Construction Industry Lagging behind Technologically — Digital Solutions Can Help

Notorious laggard

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Despite being one of the largest sectors of the global economy, the construction industry is notoriously slow to adopt new technologies; this leads to shortfalls in productivity. According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, "Reinventing Construction: A route to higher productivity," labor productivity across all sectors has grown by 2.8% in the last 20 years, but construction productivity has only increased by 1%.

The report makes the argument that if construction invests in digitization and technological solutions, they could see a 50-60% increase in their overall productivity. In addition, the report says that a digital transformation alone can increase productivity by 15% and reduce costs by 4-6%.

Digital transformation

Construction companies can see some of these benefits by introducing new timekeeping and payroll processing technology. According to McKinsey, Paper timecards and spreadsheet tracking are profit killers." The American Payroll Association estimates that 43% of hourly workers exaggerate hours worked. Time theft adds up to an average of four hours per employee per week.

Digital solutions can help, such as hh2's cloud-based time tracking tool, Remote Payroll. Construction companies install an integration client on their server; this syncs all accounting, payroll, and job cost data. Employees can use multiple time entry methods based on company preferences to enter time, including daily, weekly, prefill, and record-based.

Mobile time entry

For example, field supervisors can fill daily timecards using smartphones or tablets for all employees on the crew for a single day. In contrast, they can fill out a weekly timecard for a single employee all in one screen view. hh2's record-based timecards facilitate employees who hop from job to job, working on different cost codes throughout the week.

hh2's cloud-based solution offers enough robustness and reliability to make it Procore, Autodesk, and other major project management systems' preferred integration solution with the construction industry's leading accounting systems.

Many construction companies have reduced 'time theft' by updating their time entry practices with digital solutions such as hh2's Remote Payroll.

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