Construction Technology is Shaping the Post-Pandemic Workplace — Occupational Health & Safety
Construction Technology is Shaping the Post-Pandemic Workplace
Employers are encouraged to take a modern-day approach to make sure safety is put first.
During the pandemic, construction was classified as an essential industry across most of the USA. Given its experiences working through the crisis, construction can offer a lot of insight to businesses that are now re-opening. Specifically, how to use technology to keep people safe at work, even after we shift to a post-pandemic world.
Early Pandemic Lessons Learned
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, general contractors (GC) were forced to take a closer look at the way workers, subcontractors and visitors come on a jobsite.
The traditional process of passing around a clipboard and pen for everybody to sign in would no longer work. It wasn’t because they feared sharing a clipboard would spread COVID-19 (it can’t). It was because they added more steps – health screenings and temperature checks – to the already time-consuming process of signing into a jobsite.
With the pandemic, everybody had to be interviewed and their responses securely recorded. When the check in process was complete, the information was either put into a spreadsheet or added to a growing stack of paperwork. Staff would spend hours conducting health screenings and then inputting the data or, more typically, throwing the check-in logs in a box and hoping they would never be needed.
Once it became clear that COVID-19 wasn’t going away anytime soon, paper-based record keeping systems showed their weaknesses. Even with data entered into a spreadsheet, contact tracing was still nearly impossible. There wasn’t even a way to know if an infected worker was still at a jobsite.
Headlines featured the frequent shutdowns of construction projects due to COVID-19 outbreaks. GCs feared additional shutdowns, having to send workers home for 14 days and possibly violating OSHA regulations based on the CDC guidelines.
Arguably, some of those shutdowns could have been avoided. According to Rod Courtney, health, safety and environment manager at electric transmission engineer Ampirical, “When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, employees reporting to the office or a construction site were not allowed to enter without first having their temperatures taken and answering health questions in a .pdf.”
Gloss