At Connecteam, we want your setup to be successful and easy. 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 construction company your size. Like Connecteam, this guide works as an all-in-one solution to your HR & Skills 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 setup 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.
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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.
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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 Qualification. In my company, the Qualification will be the different jobs your employees are qualified to do, such as builders, renovations, formen, and safety managers.

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 than 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 send your users an invite to download the app.

💡Tip: If you have many users, you can import them in bulk
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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.

For 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 staff by their ability to do specific jobs like builders, renovations, foremen, and safety managers. 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 staff who are qualified as builders.

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.

Courses are an easy way to create and deliver a digital type of training or process for your team to perform from anywhere and at any time. These can be onboarding new employees, training for new tools that are coming into use, and any other needs you can think of.

In this section, we will go on how to use all the objects in the Connecteam courses feature and the steps you should take in order to create an effective onboarding. This section ill use the example of creating a training course for safety policies but the principles discussed here can be applied to any other course you wish to create 🤩

Now let’s get started!

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To get started enter your courses feature on the left sidebar, then select + add new and name the course. In the example below you can see we named the Course Onboarding for Waiters. Now simply add sections and objects.

After creating a course, you will need to add sections and objects inside those sections. The purpose of sections is to divide your course into categories. If your course contains different topics such as safety gear, how to work with new tools, how to report a safety hazard, then using sections will separate these topics into categories and keep information organized.

Objects are the material you will include in your course. For example, these can be documents, videos, quizzes, forms, and much more! Take a look below at all the options for objects Connecteam offers when creating a course.

To add an object simply select the + add object button and select the object type. Then take the relevant steps to finish adding the object.

Below you can see we used the text option to explain what employees will go through in this course.

Below you can see we added a file with all the information about the new safety regulations.

When it's all said and done, as a manager we need to measure how the users did in the onboarding, so we created a quiz for the users to take when finishing the course.

The quiz can be customized to include text answers or images. You can even adjust the quiz settings to include a passing score, randomize the question order, and much more.

Once you have finished designing your course you can save it as a draft, or publish it and assign it to users. To publish select save changes, and assign it to either select users or smart groups. That's it your course is ready to go 🤩

A Real World Example: As high turnover in construction employees could be a big challenge for construction companies, the company above used Connecteam to design an onboarding safety course, to make sure all employees are aligned with the policies and have acknowledged it.

Connecteam’s Document feature lets your employees upload documents directly through the app. Whether it's a Federal W-4 form or a new employee hire form all the documents pertaining to your entire company can be found directly in the Documents tab. No more searching file folders to find that one document.

Have all required certificates and licenses for your construction business in one place! Such as work permits, certifications licenses, and other HR documents Start using the documents feature now!

Here is what we will cover next:

Before we begin we will give you a quick overview of how using the documents feature look for your employees!

For your users uploading using connecteam document feature is a breeze. No more needing to come in to filling in that one form or carrying all your documents to the office. Everything can be filled out and sent for manager approval directly from their user profile in the app!

The document feature can be found in your left sidebar. To begin, enter the feature, and click on create a pack. This will bring you to the document settings, where you will begin setting up your document packs and adding documents.

Document packs are groups of documents. An easy way to think of them are as folders, each one for a different set of documents. These can be assigned either to individual users or to smart groups - based on position, work site, or more. You can add as many document packs as you like each containing the same or different documents.

To add a new document pack, click on the plus sign in the top of the page, then select add new document pack.

Name the packet, select and add the relevant documents, assign it to the relevant users or smart group, and then save changes. You can create a specific document pack, for example, your drivers pack with their license.

Now that you have created a document pack let's add documents to it. In order to add documents to the pack, you first need to create documents and add them to the document list. Below we will go over how to do this.

If you have a document you wish your employees will fill in and submit, you can add a blank document. Blank documents can be personal details documents containing all the information you need about your employees such as their phone number, email address, home address, and more.

Expiration dates are found inside the setting of an individual document. They are specific to that document. To access these enter the Document feature, go to the document settings in the top right corner, and navigate to a specific document's settings.

At the bottom, you will see the option to set an expiration date. You can check this off to enable it.

After enabling the expiration date it's time to decide which kind of date you want to set the options are either per a document or per an entry. Below we will go over both options.

This option sets the expiration date to be per a document, meaning that regardless of when a user uploaded a document. Once the expiration date arrives all documents uploaded will need to be uploaded again.

In this capability, you also have the ability to set the frequency at which documents expire. These are every two weeks, every month, and yearly.

Expiration dates per entry are dates that are septic to a specific submission. These are not set by you (the admin) they are set by the user or admin when uploading the document. This option could be great for example, if you have users uploading documents that expire on different dates, such as a driver's license, or a certification to work with certain tools or in different work sites.

Let's take a look at how using these options looks from the user’s perspective. In the example below you can see that when uploading my license, I have to set an expiration date.

💡A Customer Success Manager's Tip: If you set your expiration date to be per a document: Then within one week of the expiration date set you will see a countdown at the top of the document panel.

In this article we went over everything you would need as a Construction company to get connecteam Hr & Skills hub 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!

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