The Five Things That Cost Nothing

Almost every site reaching for a workforce system reaches for a product. Five arrangements deliver most of the value and none of them requires one.

For teams turning the five things that cost nothing into a repeatable record, project time tracking provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside Chartered Institute of Building so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

One: a named owner

One person, with time, and the authority to refuse access.

Because every failure in this collection follows from an unowned register, and a system does not create an owner.

Cost: a fraction of a role.

Return: the expiries get chased, the drill happens, the temporary accesses expire, and the chain data stays complete. None of which happens otherwise.

Two: the drill

Unannounced, timed, with discrepancies classified as data errors or people.

It is the only test of whether the register is a record or a list, and it is the only use of the register with consequences that are not commercial.

Cost: an hour a quarter.

Return: it finds the stale list, the unreachable file, the marshal who was not there and the gang that left at lunchtime — all of which are invisible without it.

Three: the exit arrangement

Make leaving as easy as arriving, and measure unmatched entries.

Because a register that under-records departures produces a roll call full of people who are not missing, and every minute spent on a phantom is a minute not spent on somebody real.

Cost: lanes, or sometimes a sign.

Return: the single largest improvement to register accuracy available.

Four: the flow-down, tested

Ask a tier-one subcontractor to produce evidence for somebody engaged by their subcontractor, and time it.

That one request establishes whether the contractual requirement reached the bottom of the chain, which on most projects nobody has ever checked.

Cost: an email and a stopwatch.

Return: it locates the tier where nobody is looking, which is where the unverified people are.

Five: telling people what it is for

Evacuation first, competence second, right to work third, commercial verification last.

And what it is not used for.

Because a turnstile installed without explanation is read as a timesheet, and read that way it invites the workarounds that defeat it.

Cost: five minutes at enrolment.

Return: the difference between a system people use and one they route around.

Why these get skipped

None produces an artefact for a board report.

None arrives in a box with a delivery date.

None has a supplier advocating for it.

And each requires a decision rather than a purchase, which is slower, harder and unattributable — the mechanism behind every substitution described in this collection.

Doing all five

A month, if somebody owns it.

Owner named in week one. Drill in week two. Exit fixed in week three. Flow-down tested in week four. The explanation delivered as each part lands.

At the end of it a site has a working arrangement and has spent nothing, and is in a position to decide what hardware would add — which is a much better question than the one it started with.

What hardware adds to these five

Speed and searchability at the gate.

Expiry enforcement that refuses rather than reports.

An evacuation list in seconds rather than minutes.

And a record that survives the project in a usable form.

Four real additions, and they are additions to an arrangement rather than a replacement for one.

The order they depend on

The owner first, because the other four are things that person does.

The drill second, because it produces the evidence that funds everything else.

The exit third, because it is what the drill will have found.

The flow-down fourth, and the explanation running through all of them.

Reversed — hardware first and an owner named later — produces the arrangement described throughout this collection, where everything exists and nothing has been tested.