COVID-19 and Construction Safety: 4 Ways To Improve Job Site Safety

By Jonathan Salas 

The sudden onset of COVID-19 has taken construction safety managers, business owners, and nations completely by surprise. Whole industries have been brought to their knees, while others have been forced to scramble while trying to remain agile. While our nation’s leaders try to find the best solutions to deal with this problem, businesses are forced to think on their feet and adapt. Thankfully, no one is in this alone, and WorkMax is here to not only make your job easier, but also protect you and the ones around you. But how exactly can a resource management app with live field data to collect and share time tracking and field reporting on mobile forms help keep you safe? Here are 4 ways WorkMax can help:

1. Prompt COVID-19 Symptom Screening on Clock IN/OUT- Not everyone is aware of the exact symptoms of COVID-19 including construction safety managers reading the latest news, and that can have a huge impact on your workforce. What an employee thinks is simply a symptom of a common cold could be an indication of something much worse. You need to ensure that anyone experiencing symptoms isn’t getting the rest of your workforce sick while getting the safety documentation you need without slowing down your field employees and interrupting their workflow.

WorkMax’s resource management platform improves safety by creating a workflow that fits construction businesses. The first thing employees do every day is clock in, and with WorkMax, you can have COVID-19 pre-screening questions provided by your construction safety managers that each employee is required to fill out with each initial punch for the day. If the employee answers that they don’t have any of the COVID-19 symptoms listed, they just go to work. If they answered yes, the employees can be prompted by a follow-up form to help your company determine if the employee needs to be sent for medical attention or if they are simply having seasonal allergies, allowing your projects to continue to run smoothly. The health screening questions can be prompted at the end of the shift to determine if the employee should show up the next shift. These forms can be automatically emailed to the employee’s supervisor and the health and safety managers for them to determine the safest next step if their employee has COVID-19 symptoms.

2. Facial Recognition without COVID-19 Transmission Risk- If you are using a single device for clocking in, then that creates a single point of contact that all of your employees are touching (remember, one of the ways COVID-19 spreads is by staying on surfaces like countertops). That’s a lot of contact, and too many chances for spreading infection. WorkMax allows each employee to clock time from their own device, meaning that there is no contact with shared devices during the clock in/out process. Face recognition is great because it eliminates buddy punching and time theft, but it’s even more critical that you know which employees are working on your job sites to identify any COVID-19 contact transmission risks. WorkMax’s face recognition compares a profile image with their clock in photo and clock out photo and returns a match percentage. Their supervisor and payroll admin are alerted when there’s a mismatch on their own individual devices or computers without coming into contact with a shared device. The supervisor can also approve their time on their own mobile device in the field without the risk of transmission from shared devices.

If your supervisors are clocking in their crews from a company-owned single mobile device, however, WorkMax can still be used to ensure the safety of your workforce and your company and know exactly who is working on your job site. We have added a new feature based on customer requests that allows you to utilize the rear-facing camera for facial recognition. A supervisor can have all his or her employees clock into the same device while still maintaining a safe six-foot distance and getting the facial recognition data that you need to ensure accuracy. A supervisor can hold the device, face it at the designated employee, and clock them in as simply and easily as they did before.

3. COVID-19 Form Collection and Sharing Improvements for Construction Safety Managers – Paperwork is always the worst part of the day, so we made WorkMax to take the paper and the work out of the equation. With standard paperwork, it must first get to the employee who will fill it out, and then (hopefully) turned back into the proper individual. That’s not only a headache of a process, but presents a lot of opportunities, again, for spreading infection.

WorkMax makes it all streamlined and simple, allowing you to prompt employees with questions when they clock in, allowing you to screen for symptoms. These answers are then sent directly and immediately to the safety manager, who can then make the decision whether to keep the employee on-site, or send for medical treatment. This allows your business to remain in working while also ensuring maximum safety and efficiency.

4. Deployment of COVID-19 Construction SafetyTraining Videos-  Many businesses have had to change their workflows during this time, and it’s likely that your company has had to do so as well. Sometimes, an email will suffice for new procedures, but that is not always the case. However, we can’t gather all the employees together for a COVID-19 Construction Safety training session, so how do we inform employees of these changes? WorkMax allows you to link a video onto a form, meaning that you can not only deploy training quickly but also get answers or feedback. You can also require that employees provide their signature (on their own devices, of course) verifying that they have seen the video and will follow the new procedures.

The future may be uncertain right now, but we are here to help you secure the safety of your job sites and keep your projects on schedule and on budget with healthy workers. WorkMax’s resource management platform dramatically improves safety on your projects with construction-centric workflows to prompt your employees to answer health screenings on clock out and to know who is on your job site to reduce any contact transmission risks as quickly as possible. WorkMax’s resource management platform allows you to quickly see which employees worked on similar tasks on the same project to know who may have come into contact with a COVID-19 positive worker and take the proper safety precautions to ensure the safety of all of your employees.

Give us a call, or click here to schedule your demo today, and find out how WorkMax can help you navigate this ever-changing landscape.

Construction Resource Management: 3 Ways To Prepare Now for The Post COVID Tidal Wave
By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to construction resource management. Some construction projects have been shut down because of city and state mandates, while other states are continuing to work as an essential service. Industry consultants are warning the construction industry that it’s the calm before the storm and anticipate a tsunami of construction work in the next month or so. With about a month to prepare, contractors need to focus on how to improve their current business processes and look for solutions to make them more efficient, reduce labor costs, and allow them to accurately track project progress in real-time while keeping employee’s safety as one of their concerns. They need to bring the leaders from field operations together with the business operations leaders and take a look at their business from beginning to end to see how and where they can leverage technology to help them prepare for the massive tidal wave heading their way.

Now is the time for contractors to lean on your technology partners. We can share our best practices from working with thousands of contractors that have been in this position before and have been able to not only survive construction booms and busts but thrive in the midst of uncertainty. Business leaders have the opportunity to bring together the whole company to improve business processes now with a real-time, cloud-based, construction resource management platform to make their companies more profitable, efficient, effective, and safe. Getting accurate live field data and collaborating with all of your internal and external stakeholders is critical to survive and thrive post COVID-19. How can we help you prepare now? Here are three ways contractors can prepare now:

Streamlined Workflows

The most important factor in improving the performance of all your projects comes down to simplifying and streamlining your field data collection. Your field employees and supervisors need to provide critical business information to project management, HR, health and safety, accounting, payroll, and finance. It’s imperative to make it easy for your field employees to provide the information. According to the Dodge Analytics Report, 42% of contractors are using paper and spreadsheets to collect field data for project performance (cost and schedule), payroll and man-hours, productivity, safety, and equipment tracking.

If you’re part of the 42% using manual processes to manage your most important project data, you need to look at a construction resource management platform that brings all of your project data together and works the way your employees work. When you use a construction resource management platform like WorkMax that collects live field data and integrates with your back-office systems, you can make it easy for your employees in the field to provide you the information you need. Contractors can make a simple change in how they collect their field data, which can have a huge impact on their project’s performance and profitability.

When you choose WorkMax’s construction resource management platform, you not only get live field data, you can also collect all of your field reporting for safety and progress in the same app as your labor hours and asset tracking. All of this field data easily flows into your back-office applications like HR, payroll, and ERP in real-time to keep your entire team on the same page, no matter where they are working. Because the WorkMax platform is integrated, field employees only need one app on their device, because it can collect time, mobile forms, equipment tracking, completed work and allocate labor hours by project or task. It does it all and works together to allow your employees to clock in, select the right project and task, select the right equipment for their work for the day, all with a few clicks all in the same app. WorkMax TIME talks to WorkMax FORMS, which also talks to WorkMax ASSETS. Employees don’t have to remember to click on the FORMS icon to see if they are supposed to fill out a form that day. WorkMax prompts your employees after they clock in to watch a COVID-19 safety training video and sign the mobile form with a follow up COVID-19 Health screening form to keep your job sites safe. There’s also no shuffling of papers or everyone touching the same clipboard and risking COVID-19 transmission in order to track the project data you need to manage your projects to profitability and efficiency. Contractors that made a small change in how they collect their field data were able to:

• Complete projects at/under budget better
• Increase productivity and profitability
• Improve safety
• Win more new work
• Finish projects on time or early

Document Project Status for Shut Down Projects

You’ve always documented your daily progress and safety, but with some construction sites closing down due to city and state mandates, contractors need to protect themselves now by properly documenting the status of their projects. With a cloud-based construction resource management solution like WorkMax, contractors can easily upload the job site photos or videos while they’re doing a walk through with a representative from the developer or owner. The photos and videos can help alleviate any disputes regarding the current state of the project and how the site is being secured during shut down. The mobile forms can also include notes and a signature from both parties agreeing to the validity of the photos and videos to protect both sides. These mobile forms can also be shared with anyone on your design team for review to make sure the job site doesn’t need any structural reinforcements to secure the job site because the duration of the shutdowns is unknown. The mobile forms can help document COVID-19 project and budget delays when subcontractors are not reporting to job sites for contracted work.

Track COVID-19 Related Costs

Contractors need to set up COVID-19 cost codes to track activities impacted by COVID-19. Due to the social distancing, contractors will also have to re-work their schedules to address multiple workers scheduled at the same time in a confined area. They’ll also have additional labor hours for employees to complete health screenings and for the supervisors to document that their crews are working with the appropriate 6-foot social distance and wearing their personal protective equipment. When you have a cloud-based construction resource management solution, you can quickly add the new COVID-19 cost codes to your ERP and it’s automatically available for the field employees, remote employees and office employees to track their activities to these COVID-19 expenses. The mobile forms will have photos and videos for the supervisors to document all of the COVID-19 social distancing precautions on the job site and the PPE on the employees for COVID-19 safety precautions all in the same app that the labor hours can be allocated to COVID-19 cost codes. WorkMax is flexible and allows the labor cost allocations to be performed by the employee or supervisor in real time or after-the-fact all in the same app as the mobile forms documentation for COVID-19 safety. By documenting COVID-19 safety forms in real time, job sites are safer and job costs are more accurate. Though COVID-19 will definitely have impacts on construction schedules and budgets, contractors need to anticipate the additional costs and properly document how COVID-19 is affecting their schedules and budgets to show they are making reasonable efforts to mitigate any potential contract performance delays or defaults.

Contractors need to act now and make a change to their field data collection and learn how to leverage a cloud-based construction resource management solution or they may not survive the construction tsunami on its way. WorkMax can be implemented and integrated with your ERP in less than a week. Click here to schedule a demo to prepare your business today for tomorrow. 

Rapidly Deploy COVID Safety Training Videos with Mobile Forms

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

We’re all making changes to our daily lives to do everything we can to protect ourselves from COVID-19. In general, the construction industry is still considered an essential service and contractors are busy at work. I’m sure that, just like us, you’re making adjustments to do everything you can to reduce the COVID-19 risk for your employees. We’ve heard from some of our clients that they’re sending home their office staff to work remotely, and AboutTime Technologies | WorkMax is doing the same.

We’ve recently transitioned to a fully operational remote workforce during COVID-19, allowing any employees who were not already remote to remain safe. We’ve had customers reach out to us to help make their job sites safer. Our customers, just like you, are looking for more collaboration solutions to support their businesses. They’re leaning on us as technology partners to help them solve some of their COVID-19 safety challenges and we’re helping them. To assist our WorkMax TIME customers during COVID-19, we’re offering a free WorkMax mobile FORMS licenses to expedite COVID-19 safety training and documentation and reducing COVID-19 transmission risks. Now, more than ever, it is important to be social distancing, but how can you do that when you need to communicate new COVID-19 safety procedures quickly to a large workforce spread across at one job site or multiple job sites in multiple cities, states, or countries? 

Challenges with COVID Safety Training

With COVID-19, the challenge isn’t simply limiting your job sites to essential staff to reduce the risk of spreading the virus, but you must also provide even more safety training than ever. Your safety managers are challenged to provide this training as quickly, efficiently and safely as possible. This means that you’ll need to quickly disseminate COVID safety training, but it’s not feasible to bring all your employees together on a job site while maintaining proper social distancing measures to adequately transfer the safety information needed. Employees may not be able to see or hear you on a loud job site because they’re maintaining the proper social distance. To be compliant, your safety managers not only have to provide the training, but they also have to properly document it with employee signatures while eliminating the risk for transferring the virus among those employees. This becomes tricky when you need signatures because it’s risky to share pens and clipboards to collect signatures on paper forms to properly document your safety training.

Remote Safety Training with Video Links on Mobile Forms

This is why cloud-based solutions to train your employees on new COVID-19 safety procedures is imperative now. You want to be able to quickly deploy Toolbox Talks and other safety training for COVID-19 without requiring safety managers to be at every site in-person to perform the training. Safety managers and supervisors also want to make sure they can collect time and date stamps when their employees submitted the safety forms with signatures to document that they watched the training video.

Cloud-based solutions are agile and can quickly deploy new safety training video links added to the mobile forms that also include signatures with time and date stamp for OSHA documentation within moments of creating the safety videos. Your safety manager would simply create a new form, add a signature field, and add a link to the new training video and save it. The new safety training video is available immediately after it has been saved for the employees to watch and sign the form, signifying that they watched the video. Safety managers can make the signature field required so that they know every single form that’s submitted includes has a signature verifying the employee watched the video. The date and time the form was submitted is also shown in the Control Center for proper OSHA documentation. Another benefit of a cloud-based mobile form is that there is global visibility for everyone that has permission to view the form. As soon as the form is submitted, they can see in real time all the employees and safety forms submitted. The form is searchable and easily found when you search by the employee’s name or by the form name, such as the COVID Handwashing Training Video form. You can also see all the forms of any type that have been completed by each employee. Additionally, the safety manager can be automatically sent each safety training form as they are completed in real time.

WorkMax’s TIME + FORMS works on any iOS or Android device. Employees can use their own iOS or Android mobile devices to reduce any risk of spreading germs from sharing pens or clipboards to sign off that they viewed a safety video. We’ve seen customers increase their mobile form completions by 25% to 50% when they made it part of the Clock In/Out process by using our WorkMax app to collect forms and time tracking with job costing, including production, all in one app. It’s also much easier to provide your safety training videos if employees are prompted to complete them as part of their clock IN/OUT process. It’s right in front of them on their phone and they won’t forget to do it. They’re also not sharing germs from shared pens or clipboards, and they can maintain the proper social distance from their coworkers as they watch the videos and sign the form from their smartphone.

Watch our videos on WorkMax TIME or FORMS, to learn more about how to improve the safety at your job site when you manage all your mobile resources all in one app in real time.