A commercial contractor builds offices, malls, hotels and showrooms where the client sets tight dates and approves every stage. Project managers, planners and many specialist trades must work together, often through the night, in occupied or busy buildings.
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Share your requirementsA commercial contractor takes on office blocks, retail malls, hospitals, hotels, showrooms and tenant fit-outs. The team is larger and more formal than at a house site: a project manager, planning and billing engineers, a safety officer, a quality engineer and package managers for civil, interiors, services and façade work. The building is often live, so noisy or heavy work happens at night or on holidays. Clients inspect, approve and change drawings often. Mobilising a full team in two weeks and releasing it at handover is routine. The wider construction and real estate hub covers what the sector shares.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
A won tender means a project manager, planner, safety officer and coordinators must all arrive at once, often from other sites.
Work in live buildings shifts to nights and weekends, and supervisors carry the strain with no clear rest rules.
Revised drawings and approvals alter the plan again and again, and engineers absorb the pressure.
Interiors, façade and services are often subcontracted, so your people coordinate staff they do not manage.
Missing approvals, measurement sheets and test records delay billing, yet document controllers are rarely hired or valued.
When a project closes, good engineers and coordinators wait for the next one, and many take other offers.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a commercial contractors business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A roster of roles for a small, medium and large job, with what each does.
What this coversHideA roster of roles for a small, medium and large job, with what each does. See role design for the format.
Who joins, from where, by which date and with what hand-over, filled in the week a tender is won.
What this coversHideWho joins, from where, by which date and with what hand-over, filled in the week a tender is won.
Hours, rest the next day, food, transport and who is on call, agreed once instead of per project.
What this coversHideHours, rest the next day, food, transport and who is on call, agreed once instead of per project.
A short course on managing people who are not on your payroll.
What this coversHideA short course on managing people who are not on your payroll. The manager development programme can carry it.
A named document controller on each large site, with a grade and a route to planning or billing.
What this coversHideA named document controller on each large site, with a grade and a route to planning or billing.
Review the tender list quarterly and tell the best engineers early where they are likely to go next.
What this coversHideReview the tender list quarterly and tell the best engineers early where they are likely to go next.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A standard project team for each job size, with clear role boundaries between planner, billing and quality.
Coaching for package managers who coordinate people they do not employ.
Records of who is on which project, with skills, certificates and next availability.
A forward view of team needs from your tender list, so mobilisation is planned and not rushed.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
A flat structure works until the founder becomes the only route to a decision. How to tell when you have passed that point, and how to redesign without a reorganisation.
8 min readRead article
Hiring decisions made one request at a time, in the month the pain is worst. What a workforce plan contains and why a twelve-month view changes what you hire.
7 min readRead article
Plastics training dies when it waits for a free Saturday. Tie it to mould changes, purges and cold starts, use one-point lessons and a visible skill ladder, and protect it in peak months.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Keep a standard roster for each job size and a list of people with their release dates. Fill the key roles from this list first, then recruit for the rest while the team begins.
Set rules for hours, rest the next day, food and transport, and confirm the legal requirements with a qualified professional. Agreeing them once avoids a new argument on every project.
You cannot manage them as employees, but you can agree plans, work fronts and communication clearly with their managers. Train your coordinators in influence and clear instruction, not control.
Because delayed approvals and missing records hold up payments and increase disputes. A good controller pays for the role through faster billing and fewer arguments at the end of the job.
Share the tender pipeline openly, keep them occupied on bids or planning, and tell them where they are likely to go next. Silence between projects is what makes people look elsewhere.
We would look at the roles you filled in a hurry last time, ask night supervisors about their rest, and count revised drawings on one live site. A standard project roster with a mobilisation checklist is a common opening, scoped in writing for you to approve.
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