With construction teams working amidst the pandemic, digital tools have become more essential than ever for teams looking to maintain their productivity, while maintaining social distancing measures.
Digital platforms can be leveraged to augment, or even entirely replace, a variety of daily tasks that traditionally do not adhere to social distancing procedures. They can completely reshape toolbox talks, health screenings, and the delivery of documents from the field to the back-office. Below, we have outlined a few of the key ways construction teams are leveraging digital tools to adapt to COVID-19.
Reducing In-Person Interaction
Ordinarily, in-person interaction in close quarters is a regular occurrence for construction teams, which presents an obstacle when social distancing. For this reason, many teams have been turning to digital resources to collaborate with teammates limited to absolute minimum in-person documentation or hand-offs. Digital forms act as a powerful and safe medium for communicating and collecting information. Manual resources, like paper forms, clipboards, binders, and filing cabinets not only challenge the demands of social distancing, but also pose the danger of miscommunication, delays, and human error. Utilizing digital platforms allows your business to collect and review data in real-time, resulting in a constant current of information throughout your operation.
Standardizing Cleaning Procedures
Teams in the field and the back-office are also leveraging digital platforms to bolster their cleaning procedures, especially for shared areas like breakrooms. Digital forms can be instantly generated on a phone, tablet, or computer, allowing teams at any location to access cleaning guides and checklists. These digital forms can be equipped with simple logic. Fields can be made required, change color, or become visible so that data is captured completely and accurately. Your digital COVID-19 cleaning checklists can also host new data types, like GPS data and images, adding further context to complete documents.
Once submitted, these digital forms can be immediately accessed by teammates anywhere, routed to the appropriate contacts, or even reported on—granting real-time visibility into your team’s cleaning procedures and needs. For example, with access to more frequent, comprehensive cleaning audit data, issues like the lack of hand sanitizer in a common space, could be rapidly identified and resolved.
Pre-screening Jobsite Visitors
Digital tools are also being used to share and collect health screenings for the jobsite and office visitors. Comprehensive health screenings allow businesses to monitor and effectively mitigate the risk of COVID-19 exposure in the workplace. Jobsite visitors need to disclose whether they have been in contact with an individual exposed to COVID-19, have experienced any COVID-19 symptoms (e.g. fever, shortness of breath), or visited a COVID-19 ‘hotspot’. These assessments can be required to be completed before a visitor’s arrival, allowing teams to efficiently review and process a visitor’s request for entry.
Using digital tools like GoFormz mobile forms, health screenings, and other COVID-19 compliance forms can be easily shared and completed. These digital and online forms are easily generated and can be filled out from any location and can be instantly routed to supervisors and administrators, or even to jobsite security—accelerating visitor screenings and site-to-office communication. To further streamline this process, GoFormz has integrated with Procore, meaning completed health assessment forms can be instantly uploaded to the Documents tool and corresponding Procore records.
For Roadbridge, a global civil engineering firm, digital forms have played a critical role in streamlining the collection of health assessments from employees spread across many jobsites. Digital health assessments allow Roadbridge now to instantly access submitted health assessment forms, allowing security to more rapidly screen visitors requesting access to the jobsite.
Written by Monique Van Zuylen, this article was originally published on Procore. Click here to read the full article.