Cell Phones
Most employees have their own cell phones they are a convenient tool that allows family’s to keep in close touch with each other. Prior to cell phones this trade utilized beeper to communicate and very few people had personal beepers. Cell phones have rapidly made pagers a thing of the past. Today they are fairly inexpensive to purchase and the monthly service plans are within most people’s financial reach.
But what is the true cost to your employers regarding cell phones? For the vast majority of people, nothing, personal cell phones offer a employer the ability to get in touch with an employee quickly in the case of an emergency. Two problems that do cost a contractor a great deal of money is personal cell phone use on the jobsite during working hours and the ability for employees to call into the office every time a question arise.
Let us take the first question first, personal cell phone use during working hours. Calculate an employees package including all fringes, overhead, and profit. Now add to that the lost revenue because the employee was on their cell phone, talking or texting a message. For conversation purposes use $25.00 as a true cost, including benefits of your efforts for an hour all that is needed is to add the overhead to that hour and you can get to the true cost of a hours labor. Let’s use 10% overhead and 10% profit for the sake of argument, $25.00 plus $5.25 equals $30.25 / 60 minutes equals 50 cents per minute. The cost for these phone calls, company wide becomes a stifling amount, not to speak of the disruption they cause.
The second problem is even worst, because it is robbing us of our ability to think and that is the continual phone calls to the office to find out how to do something or to get material that was not ordered. Foreman that call continually to get this information are robbing the office personnel because of the disruption to their days. Now a lot of this is the offices fault because they do not set the various projects up properly to start. Rolling schedules based on a projects construction schedule. Materials being ordered, including submittals being submitted early. Labor requirements must be considered to allow for the proper personnel on the project when needed
