of folks to spend a lot of time sitting in meetings. One particular type of construction meeting often becomes onerous: the progress meeting.

While this sync plays a key role in keeping teams aligned, it can feel overly lengthy and minimally effective. Sometimes, it even feels like meeting to plan the next meeting. The overhead costs of the hours per person per meeting add up for the company, too. 

Fortunately, general contractors can take steps to make their progress meetings faster, easier and more efficient. That doesn’t mean ditching the meeting entirely — but GCs can take a different tack to make these stand-ups more useful and less burdensome.

Applying a new framework to progress meetings

Some progress meetings gather more than 50 people in a room in the hopes of getting updates from all of them in an hour or less. That means that most of the folks sit there waiting for their turn, wasting precious minutes in the day. 

By applying lean principles, GCs can rework the structure of these meetings to save everyone time (and boredom) while delivering better results. Foremen can get back on the job in 30 minutes, and other stakeholders can process important information to move up the ladder. They can do this with timeboxed 15-minute meetings that gather the right people around an action-oriented agenda. 

Start by breaking the progress meeting into 15-minute increments. 

• 0–15 minutes

  In the first 15 minutes, crews meet with their specific foremen, providing updates. This allows the team leads to get information about the work from the people closest to it. The equipment operator can flag any maintenance concerns, for example. Crews can then be released to their work with just 15 minutes of their day allocated to the meeting. 

• 15–30 minutes

  Hold an all-foreman stand-up in which those team members report back information from each of their crews to the superintendent or other representative from the GC. This makes sure that individual crews are aligned and moving in the same direction. Foremen are then released to their work, having spent only 30 minutes in the progress meeting. 

• 30–45 minutes

  The superintendent or other appropriate stakeholder(s) takes what was reported by the foremen and shares it with whoever needs that information higher up the ladder, whether that’s the owner, the architect, the GC’s decision-makers, or someone else. 

By the end of 45 minutes, the appropriate information should be reported to the people who need to know about it. This framework allows anything blocking the project’s progress to be identified. More importantly, it notifies the people who can solve the issue so they can start taking action. 

For example, maybe the foreman learns about a problem that came up yesterday during the meeting, and they can intervene. But maybe it’s a bigger issue, like equipment breakdown, and the issue needs to be raised with other stakeholders who can help teams workaround the problem. The sequential structure of this progress meeting format helps problems get moved up the ladder to the appropriate height.  

This structure also keeps people out of meetings for too long, freeing up time if they need to discuss something further. If a blocker warrants more conversation, they can have a smaller huddle with the necessary team members afterward. And since this structure only demands 30 minutes maximum from any given person, they’re still saving time over the traditional hour-long meeting. 

In short, this progress meeting framework enables the GC to fulfill its role as a leader on the jobsite. When the GC knows about blockers quickly, it can act on them to make sure the work can be done — and done right. 

Focus: Unlocking productivity in progress meetings

To get what’s needed from team members in 15 minutes or less, whoever is running the meeting needs to come in with a clear and relevant agenda. Packing too much into a meeting often makes it less effective. A streamlined approach is best when trying to unlock fast, meaningful stand-ups. 

Usually, productive and efficient progress meetings center around asking three basic but significant questions:

1. What has been completed since the team last met?
2. What is the team planning to complete between now and the next meeting?
3. What’s blocking them from completing planned work?

The GC can identify any artifacts needed to back up the answers to those questions, like reports. People should only be required to bring something they need to prepare if it will be used in the meeting. It goes against lean thinking to have people spend time and resources (e.g., printer ink, paper) creating waste that won’t be addressed. 

Templates can help provide predictability in an otherwise highly uncertain and unpredictable environment. With a templatized meeting agenda, the GC has a way to make sure the same information gets requested at the appropriate cadence. That consistency makes it easier to flag outliers. In construction, catching issues early almost always makes them easier and cheaper to solve. 

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Case study: Labor tracking through progress meetings

Labor can be a somewhat elusive element for GCs. Unless they self-perform work, labor largely gets managed by specialty contractors. Still, because labor data often plays a role in the release of payment to the GC, firms want to keep a finger on the pulse here. 

Really, the general contracting company needs to know if its subcontractors' laborers can perform their tasks on schedule. This gets tricky because there could be any number of blockers, including:

• Materials not being on site
• Not enough people 
• Too many people making it hard to work in the space
• The area not being ready because a previous contractor’s work isn’t done 
• Weather delays
• Equipment breakdown
• Miscommunication leading to installation in the wrong spot, then requiring rework

In short, even though the GC isn’t directly managing labor, they do have a hand in managing the elements that make it possible for labor to happen. 

With streamlined progress meetings, the GC gets a way to stay informed about what work is happening — and what roadblocks could be derailing it — without requiring excess information or time from specialty contractors. 

Leveraging technology for easier progress meeting prep

Meeting fatigue is a common problem across all workers and industries. It can be particularly problematic for knowledge workers at GCs. Continually tasking them with compiling logs can lead to burnout, which hinders retention. Worse yet, word might spread and interfere with the GC’s ability to recruit top talent. 

Fortunately, technology can help here. With templates to create meeting agendas and automation to create reports, tools can tackle the more mundane tasks involved in meeting prep. For this to work, the GC needs to implement rules around what data gets collected and how it gets used. With a standardized system in place, creating the necessary documentation for progress meetings should take a matter of minutes. 

GCs and specialty contractors don’t need to sink hours into progress meetings every week. With this lean-based approach, general contractors and the subcontractors they hire can spend less time on meeting prep and less time in meetings. And they don’t lose anything in the process. 

Instead, the GC should gain more clarity into the project’s current status, and the subcontractor should gain more focused support from the GC. This workflow highlights blockers so the GC’s team can act quickly to solve them, keeping the project on schedule and on budget. 

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