Corey Febo is a superintendent with Kansas City, Missouri-based JE Dunn Construction. Opinions are the author’s own.
I’ve only been in the superintendent role for a short time, but one aspect has surprised me more than anything else: how often communication — not manpower, not procurement, not even bad weather — has the biggest impact on schedule and morale.
More specifically, I’ve been shocked by how much we rely on email for problems that could easily be solved in a simple, direct conversation.
Early in my role, I assumed email was efficient. Now I’m starting to see that, in many cases, it actually slows things down.
The more time I spend in the field, the more convinced I am of something simple: when communication matters, talking to people is still the fastest way to move work forward.
Email only feels productive
Email feels official. It feels like progress. You can include your bosses on it to show you’re on top of it. It creates a digital paper trail that makes you feel like you “handled” the issue.
And yet, without consistent follow-up, email rarely creates efficiency. Instead, it often produces:
- Delays.
- “Waiting” waste.
- An increase in the chance for misinterpretation.
- Permission to avoid an issue entirely.
- Slower decisions that should be immediate.
On a past project, my team was waiting on another trade supervised by a different superintendent to finish their scope so mine could move in behind them.
When I asked him why his trade partner was falling behind, he said he was still waiting on an emailed response from their foreman. Instead of waiting, I walked directly over to that foreman, asked a couple of questions, and got the clarification they needed. Within minutes, the trade partner was back to work and able to hand off the area so my team could stay on schedule.
That experience stuck with me. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was something so simple. No formal meeting. No paper trail. Just two people talking in front of the work.
Email from a lean perspective
Lean construction identifies eight forms of waste and “waiting” is one of the biggest. Every time someone sends an email, what they’re actually doing is handing the issue off and hoping it comes back resolved.
Email causes:
- Batching (people answer in groups hours later).
- Overprocessing (typing explanations that would be clearer verbally).
- Duplication (explaining things twice: once in writing, once in person later).
- Defects (misread tone, unclear instructions, wrong assumptions).
Lean emphasizes conversation first, documentation after because conversations create flow. What I’m learning is that on a jobsite, conversations create movement. Email usually creates waiting.
More disclosure
One thing I’ve learned over time is when you talk to someone face-to-face, they’re more candid than in writing. Foremen will tell you things in the field that they would never put in an email.
Things like, “we’re short a guy today” or “the materials still haven’t arrived.” Instead, emails give polished versions of reality. Face-to-face conversations give the real version, and the real version is what superintendents and project managers need if we want our schedules to reflect the truth.
I’m learning that a superintendent sets the tone, whether they intend to or not. If I rely on email as my main form of communication, everyone else I interact with does too. If I walk the job and talk directly to people, others follow that same example. When communication happens face-to-face, problems shrink, accountability increases and decisions happen faster.
Talk first, email after
I don’t claim to have this mastered, but these are just some of the habits I’m trying to build early in my career:
- If something affects flow, I try to talk first.
- If someone or I seem confused, I stop typing and walk over or pick up the phone.
- I send short emails after conversations to document decisions.
- If something is urgent, I avoid emails entirely.
Construction worked this way long before inboxes existed and I’m learning there was a reason for that.
I’m still learning every day. I don’t have this all figured out, but the biggest lesson so far has been the simplest: most jobsite problems don’t need a perfectly written email. They need real conversations. Construction is built by people and when people talk to each other and communication is clear, people tend to build better
