From Air Horns to Instant Alerts: How Skanska Modernized Jobsite Communication

From Air Horns to Instant Alerts: How Skanska Modernized Jobsite Communication

Construction has a communication problem, and the industry has the numbers to prove it.

A landmark study by FMI and PlanGrid found that poor communication drives an estimated $17 billion in annual costs across the U.S. construction industry and accounts for 26% of all rework on jobsites. Workers lose nearly two full working days each week resolving avoidable issues, not because of bad planning or poor craftsmanship, but because the right information didn't reach the right people at the right time.

That was 2018. The projects have gotten bigger since then. The crews have gotten more distributed. And the communication systems most teams rely on haven't kept up.

One general contractor, Skanska, faced this exact challenge on a 52-acre healthcare project in Fort Myers, Florida, with more than 700 workers active daily. What the project team did to solve it is the story behind this post.

If you've read our other posts on why the traditional communication chain breaks down or why language barriers are still an unsolved problem on most jobsites, you know what the problem looks like. What's less common is seeing what it actually looks like when a team solves it, with real numbers, a real project, and real workers on the ground.

That's what this blog is about.

The Traditional Communication Chain Was Built for a Different Era

For decades, construction communication has followed a familiar chain: the general contractor shares information with trade partners, trade partners brief their foremen, and foremen relay the message to crews.

On a small job, that works. On a 700-person jobsite spread across 52 acres and dozens of active work zones, it doesn't.

The failure isn't effort, it's scale. A single foreman responsible for 150 to 200 workers physically cannot guarantee that every person under their supervision receives a time-sensitive update. Workers may be in separate buildings, on different floors, or focused on tasks with heavy machinery running nearby. By the time a message reaches the last person in the chain, it may already be too late.

Trenton LeBlanc, General Superintendent at Skanska, put it plainly:

"If you tell one foreman to communicate to 150 or 200 workers, it takes a long time to reach everyone. It's almost impossible to expect that to happen right away."

That's not a failure of leadership. That's a failure of the system, and it plays out on large commercial, healthcare, industrial, and infrastructure projects every day. According to Deloitte's 2026 Engineering and Construction Industry Outlook, the industry needs to attract an estimated 499,000 net new workers this year alone to meet project demand, which will mean more crews, more trades, and greater coordination pressure on already stretched project teams.

When Communication Fails, Safety Suffers First

Construction remains one of the most dangerous industries in the United States, accounting for nearly one in five occupational fatalities nationwide. The causes are complex, but slow, inconsistent, or incomplete communication consistently worsens jobsite hazards.

Traditional alert tools like air horns and radios have real limitations on a large, active site. As Adal Melendez, Safety Manager at Skanska, described it:

"We used air horns for emergencies, but if you're not close enough, you don't hear it."

The consequences of that gap go beyond missed alerts. On a separate Skanska project, a muster point was relocated, and the change was communicated at a trade partner meeting, but it never made it to all workers on site. When a full building evacuation was required shortly after, craft workers headed to the old location. Daimon Perez, Senior Director EH&S Florida at Skanska, described the scene:

"During the emergency, craft workers began gathering at the old location. The Project Team spent about 25 minutes getting everyone to the new muster point. It created exactly the kind of confusion you can't afford during an active evacuation."

Twenty-five minutes of confusion during a live evacuation is not just an operational failure. It's a safety event, and it was caused entirely by a communication gap, not a planning one.

This is also becoming a compliance issue. OSHA's enforcement posture in 2026 places increased emphasis on documented, proactive safety communication, meaning inspectors are looking for evidence that workers actually received safety information, not just that it was shared in a meeting. Digital records of alerts, acknowledgments, and orientation completions create an audit trail that word-of-mouth relay chains simply cannot.

Language Access Is No Longer Optional

The modern construction workforce is increasingly multilingual. On many large projects, Spanish is the primary language on the jobsite, not the exception, but the standard.

Safety alerts delivered only in English create a direct communication coverage gap. A lightning warning, a crane movement notification, or an evacuation instruction must be understood before action can be taken. When messages pass through multiple people before reaching a worker who doesn't speak English, critical details get diluted, mistranslated, or lost entirely.

Trenton LeBlanc described the reality on his jobsite directly:

"Most of our workforce is Spanish-speaking. Without communication in Spanish, many workers would not receive critical information when they need it most."

This isn't a fringe issue. It's a daily operational challenge for safety managers, project managers, and superintendents working on projects where workforce diversity is the norm, not the exception. We've written about how informal translation is still the default on most jobsites, and why that gap has direct consequences for safety, rework, and schedule.

Construction teams that build communication systems capable of reaching workers in their preferred language aren't just checking a compliance box. They're closing a genuine safety gap.

Labor Shortages Are Amplifying Every Inefficiency

The construction industry is currently grappling with a severe workforce crisis. Data from the Associated General Contractors of America reveals that 94% of firms struggled to fill positions in 2025, identifying labor scarcity as the primary catalyst for project schedule delays.

Within this high-pressure landscape, every production hour squandered on communication friction carries a heavy price. Time lost to manually tracking down crews, repeating orientations for individual hires, or untangling the knots of inconsistent messaging represents labor value that is permanently gone.

Research by FMI quantifies this impact, showing that workers lose nearly 2 full days each week to preventable issues, largely due to a lack of immediate, accessible project data. Adal Melendez, Safety Manager at Skanska, noted the limitations of the old model:

"I had to rely on foremen to spread the word, and I already knew which ones weren't going to tell their people. I'd have to go out there myself and make sure the message got delivered."

That is a safety professional performing a clerical function—time diverted from high-level field oversight. Projects that bridge this information gap gain a significant competitive edge over those still managing the field through manual effort.

Digital Orientation Is a Productivity Issue, Not Just a Safety One

Communication challenges don't begin after workers arrive on site. For most large projects, they begin during orientation.

Traditional jobsite orientations can consume one to two hours of a worker's first day, time spent sitting in a training room before a single productive hour of work begins. For the project team, it means a safety professional is tied to a training room instead of the field. On a project with hundreds of workers over a mobilization period, those hours compound quickly.

When workers complete orientation before arriving on site, projects reduce bottlenecks at the gate, improve consistency in what workers actually learn, and give safety teams back hours that are better spent where risk actually exists: on the ground. As we've covered in our guide to smarter site orientations, this shift also improves day-one preparedness, as workers arrive knowing what to expect rather than learning it in real time.

How MindForge Helps

The challenges above aren't hypothetical. They're the exact problems Skanska's project team faced on the Lee Health project in Fort Myers, Florida, a 52-acre healthcare facility with more than 700 workers active daily across multiple trades, work zones, and a predominantly bilingual workforce.

Skanska implemented MindForge as a central platform for direct workforce communication, digital orientation, and real-time alerting. Instead of relying on foremen to cascade messages through layers of supervision, the project team could instantly reach every worker on site with a single message. Alerts were automatically translated between English and Spanish. Workers completed orientation before arriving on site, reducing the on-site onboarding process to approximately 15 minutes.

The shift was immediate. Adal Melendez described the change directly:

"Before, I had to walk the jobsite and make sure people got the message. Now I send one message, and I know everyone received it. It saves a lot of time."

For bilingual crews, the translation capability changed the game entirely. As Daimon Perez explained:

"That was a game-changer. You send it in English, and they receive it in Spanish instantly. And when they reply, you get it back in English."

And the visibility it gave project leadership was something foreman-chain communication had never provided. Bill Bryant, Senior Superintendent at Skanska, put it best:

"When I send a message out, I can actually see the response. Workers start moving right away. You can physically watch the jobsite react."

The results from the Lee Health project:

• 700+ workers connected in real time across the entire jobsite
• On-site orientation reduced to 15 minutes, down from one to two hours
• 280+ onboarding hours saved across 2,400 workers, estimated to be more than $14,000 in recovered labor
• 5,000 production hours recovered through faster, direct communication, equivalent to approximately $125,000 in labor value
• Bilingual communication delivered instantly, with automatic translation between English and Spanish

The Projects That Perform Best Are Rethinking How Information Reaches the Field

The construction industry is not going to get less complex. Projects are getting larger. Workforces are more diverse. Safety expectations and regulatory scrutiny are higher. Labor is harder to find and more expensive to waste.

The teams setting a new standard for jobsite performance share a common thread: they've stopped relying on a communication chain that was never designed for today's scale. They've built direct, reliable, language-accessible connections to every worker on site, and they've made it part of how the project operates from day one.

Perhaps the simplest summary of what that shift looks like in practice came from Daimon Perez:

"MindForge is a simple solution to complicated problems."

When every worker receives the right information at the right time, in the language they understand, projects become safer, more efficient, and better connected. Communication is no longer just something that happens at work. It's part of how the work gets done.

Want to see exactly how Skanska transformed communication across a 700+ worker healthcare construction site?

👉 Read the Full Skanska | Lee Health Case Study

MindForge is a workforce communication and engagement platform built for the construction field. Learn more at mindforgeapp.com.

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Citations 

Here are all four citations used in the blog, with direct links:

1. FMI/PlanGrid — "Construction Disconnected" Report The $17B annual cost of poor communication and 26% of rework stat. 🔗 https://www.autodesk.com/blogs/construction/construction-disconnected-fmi-report/ Note: This is the Autodesk/PlanGrid hosted version of the original FMI report. Clean, credible, still widely referenced across the industry.

2. Deloitte 2026 Engineering & Construction Industry Outlook The 499,000 unfilled worker positions figure. 🔗 https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/engineering-and-construction/engineering-and-construction-industry-outlook.html

3. Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) — 2025 Workforce Survey The 94% of firms struggling to fill positions stat. 🔗 https://news.constructconnect.com/agc-survey-finds-construction-workforce-shortages-as-leading-cause-of-project-delays Note: This is the ConstructConnect news coverage of the AGC survey — cleaner landing page than the AGC source directly for a blog link.

4. OSHA 2026 Enforcement Shift — Digital Safety Communication The increased emphasis on documented, proactive safety communication. 🔗 https://www.soter.com/blog/osha-rules-2026-expectations-shifted-compliance-enforcement