5 Ways Fieldwire Powers Construction Teams through the Pandemic
Since earlier this year construction companies have been coping with COVID-19 (coronavirus). Already GCs like Skanska have seen hundreds of their projects impacted by government shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and lowered demand from clients.
Now, as jobsites prepare to reopen and crews get back to work, construction teams will be facing new challenges, namely:
- Varying levels of physical distancing on jobsites
- Staggered starts to keep fewer people from interacting
- Dedicated cleaning teams to sanitize highly touched surfaces and tools that change hands
- Office staffs working remotely as essential field personnel are on site
Fieldwire can help teams stay productive by empowering them to plan, manage, and prove work — including showing proof of compliance with COVID-19 regulations. Here’s how.
1. Communicate safety measures
Ensuring a safe work environment now includes mandating multiple checks and protections against COVID-19. Fieldwire enables team leads to easily and effectively communicate the latest guidelines and procedures with a single source of truth.
Post new safety guidelines, toolbox talks, and other critical COVID-19 documents with Fieldwire’s files features
Everyone on the Fieldwire project will know where to find important documents for reference. Team leads can also require all workers to sign off to confirm they’ve read them via PDF markups — all document changes including signoffs are visible to everyone instantaneously via the cloud.
Share information with the entire company in a Fieldwire project
By creating a project in Fieldwire and inviting all account users to join, everyone will be notified of new communications and updated files in real-time.
2. Verify workers' health
In addition to alerting everyone to new guidelines, Fieldwire can be ensure everyone’s in compliance.
Have on-site tradespeople self-certify health with Fieldwire checklists
Fieldwire makes it easy to pre-populate checklists for repeated use and tracking. If workers are required to have their temperatures checked and need to answer questions regarding potential COVID-19 exposure daily, creating a digital checklist allows everyone to self-certify they’re symptom-free and are OK to be on-site that day.
3. Assign and confirm on-site sanitization
Fieldwire plans and tasks provide everyone on the team the most up-to-date information about site conditions and work progress. In these times, they’re also tools for quickly adjusting to the new normal.
With Fieldwire you can:
- Mark up plans to designate high-traffic/high-touch areas on-site
- Assign tasks for sanitizing specific locations to a cleaning taskforce
- Alert everyone of new hand-washing station locations by adding to plans with unique color labels
- Document the most recent cleanings of tools, spaces, etc., with timestamped before and after photos
4. Manage work remotely
Limiting person-to-person encounters means more WFH for managers and office staff. Fieldwire helps keep remote workers in-the-know and up-to-date so they can keep productive.
Get everyone on the same page
Now that project stakeholders like engineers and inspectors may be off-site more days than not, keeping updates moving can be its own challenge. Fieldwire tasks are for documenting and tracking pending issues and questions — so there’s a single source of truth and everyone involved has full access to the conversation no matter where they’re located in real-time.
Post RFIs and document updates directly to Fieldwire plans
With even less facetime on the jobsite, it’s become more important to make sure that everyone has access to the documents that move projects forward. By posting critical information like RFIs, submittals, and product data sheets, to name a few, across all mobile devices and tablets in the field, teams have the right information to go out and build without any paper handoffs.
5. Confirm and prove work
Fewer site visits means more potential for missed details, rework, and even payment delays. Using Fieldwire as a record of completed work eliminates potential disputes.
When questions about the work done arise, there’s proof of what took place, who did what, and when. Fieldwire’s photo, 360 photo, and video tools make it easy to capture conditions and verify all work has been done to spec — so teams can get paid faster.