A road company builds highways, bypasses and city roads in stretches, with plant, crews and engineers spread along many kilometres. The workforce moves with each contract, lives in camps and works through weather, so every site is its own small company.
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Share your requirementsA road infrastructure company wins contracts for stretches of highway, bypass or city road and builds them with earthwork, sub-base, bituminous or concrete layers, drainage and structures. Each project sets up its own site office, plant yard, crusher or hot-mix plant and labour camp, often far from a city. Engineers, surveyors, plant operators, drivers and gangs of labour work in parallel along the alignment. Work follows weather, land handover and client approvals, so crews swell and shrink. When a project ends, the team is moved on or let go. The wider construction and real estate hub covers what construction firms share.
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 site staffs itself from scratch, builds its own rules and loses them when it closes, so lessons rarely reach the next project.
A good grader, paver or roller operator is rare and sought by every contractor on the corridor, and one resignation can stall a stretch.
Food, beds, water, phone signal and leave rotation decide whether site staff remain through a season, and the camp manager often has no HR guidance.
Crews wait or are sent home, then are asked to recover time with long days, and the goodwill built in good weeks drains away.
Young site engineers spend months away, and many leave for a city job as soon as they have a year's experience.
Gangs arrive through supervisors and leave when the stretch ends, so the company knows little about who is on site on a given day.
Moving plant, trucks and traffic near work zones put heavy responsibility on drivers and operators who may be tired, new or unqualified.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
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.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
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 road infrastructure companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A checklist for staffing, camp set-up, role letters and, at the end, redeployment and release.
What this coversHideA checklist for staffing, camp set-up, role letters and, at the end, redeployment and release. The HR documentation process can supply the formats.
A ladder with trade tests for graders, pavers, rollers and excavators, tied to pay and to posting priority.
What this coversHideA ladder with trade tests for graders, pavers, rollers and excavators, tied to pay and to posting priority. See compensation and rewards.
Rules for food, accommodation, drinking water, medical access and leave rotation, with a named camp manager responsible.
What this coversHideRules for food, accommodation, drinking water, medical access and leave rotation, with a named camp manager responsible.
A rule for how idle days are treated and how recovery days are shared, agreed before the monsoon, not during it.
What this coversHideA rule for how idle days are treated and how recovery days are shared, agreed before the monsoon, not during it. Attendance and shift planning can carry it.
A simple daily count by gang, trade and employer that reaches the project manager and head office.
What this coversHideA simple daily count by gang, trade and employer that reaches the project manager and head office.
A visible route from site engineer to section in-charge to project manager, with a rotation home between assignments.
What this coversHideA visible route from site engineer to section in-charge to project manager, with a rotation home between assignments.
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.
Safe working around plant, traffic and camps, with training and checks that suit road sites.
Rotation, idle days and long-day recovery planned fairly across dispersed crews.
A view of which skills are needed when, so teams move between projects without gaps.
Allowances, grades and rewards that keep operators and site engineers through a project.
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 shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 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
How to design incentives for operators, setters and inspectors in fastener, gear, spring and valve units so that accepted lots, not piece counts, earn the bonus.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Pay for skill, keep a proper camp, honour the leave rotation and tell them early where they go next. Operators leave when they feel unseen, or when a rival offers a steadier posting.
A named camp manager with written standards and a way to report problems to the project head and to HR. A camp left to chance becomes the first reason people give for leaving.
Agree the rule before the season, treat idle days fairly and share recovery work evenly. Surprises about pay or long days damage trust more than the rain does.
Give a clear route to a bigger role, a rotation closer to home and real responsibility early. Young engineers go when the site feels like a posting with no future.
Ask for a simple daily count by trade, gang and employer from every site. It does not need software, but it must be sent on time and read.
First we would visit a camp, ask your project managers which operators they could not replace and look at how idle days were handled last season. A project start and closure pack with an operator grade ladder is a natural first piece, and scope goes into writing for your approval.
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