Turn a Labor-Loaded Schedule Into an Electrical Crew Plan

A labor-loaded schedule shows how many hours an activity is worth. It does not tell a superintendent how many electricians to receive on Monday or who will run them, and getting from the hours to a crew takes arithmetic, a walk of the work area with the foreman, and an honest guess at how much of a paid day goes to installing.

Start with the arithmetic.

Divide by six productive hours, and staff to the result

Stan Shook wrote the estimating column for Electrical Contractor from 2005 to 2012, and in a 2008 column on calculating manpower he worked a job of 4,000 hours over about 120 working days. At eight hours a day that comes to 4.17 electricians. "You'll be lucky to get six fully productive labor hours per day, per electrician, so you need to factor for the lost time," Shook wrote. At six hours the same job needs 5.5 electricians, and he rounds up to six. The two lost hours a day still get paid. On that job they add up to 1,440 hours (120 days times 2 hours times 6 electricians).

Six may be generous. A University of Texas at Austin team published a July 2025 study that drew on 61 projects executed between 2016 and 2023, and craft averaged 35% direct work on traditional projects with no work packaging, 40.18% with workface planning and 42.75% with advanced work packaging. Jamie Sullivan, president of Staff Electric in Milwaukee, sees about the same range.

"They probably only spend 40% to 45% of their time installing, so there's 60% to 55% waste," he says in an EC&M story by Tim Kridel. The story ties that lost time to crews waiting on materials, equipment, colleagues and even customers. Sullivan points to planning. "I feel that the biggest factor is not having a plan and working to that plan," he says.

Write the productive-hour basis beside the headcount. If orientation, the walk from the site entrance or inspection waits change it, recalculate.

One foreman should be able to finish each package

A line like "Electrical rough-in, Level 3" is too broad to put a crew against. Corridor conduit and room branch circuits have different drawings and different access dates. Advanced work packaging sizes the unit to the crew instead. Shawn Anderton, a vice president at Graycor Industrial Constructors, wrote about it in POWER in 2020. He quoted the Advanced Work Packaging Institute, which says an installation work package (IWP) is generally "small enough that it could be completed by a single-foreman team, typically in a one- or two-week time frame," and then gave the upper limit himself. "Typically, no IWP exceeds 1,500 man-hours." Some run as short as a single day or shift.

Space another trade is still working in is not available work, and neither is a room held for a design change. Rick Trocano, VP of business development at Sequoyah Electric in Redmond, Wash., says in a 2018 Electrical Contractor story on the Last Planner System that the usual order is plumbing and sprinkler first, then mechanical, then electrical, then low-voltage and fire alarm. Without clear access, he says, "we must stay busy doing something else and then come back multiple times to do an installation that should have been completed in just one pass."

Keep those rooms on the constraint list. Sullivan calls a fully ready package "a truly utopian world," and in it the electrician on the 18th floor who gets there at 7 a.m. "would have his drawings in front of him. He would have all his material. All he would have to do is install it." Our post on what an open workfront really costs puts numbers on the other case.

The role mix and the supervision go on the same line

The package also sets who shows up. Shook put the apprentice risk in dollars. Bid a job with 30 percent of the labor at apprentice rates, get to use only 10 percent, and "the remaining 20 percent might be billed at higher journeyman, or worse, foreman rates." Rich Shumway, a field supervisor at Wilcox Electric in Hyattsville, Md., told EC&M in 2023 that Wilcox had "nine electricians and six apprentices right now," and that "the apprentices work with all the electricians." The electricians, he says, "need to know the apprentices' skills and get the most out of them."

Ratios are set by law and by contract. In California, 8 CCR §296.3 puts an electrician trainee under the direct, on-site supervision of a certified electrician who supervises no more than one trainee, and registered apprentices do not count toward that ratio. Washington's Department of Labor & Industries sets the general ratio at 1 trainee per journey-level electrician on journey-level work and 2 per specialty electrician on specialty work. The trainee and the supervising electrician have to be on the same jobsite.

Foreman span changes from one agreement to the next. Section 3.19 of the 2023-2026 Inside Wiremen's Agreement between IBEW Local 11 and the Los Angeles County Chapter of NECA let a foreman supervise nine journeymen or 15 workmen, counting the foreman, and a job with more than one foreman needed a general foreman. Section 3.09 of the IBEW Local 569 inside agreement for San Diego and Imperial Counties, in effect through May 31, 2028, calls for a foreman once five electricians are on a job and caps a foreman at 12 electricians. Put each foreman's span on the plan, along with the headcount that calls for the next lead. More on this is in setting the skill mix for a multi-craft crew.

Square footage sets the ceiling on crew size

Awad Hanna, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, measured this with data from several electrical contractors. There is "0 percent lost efficiency at a worker density of 191 square feet per worker and a 50 percent loss of efficiency at a worker density of 90 square feet per worker," he wrote in Electrical Contractor in 2004. The model covers jobs of 2,000 to 150,000 man-hours. The Wisconsin research put the minimum at 200 to 250 square feet per worker for full productivity, depending on how complex the work is, and NECA members surveyed by the university placed nearly half of trade stacking in the final quarter of a job.

So walk the package with the foreman and measure it before the crew request goes out. If the room takes six, the real choices are a second package, a longer duration, a smaller first crew or a second shift. For a second shift, Hanna suggests the first-shift foreman stay an hour late and the second-shift foreman come in an hour early. Check inspection coverage before adding nights. In Washington, WAC 296-46B-901(9)(b) requires requests for after-hours or weekend inspections to reach the local electrical inspection supervisor at least three working days ahead, and the portal-to-portal inspection fees come on top of the permit.

Plant Vogtle ran into stacked crafts late in the job

In June 2018, state construction monitors estimated Bechtel would need to hire roughly 400 more electricians and 700 more pipefitters to meet the accelerated schedule for Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, ENR reported. In April 2020, Georgia Power cut the Units 3 and 4 construction workforce by 20 percent in response to COVID-19. Southern Co. told the SEC it expected the cut to raise the productivity of the people who stayed and reduce "workforce fatigue and absenteeism."

Two months later, monitor Donald N. Grace testified on data through mid-March 2020 that Unit 3 cable terminations were moving at a pace where 10 months of planned work could take 57.5 months. More subcontractors were trying to get into "the already crowded areas" to finish their work. His team called that condition near the end of the job "the stacking of crafts."

Both units were finished. Unit 3 entered commercial operation on July 31, 2023, and Unit 4 followed on April 29, 2024, according to Georgia Power.

Check the plan three times before the first assignment

Glenn Ballard's 1994 paper "The Last Planner" lists "matching manpower to available work" among the ways better planning improves productivity. On one project, he wrote, foremen who completed more than half of their planned activities were 25 points more productive (a performance factor of 1.25 against 1.00) than foremen who completed less than half.

The first check is at planning. Quantity, remaining hours, role mix, dates and known constraints get written down, and any assumption is labeled as one. The second comes before anyone travels, when the roster, project credentials, shift, arrival instructions and supervision are confirmed along with a real date for each package to open. The last one happens on the morning of the shift. The receiving foreman confirms the current drawing, the location, the material and the first assignment.

With supplemental crews, OSHA says the staffing agency and the host employer "share control over the worker," and it recommends that the two write their respective responsibilities for OSHA compliance into their contract.

Update the plan from installed quantity

Compare the forecast with installed and accepted quantity, package by package. Jennifer Daneshgari, VP of financial services at MCA, Inc., a Grand Blanc, Mich., consultancy, and Hannah Durant, a business operations analyst there, wrote in EC&M in August 2026 that the labor plan should be re-evaluated at least at 25, 50 and 75 percent complete, or every few months on a long job. It needs another look when schedules shift or when material deliveries, equipment or weather change the work. "If a project needs a larger crew in four weeks, that information is much more useful today than it is three days before the need arrives," they wrote.

When output misses the basis, find the cause first. A material shortage needs material. A held design needs an answer from the engineer of record, and only a demonstrated capacity gap calls for more electricians. Those are hard to find this year. Of the 1,830 respondents to the AGC and NCCER 2026 Workforce Survey, released Sep. 3, 42 percent said shortages of their own or their subcontractors' workers had delayed projects, the most commonly cited cause of delay.

"The need for people to work on new data centers is keeping labor conditions tight even as demand for many other types of projects remains relatively soft," says Ken Simonson, AGC's chief economist.

Sources

1. Calculating Manpower, Stan Shook, Electrical Contractor, May 15, 2008.
2. Examining the impact of Advanced Work Packaging and WorkFace planning on direct work rates of on-site construction workers: a comparative analysis, Vishal Porwal, William J. O'Brien and John D. Borcherding, Frontiers in Built Environment, July 3, 2025.
3. How to Reduce Lost Labor Hours on Electrical Construction Projects, Tim Kridel, EC&M, Feb. 10, 2023.
4. How to Successfully Complete Projects with Advanced Work Packaging, Shawn Anderton, POWER, Nov. 24, 2020.
5. Working Backward to Plan Ahead: The Last Planner System, Susan Casey, Electrical Contractor, Aug. 15, 2018.
6. 8 CCR §296.3, Employment of Electrician Trainees, California Department of Industrial Relations, subsection (a) operative Aug. 17, 2008.
7. Electrical Trainee, Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, accessed Sep. 29, 2026.
8. Inside Wiremen's Agreement 2023-2026, IBEW Local 11 and Los Angeles County Chapter NECA, effective July 31, 2023.
9. Inside Agreement 2024-2028, IBEW Local 569, effective June 1, 2024.
10. The Stacking of Trades, Awad S. Hanna, Electrical Contractor, Aug. 15, 2004.
11. WAC 296-46B-901, General electrical inspection requirements, Washington State Legislature, accessed Sep. 29, 2026.
12. Plant Vogtle Needs Hundreds More Craft Workers to Meet Schedule, ENR, June 13, 2018.
13. Vogtle 3 and 4 nuclear expansion workforce reduced by 20% due to COVID-19 impact, Power Engineering, April 17, 2020.
14. Public Disclosure Direct Testimony of Donald N. Grace, P.E., Docket No. 29849, Georgia Public Service Commission (hosted by POWER), June 5, 2020.
15. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation, Georgia Power, April 29, 2024.
16. The Last Planner, Glenn Ballard, Northern California Construction Institute (hosted by Lean Construction UK), April 1994.
17. Protecting Temporary Workers, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, accessed Sep. 29, 2026.
18. Staying Ahead of Electrical Job-Site Changes, Jennifer Daneshgari and Hannah Durant, EC&M, Aug. 17, 2026.
19. Construction Workforce Shortages Remain Acute Despite 'Soft' Market Conditions As Data Centers Strain Labor Supply, Survey Finds, Associated General Contractors of America, Sep. 3, 2026.

Featured image: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kansas City District (public domain).