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Site Meetings that Save Time
Have you ever attended a meeting that could have been handled via email? The one where Joan didn’t read the previous minutes correctly and needed the sale stats explained all over again. Time is a valuable commodity to every person. We are becoming more-and-more aware that time equals money, and wasted time is a cost we begrudgingly pay and seldom recover.

Why do we need site meetings
Weekly site meetings with your building contractor are critical to managing your project. They are there to ensure that you remain updated with site progress and are available to make any critical decisions before it is too late. It is very easy to identify a project where a client stays involved. The project runs smoothly and on time. All stakeholders are aware of timelines and when they need to give input. Meetings also reduce project scope changes and avoids budget overruns.
Making time for site meetings
So how do you balance time spent at site meetings versus the need to be at the office? If you include travel time, traffic, and the potential of a site meeting over-running, your 1-hour lunch break can easily turn into an entire afternoon. When setting up weekly site meetings, we consider:
- Where you work in relation to the site?
- Are morning or afternoon meetings better?
- How can we make the best use of the time of day, taking travel time, and traffic congestion into consideration?
- Does the meeting time suit all parties involved in the meeting? (Keeping in mind that we often have third-party suppliers or contractors join the meeting at various stages. They are usually only available during office hours.)
- If the meeting does not specifically need to happen on site, can we meet at your office instead? Or perhaps a virtual meeting? Zoom, WhatsApp and Skype have become a part of our everyday life. They all offer secure platforms to have meetings and are just as effective as meeting in-person.
Saving time for everybody
To avoid in person meetings that should have been over an email or a call, we create a WhatsApp group for each project. This group will be between ourselves and all major stakeholders such as owners, designers, architects, quantity surveyors. Throughout the project, we update this group with images, questions, and progress to keep you informed of what is happening on site. This also ensures that we keep any site meetings short and effective, having already dealt with minor issues. All meetings, whether virtual, on-site or at an office are minuted, and distributed to all in attendance shortly after the meeting.
In conclusion, site meetings and your involvement is the lifeline that keeps your project on time and within budget. We will work with you to find the best solution to hold these meetings and efficiently carry them out.
May you never say of your project, “I just attended a site meeting that could have handled via email!”