Fixing contact tracing in construction: working with a highly transient workforce.

The construction industry has a unique challenge when it comes to COVID-19 management and contact-tracing requirements: having to manage a highly transient workforce. Construction workers often work across multiple sites and under the management of multiple General Contractors - where someone works on a Monday is often completely different to where they will be on a Wednesday. This means that the vast majority of current contract-tracing solutions don't actually work in construction.

The challenge is mapped out below. In a typical industry (left side of the image), businesses (blue dots) will have staff (green dots) operate in various locations (clusters of dots). They generally stay in a location with occasional movement between sites. But the construction industry (the right side of the image) is hyperconnected and highly transient. People go everywhere.

If you're a contractor with hundreds of people working across multiple sites, how do manage contact tracing? Most digital site attendance systems stick to a site-specific view, so you'll have to quite a bit of detective work tracing the person in question, and then a whole lot more work finding out who else may have been exposed across all of your sites. This will likely result in a lot of down time.

So we built a solution for our customers, alongside them. They told us:

• "Let me to see all of the users who have been on any of my sites in one place."
• "Let me see all of the sites that a user has been to."
• "Let me see all people who were on site at the same time as a user (contact trace)."

On Friday 30th October 2020, we formally released a contract tracing solution made just for the construction industry. The People Register allows contractors to view the details of everyone that has signed on to a site. This presents a quick and easy way to trace potential contact with COVID-19.

If you're interested in implementing this solution at your company, get in touch with us today.