THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
MY HOPES FOR THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY POST COVID BY ALISON MIRAMS AAIQS
Three weeks into the COVID lockdown, I was working from home, I’d had three sleepless nights wondering if construction would be stopped, we were modelling 7 different scenarios and I remember having the very distinct thought – “I didn’t sign up for this as a CEO”. There was no playbook that I could look to. There was no other event in history that I could learn from. This was a true black swan event that no one saw coming. But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining and COVID-19 has put the construction industry (along with other industries) into the biggest and fastest experiment on flexible working. For the past 20 years, I have heard many dinosaurs in the industry say, “you can’t work flexibly or be part-time on a construction site”. This attitude has perpetuated the gender imbalance as women leave the industry 39 times
faster than men, mostly during their childbearing years, thinking they can’t have a family and be based on site. COVID-19 has allowed us to test those outdated theories and pleasingly it has been a resounding success. We have developed new ways of working that I sincerely hope becomes the new normal for the construction industry. It would be such a waste of a bad situation if we didn’t sit back and analyse what we’ve learnt and set some new benchmarks. I am sharing my hopes for the construction industry moving out of the global pandemic known as COVID-19. 1. I hope that the construction industry will actually embrace flexibility. Companies need to stop talking and pretending they are working flexibly – they need to truly embrace flexibility for all. We have seen over the past three months that you can work
remotely and still build. From the start of March, we asked our engineers, contracts administrators, design managers and project managers to alternate days between the site office and working from home. Sure, it’s had its challenges. We had to introduce virtual meetings and we turned on face time so engineers could see the issues on sites; but our jobs kept moving, we increased the numbers of workers on site and we kept everyone safe. People had time with their loved ones. And people experienced the joy of eating dinner together as a family at least a couple of nights a week. We have proven flexibility is possible and we have demonstrated it’s not a women’s issue, it’s a people issue. If we genuinely embrace flexibility, it will help to attract more women and keep them in the industry, and we can break the gender imbalance.
BUILT ENVIRONMENT ECONOMIST: SEPTEMBER - NOVEMBER 2020: 09
