How Schimenti improves work-life balance and forecasts staffing needs

Abstract

They've seen an increase of over 130% in annual growth over the past 5 years and have a growing workforce that consists of over 225 team members. Schimenti takes a relationship and people-driven approach to every build, but managing a team effectively across multiple offices requires constant collaboration, coordination, and the ability to forecast workforce needs accurately. "We used an Excel spreadsheet to manage our resources, which took a lot of time and didn't give us the ability to forecast out too far," said Barry of workforce planning in Excel, "It was really cumbersome, it took longer to do, and you're not working with a live document all the time. If something changes the spreadsheet has to be updated. If you're remote, it becomes difficult." When it came to sharing resources across multiple offices, team members throughout Schimenti found it challenging. "Some of the challenges were also with my counterparts on the project management side," explained Barry, "If someone from the East Coast Connecticut office needed some extra support, he had to get on the phone and start making all these calls and emails, going back and forth." THE SOLUTION The team at Schimenti began using Bridgit Bench for workforce planning in the summer of 2020 during the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it wasn't long before the team had completely abandoned their Excel spreadsheets. "It shows our capacity in real-time. If you get asked by a board member or an owner,"How are we looking with capacity in two, three months?" Bridgit Bench takes the guesswork out of it," said Barry, "You can pull up Bridgit Bench and look out two months and see that we're at 80% capacity with project managers, or we're going to have three available supers in November." Accurate forecasting is proved valuable for business development and estimating teams. "We can share information and they can see what resources we have available and what types of people," said Barry, "We can be proactive and say 'In 12 months we'll have extra people that are very successful in remodels. Let's go after some more remodels.'" SHARING RESOURCES ACROSS MULTIPLE OFFICES The team at Schimenti values having enough people to provide their clients with the right experience, which sometimes requires sharing resources across multiple offices. "Now, with Bridgit Bench, everyone's putting that information in one platform. This helps for multiple reasons; you don't have to get on the phone or email, you can just pull up Bridgit Bench on your phone or laptop and see where there are available resources," explained Barry, "Using Bridgit Bench as a live document between all our offices, we're able to set up our teams for success and they're ready to go so we can start those jobs right." PUTTING A FOCUS ON WORK-LIFE BALANCE Schimenti's relationship-driven approach isn't exclusive to clients, they take pride in extending that value to their team as well, which includes taking work-life balance into account when allocating people.