At Connecteam, we want your setup to be strong and concrete. As customer success managers we took our experience from working with hundreds of construction companies worldwide and created this step-by-step tutorial to get your company set up to PERFECTION. You can expect this guide to go through all of the steps needed to get your account up and running with real-world examples of how each feature or capability can work for a cleaning company your size. Like Connecteam, this guide works as an all-in-one solution to your Operations Hub Set Up.

While there are many other articles found here on our Help Center we have designed this guide particularly for construction companies of your kind and it should walk you through your complete setup step by step.

Don't worry! We’ve got all of the first steps to make your life easy and Connecteam work for you! 🤩

After reading this guide you should be able to start fully operating the platform you will learn how to:

💡 Tip: Anytime you see blue text in this article it is a link or menu of links to other areas inside this guide. If you're looking for something specific, or you don't finish the set up in one day, you can always find what you need or pick up where you left off by clicking on the relevant topic.

Wait! Did you sign up for multiple hubs? Did you already receive a setup guide and know how to add users and create smart groups? Then click here to move onto the next section

The first steps when setting up your account is going to be adding your users and creating your smart groups. In this section we will walk you through:

Custom fields are information fields found inside the user's profile, and are filled with information specific to each employee. Custom fields are a smart way to identify and group your workforce, allowing you to customize what information is important to your company in order to organize their users. Examples of custom fields can be Position, Department, Birthday, Uniform Size, and much more.

We recommend planning out the information you want to know about your employees and creating these custom fields prior to adding the employees themselves. This will allow you to update all their information when adding them and save you tons of time later.

To add a custom field head over to the user tab, click on user details and select add fields, name it, and press save. In the example below you can see we created a custom field named Project. In my company, the project custom field will mention the projects that the builder are working on.

Once you have created the custom field click on one of your users to enter their personal user card, there you can update the custom field for that user.

You can also select multiple users at once and an action button will appear, click on update user details and update multiple users information at once.

Please note that there are 3 default fields you will never be able to edit or delete; these are First Name, Last Name, and Mobile Phone.

💡 A Customer Success Manager’s Tip: We recommend using the drop-down custom field type when creating your custom fields, which allows you to create a list of information to select from when filling out the custom field. This will simplify things later if using smart groups, which are filtered by custom fields. The filter of smart groups is case-sensitive, and here at Connecteam we have encountered numerous companies whose users were not added to the proper smart groups because of typos made when filling out a users custom field. Using a drop-down custom field avoids this possibility right from the start!
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Once you have set up your custom fields it's time to move on to adding users. After all, that's what you came here for - managing your workforce.

To add users simply navigate your way to the Users Tab on the left - hand and click on it. Once inside select Add Users and fill in the requested details. You can also use the menu on the right side to add more details then the ones which appear here which are only the required fields. After filling out the details make sure the Send an invite button is selected in order to

Smart groups are groups based on rules. All the users who meet the rule will automatically be added to the group and those who don't will not be added. It's as simple as that. A smart groups filter is based on custom fields - which we previously created.

Construction companies' smart groups are hugely beneficial and allow you to create different teams with different qualifications for your staff. For example, you can group your employees by the different projects they are working on to create a group for each project or work site. Since Connecteam's features, assets, jobs in the schedule, chats and much more can be assigned to smart groups, grouping them now will help us later on with things like scheduling correctly (and much more).

Step 1: Navigate to the smart group's category on the left sidebar

Step 2: First, add a Segment

Step 3: Use the + Add a group button from inside the Segment to create a group and then name the group.

Step 4: Set the Filter. First, choose the Custom field, and then finally select or enter the criteria that the group will be defined by.

In the example below you can see how I create a group of only my users that work on a project in main street.

Now that you know the basics of setting up your account it's time to move on to the features related to the operations hub.

This hub consists of 4 features, but for construction companies we find the time clock, job schedule, and forms to be most beneficial. Below we will go over how to set up and utilize the capabilities in each feature that we find most construction companies working on many shirt projects like yourself will find beneficial.

Utilizing the time clock will allow you to track your employee’s work time and help ensure that you are paying them for the actual time they’ve worked.

From all the many construction companies used by Connecteam we found that there are 6 capabilities that should be used to optimally run your business.

These are:

Before we begin setting things up, we will give you a quick overview of how the time clock look for your employees!

For you employees using Connecteam's Time Clock in their day 2 day is a breeze! They can clock in and out only to jobs relevant to them, switch jobs, take a break, review their timesheets, and much more! Take a look at how using the time clock looks from their perspective below, and then lets get started setting up and customize your company's time clock.

The first thing you need to do is set up your Jobs. In Connecteam, "Jobs" are an information layer that you track time for and what your employees will be clocking in for. Construction companies usually use the jobs as the qualification of the employees for example: foreman, safety manager, builder, electrician, and so on.

To Set Up Jobs follow these steps:

In Connecteam you can set up your employees breaks so they will be automatically deducted from their time card. We have two options to set up breaks, the first one is automated breaks that will automatically deduct any unpaid break from your employees timesheets, and the second option is manual breaks, so your employees will be able to clock in and out of breaks to record the time they were on a break.

Most construction companies go with automated breaks, to prevent mistakes of employees forgetting to clock in and out of their breaks.

Calculating your employee’s hours correctly is one of the most important and necessary parts of running a business. However, correctly figuring out your employee’s hours and overtime hours can also be incredibly challenging.

For this reason, we have created our simple-to-use Overtime Capability. The overtime can be set in a variety of ways, ensuring that you will always comply with your company policies or country’s legal requirements. This makes paying your employees correctly a whole lot easier!

Geo fences and breadcrumbs are useful tools for you as a manager of employees that work in different locations to make sure your employees are clocking in where they need to be. Geo fences are areas you can create in your platform that will restrict employees from clocking in from outside the work site. In addition, if employees clock out outside of the geofence, you will be notified and you will be able to edit the shift to the correct working hours.

If your employees are traveling to many different sites in the same day, and you want to make sure they are not making any unnecessary stops you can also enable the breadcrumbs to oversee the live tracking of your employees.

To set up geofences go through the following steps:

A Real World Example:Throughout this guide we will share with you real examples from construction companies using connecteam so you can get the idea of all that is possible with connecteam in a way that is specific to your industry. A company working with us has created geo fences around each of their project work sites to make sure employees are not clocking in from home. They have also turned on the breadcrumbs for employees that go between the different work sites, to make sure they are taking the shortest route.

The auto clock-out and daily limit capabilities are commonly used by construction companies to make sure employees are not forgetting to clock out or go into overtime without being approved.

In Connecteam you can set a daily limit so you will get notified of any employees that have reached the daily limit and remind him or her to clock out, and you can set an auto clock out if there is a certain amount of hours you do not want your employees to surpass in any way.

The Kiosk App is all about allowing users to easily log in and out quickly on the same device. Once they enter their personal Kiosk code the app would look exactly like the personal app they download to their phone. The users will be able to clock in, check their schedule, edit their time sheets, fill in forms and more. You can download the kiosk app to a tablet or a smartphone that is located at the work site and allow your employees to only clock in from the kiosk to make sure that they are on site when they clock in.

One of the most popular capabilities for construction companies using the Kiosk app is the ability for you as an admin to require the users to take a Selfie when logging in. This ensures if a user clocks in on behalf of somebody else you will know about it. Let's go over how to set this up and how it looks from both the admin and user's side below:

An important step in setting up your time clock is to set up your payroll period.

Once you set up your payroll period, all the reports you export will automatically be for the relevant payroll period. You can also set reminders for your employees to review their timesheets at the end of the payroll period to make sure they have requested any changes in the time sheets before you process your payroll.

To set the payroll period and reminder follow the next steps:

The main objective of the time clock is to track employees time and conduct payroll, and we aim to make it as simple as possible!

The Job Scheduler makes it effortless to publish 'claimable' open shifts for your team and provides them with all the info they need right in their mobile app, such as location, special instructions, attached files, and more.

From all the many construction companies used by connecteam there are few capabilities in the job schedule which should be used to optimally schedule all your employees and clients. These are:

Before we begin we will give you a quick overview of how the job schedule look for your employees!

For your employees using Connecteam's Job Schedule couldn't be easier.

They can easily see their schedule and all its details. If you, the admin/owner, allow them, then they can also see their whole team's schedule, submit their availability, and find shift replacements on their own.

Now let's set it up and customize it to your company’s needs. We will begin with jobs!

The first thing you need to do is set up your Jobs. In Connecteam, "Jobs" are an information layer that you track time for and what your employees will be clocking in for. Construction companies usually use the jobs as the qualification of the employees, for example: foreman, safety manager, builder, electrician and so on.

1. Position yourself on the row of the employee you would like to add a shift for or on shifts without the users row and hover your mouse over any day, then click the plus icon (+) to add a shift

2. Click Add shifts on the top right of the screen, then click Add single shift

Complete the shift details: date, time, title, job, location, shift notes, and tasks.

3. For adding multiple shifts click on the add shift button and select the add multiple shift option.

4. You can also add shifts by importing a CSV file. Click on the add shift button and select Import shifts from excel.

Once you have created a shift there are 3 saving options:

Shifts in draft mode will be white in middle, and published shifts will be colored in the color of the job that is listed in the shift.

Once your schedule is ready, simply click on the publish button to publish all the draft shifts in this week's schedule.

Real-world example:

We have companies publishing shifts with the job as the qualification for example: Forman, builder, forklift driver. And the shift title they will type in the project's name - Main street metro station renovation.

Open shifts are shifts that are not allocated for a specific user, but are open for employees to claim. If you have many employees working on the same projects, and you prefer having them select the shifts for themselves create open shifts for them to claim.

In the Job Scheduler, you have 2 ways to create an open shift.

1. Position yourself on the shifts without users row and hover your mouse over any day, then click the plus icon (+) to add a shift

2. Click Add shifts on the top right of the screen, then click Add single shift

Complete the shift details: date, time, title, job, location, shift notes, and tasks. Select ‘Enable users to claim this shift’ and choose the number of available spots. Click save and publish.

A world example: One of the companies that users Connecteam has many employees working for her on part-time jobs, they don’t need all employees coming in every day, and they rather create open shifts for employees to claim.

The shift and weekly templates are a great way to save yourself some precious time. By creating templates you will not need to type in all the shift information again and again, you can simply save it once and drag and drop it to the relevant users on a relevant day. If you have projects that you know will last for a while, or a workshop shift that happens multiple times, create a shift template for it!

There are two ways to create a new shift template:

To use the weekly template, click on the actions button again and select “load week template”

A real-world example:A company working with Connecteam uses the weekly template for the full-time employees that come to work every day. For the part-time employees they have created shift templates and they add them to the weekly template every week.

Repeating shifts are also a great time saver in our job schedule. Repeating shifts are shifts that you create only once, and then you can set them to be repeating so that you will not need to create them over and over again. If you have a job that will be repeated every day for the same user, or on a weekly basis for the same user create a repeating shift for that job. For example - if you have a client that you work for once a week or once a month for maintenance of checkups, you can create that as a repeating shift that will repeat once a month or once a week.

Our layers capability allows you to add additional information layers into users shifts, giving you the manager, full control, and an overview of your resources and how they are being allocated.

Construction companies usually use the layers to track the heavy equipment they use, to make sure that you are not double-booking your equipment.

For example, you might have a limited amount of forklifts and by viewing the job schedule on the view by layer view you can very easily make sure you have the equipment needed for a job available before taking on a new job.

You can also easily check if you have equipment available for ‘surprise’ jobs or tasks you need to do by viewing the Job Schedule by layers. If you need a track to pick up supplies you can switch to the view by layer view in the Schedule and check if you have an available truck.

Once the layers are all set up to your satisfaction, add them to the relevant shifts you wish!

A real-world example: We have companies working with us that have a limited amount of forklifts, or trucks and they need to dispatch their equipment as well as they dispatch employees. They use the layers to keep track of their equipment and by using the view by layers they make sure to not double-book the equipment.

Automating processes and standardizing them is something that is important for every business and especially in the construction industry. Forms allow your users to fill in reports, safety checks, equipment checks and more, all from their mobile app anywhere at any time.

In this section we will go over:

After creating the form, access the setting and there you will find the sharing options for each form. You can have each submission shared with you or with the relevant admin for that form, or even have it sent out to the client and the end of the job.

In Connecteam we have three types of sharing options:

A real-world example: A company working with Connecteam would like to have all the proof of work reports sent out to the work site manager so that they will know exactly what has been completed in each work site. They have selected the second option of the sharing option and the employees select the relevant worksite manager.

The manager fields are how you can communicate with your employees regarding the form. If you have seen that there was something missing from their work today, or you wish to let them know that the job seems to be completed, create a status manager field and make it visible for your employees. Once you fill in the field they will get notified about it.

A Real World Example:

Many companies working with Connecteam use the machine maintenance forms. They use the manager field to add a note about what reapers they plan on making and the status to mention if it is approved or not.

The Kiosk App is all about allowing users to easily log in and out quickly on the same device. This can be great if you don't want users to use their phones for work-related purposes or if you wish to make sure that all employees are clocking in on site. The Kiosk App can be added to a stationary device such as an Ipad, or even to a manager’s phone.

To get your kiosk app running follow these steps:

Since the Kiosk app allows all users to log in it must be set up to your company account. Setting up your Kiosk App is easy, and takes no more than a few seconds.

The Kiosk App can be downloaded here or by using this link: http://onelink.to/wbvv3t, and can be installed on any Apple mobile device (i.e. iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) or any compatible Android OS mobile device (Smartphone and tablets).

💡Customer Success Managers Tip: The Kiosk app can only be downloaded to a smartphone or tablet, and not a computer. To use the links above to download the app be sure to open them on the device (smartphone or tablet) you wish to download the app on - opening the links on the computer will result in an error message.

After downloading the Kiosk App from the AppStore, a system admin will need to set it up for the first time.

The setup process works just as in the main Connecteam app - the admin clicks on the "Login" button, enters their mobile phone number, and then enters the code they'll receive through a text message.

That's it! The Kiosk App is now ready to use by the company's employees.

In this article we went over everything you would need as a construction company who's projects are long term based to get connecteam set up and customized to meet your company's needs. While setting up and adapting to a new system might bring challenges and periods of adjustment for you and your employees here at Connecteam we are always here to help.

You can always reach out to our LIVE support team 🙋 (at the bottom right corner of your screen). They reply in under 5 mins to ANY question!