Never be too busy to improve business performance

We have just come out of our busiest period yet at GKR.

We have broken the back of some of our biggest projects, including Battersea Power Station and Tottenham Hotspur’s Stadium.

At our peak at the beginning of 2018 we were hiring and training in a continuous cycle. 

We were challenged; I’ll be honest about that. But we not only survived, we have come out of it with a stronger and more adaptable team.

We never bid for work that we cannot operationally fulfill as a rule. But like many businesses, you accept work as it comes despite the fact that it may stretch resources as far as they will go.

This was us at the beginning of the year.

Because we were visibly working on larger, well known projects, some of our clients were concerned that they wouldn’t get our A-Team because of this.

So we set out to ensure that across GKR, no matter which team a client was allocated, they got the ‘A Team’. 

Because the whole company had to be the ‘A Team’.

But it wasn’t easy. The staff that have been with us a long time were being joined by completely new staff in larger volumes than before. Integrating so many into the workforce was always going to have a big impact on the whole business. 

All our processes and procedures were stress tested. The temptation was to put our strategy to one side and simply firefight.

However, we had to keep an eye on what happens on the other side of a busy period. Drop a ball now, and we could damage our entire business. 

So we more proactively embraced a strategy set for us at the beginning of the year. One based on ‘continuous improvement’ - the ability to identify and make small changes when needed to improve overall business performance - and measure it.

Below is how we still strived for consistently high performance during our busiest operating period yet:

We communicated our standards 

There were times when out of the need to deliver something quickly, we had to stand down and remind ourselves of the standards we cannot compromise – operationally, with safety and with our people’s performance and behaviour.

Out of this came a common phrase that we now use all the time. 

“We are GKR”.

What this statement means to us is simple. We never compromise on anything – safety, quality, skills, etc… because we are GKR.

It may sound arrogant, and it probably is. But for us it’s a reminder of who we are, and more importantly why.

This is how we ensure we have productive, high performing teams consistently… and how we communicate what is expected of everyone.

It has been during this period where we have valued our more experienced and longest serving members of staff the most. 

For example, we put in place an Operational Improvement Manager whose role is to act as consultant and trouble shooter across all projects. He ensures that even the newest members of our teams get the benefit of experience and that high levels of operational quality are maintained.

But overall we ensured greater management visibility on every project, and more regular strategy sessions across the workforce so that everyone bought in to the business' goals and challenges.

We understood our productivity

The whole industry has a productivity issue as we know.  Projects can be hampered by poor planning, unforeseen delays and poor supply chain engagement.

What we do not want is for poor labour output to become our client’s problem on a project.

At Battersea Power Station we trialed productivity monitoring which helped us identify what slowed our teams down – excessive waiting times for materials, inability to get deliveries onto site, etc. This is now being rolled out across the business so we can remove any barriers to us getting the job done.

This requires great client collaboration but also a motivating project manager. Output plans are communicated clearly to the teams of operatives to drive them towards an output goal. 

We ensured that client engagement genuinely added value

Early engagement is talked about a lot now, but I cannot stress how much of an impact this has on the operational and commercial performance of a project for both us and the contractor we work for.

Frustratingly we are often consulted too late on projects and we see the number of adaptions and variations spiral out of scope – costly for our clients. This doesn’t help us either because we cannot plan – being reactive costs us time and resources, and ultimately money.

During this last busy period, we had some of the larger projects working with us collaboratively. Wimbledon is a case in point. Working with their Temporary Works Engineers months before we set foot on site enabled us to plan out the tight programme and advise them on solutions to challenges the client wouldn't have considered.

This is framework we endeavor to use across all projects at early stage.

We measure what matters

This has been the most exciting learning strategically for us.

At the beginning of the year we introduced a health and safety league. Our H&S team audit every site, every month and using a scoring matrix, measure performance across a huge set of safety variables.

We were always strong on compliance but as we also look to still improve, the league helped us identify specific areas for projects to work on and common trends across the business. 

What we have seen is incredible. Compliance has increased by 25%.

This proved to us that if you measure the behaviours that are most important to your business, then they improve. This philosophy is now being applied to productivity, commercial performance and operational/quality standards.

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The results of measuring all these areas will be used to drive continuous improvement across the business, and identify how we support our people in leading and playing an active part in our high performance team.

This year has been both exhilarating and stressful. But our biggest learning is in how we apply ‘continuous improvement’ processes to achieve consistency in how our teams operate. 

The market is still challenging today, but I’m optimistic that our current team combined with this strategy will drive us through a more stable 12 months.