If construction loan interest on large projects amounts to hundreds of dollars per day…then the construction office trailer should not be something to be economized…but should be seen for what it is…a combat command center.
Instead of looking at the office trailer, furniture, and equipment as overhead costs to be automatically economized…the field office should be looked at as a tool to speed up the construction operation.
The size of the construction trailer is critical for function as a command center…but some builders think that two or three people can work effectively out of an 8×12 or 8×16 foot trailer.
Try placing the company president, the office receptionist, and an accounts payable accountant within one small room at the corporate office…and see how long that lasts.
A few years ago, I worked as a superintendent on a 282-unit, 22-building condominium project. The size of our construction office trailer was 12×60 feet, with three offices and a plans room. Having previously worked out of the typical 8×12 and 8×16 foot trailers on other projects for other companies, the luxury of having enough wall space to hang schedules and pickup lists, along with being able to work in a separate office…without having random interruptions and attempting to tune-out background conversations as a result of being in a confined space…was a huge benefit toward improved efficiency, time management, and morale.
This book describes management tools such as schedule charts, walks checklists, homebuyer options selections spreadsheets, and cheats sheets.
All these paper tools require enough wall space to be displayed. These and other informational aids…such as contact phone number lists and calendars…provide information at a glance…thereby saving time and improving efficiency. The typical 8×12 or 8×16 foot trailer simply does not have enough wall space.
An archaic mindset of some builders is that by providing an inhospitable and too small office trailer for the field staff…that this will encourage the superintendents to spend more time out in the actual construction site and less time “camped-out” in the construction trailer.
This old-fashioned approach backfires at the end of the workday when superintendents need to stay onsite to do paperwork after the tradespeople leave. If the construction office trailer is an uninviting place to work…the superintendents are more apt to leave the project each day when the construction activity concludes.
In my opinion, the best approach is to provide a construction office trailer that is adequately furnished and equipped to function as a field office, have a comprehensive construction program in place and functioning so that field staff has clearly assigned tasks to perform daily, and have an organized overall operation in the field for between 8 to 10 hours per day on weekdays with no “catch-up” work occurring on weekends…no matter how much time is spent inside or outside the trailer by the builder’s field staff.
