Construction is not a factory with a fence around it. A project has a client, a main contractor, a series of subcontractors, material suppliers, an architect or engineering firm, a municipality that grants permits, and local residents who have nothing to do with the commission but do have to live with the result. Those inside that chain see the work. Those outside it mainly see the disruption, the construction fences and, sometimes years later, the building. Together, these two groups do not form an average; they are two separate audiences with a different reason to have an opinion about your organisation.
On top of that, the client is not always the user. A housing association commissions the work, the tenant lives in it. A municipality outsources, the neighbourhood experiences it. Anyone drawing up a stakeholder picture for construction must therefore establish afresh for each project who sits where, rather than working from a fixed list that carries over from one project to the next.
Within your own organisation, there is probably a picture of how a project is experienced: on schedule, within agreements, with the usual nuisance that comes with building. That picture arises at a boardroom table, based on reports and progress. The picture on the street arises differently: with a local resident who has had three weeks of dust, with a subcontractor waiting for payment, with a municipal official who does not see a promise about noise reduction reflected in the execution.
The Trust Baseline starts from that difference, not from a judgement about who is right. An internal survey records what management thinks is going on. An external survey among a chosen circle of stakeholders records what is being said. The difference between those two pictures is the first outcome, and often the most useful one, because it shows where the internal picture and the external signal diverge, without that already carrying an explanation.
In construction, something is constantly being promised at project level: a time for pouring concrete, a noise limit during working hours, feedback to the neighbourhood about a changed schedule. These promises are small relative to the investment in the project as a whole, but they are the point of contact at which a local resident or a local authority judges your organisation. A large investment that does not go ahead is often explained by market conditions. A small promise that is not kept is explained by unwillingness or indifference, and that costs more trust than the investment itself can ever make up for.
The commitment tracker therefore does not keep track of the big decisions, but of the series of smaller statements made per project, per local resident or per partner. Not to keep them on your behalf, but to make visible which commitments are open, which have been fulfilled and which have been left unaddressed. The signal rhythm repeats the external survey at a fixed regularity, so that a shift in perception is noticed before it settles into a reputation that is harder to turn around than a project.
This page makes no statement about what a local resident, a subcontractor or a municipality actually thinks of your organisation or a specific project. We do not know that, until that party says so themselves in the external survey. What can be established is the difference between the internal picture and what is expressed externally. That difference is a starting point, not a conclusion, and certainly not advice on who you should be talking to today.
The question of who is relevant, incidentally, differs greatly by sector. Where in construction the chain from client to local resident is central, this is different for who you need to talk to in the installation sector, where the relationship with end users and maintenance contracts plays a larger role, or for who you need to talk to in the transport sector, where planning and public infrastructure determine the stakeholder circle. A sector such as healthcare also has an entirely distinct relationship between who decides and who experiences, as can be read on the page about who you need to talk to in healthcare.
The Trust Baseline, the commitment tracker and the signal rhythm are currently being built. There is no dashboard yet that you can open today and no report that we can send you. Anyone with an interest in this can sign up for the waiting list; we will let you know when the instrument is ready for use, without being able to give an outcome or timeline for that at this point.
The question of who you need to talk to is inextricably linked to another question: who within your own organisation conducts that conversation, records the commitment and monitors the follow-up. In a sector with so many layers — client, contractor, subcontractor, regulator, local resident — keeping track of who has promised what to whom takes quite a bit of time from people who also still have to deliver a project. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, what portion of that kind of recurring, administrative follow-up work can be taken over by AI, so that the people currently keeping track of commitments have more time left for the conversation itself.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.