ConstructConnect Blog

On a typical Earth Day, the construction industry is usually called out equally for its role as both a sustainability leader and as a leading offender when it comes to the size of its carbon footprint. 

It’s been a little over a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In the days and weeks that followed, we started to get a feel of how it would impact our lives as states began issuing stay-at-home orders, mandating people shelter in place except for essential work and activities.

Long viewed as a male-dominated field, the construction industry has slowly been adding more and more women to their offices and jobsites as they fill roles as varied as construction technologists to painters.   

Despite being the leader in technology, research, and health sciences, the US on January 14, 2021, was the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases surging as high as 23.1 million and more than 384K deaths.

It is no news that the global economy has been a bit shaky for years now, then the pandemic struck and everything went spiraling downward. Statistics show that unemployment was at 14.7% in April 2020, the highest rate in America since the Great Depression, and gross domestic product fell by 4.8%.

The construction industry can be volatile and unpredictable at the best of times. With the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe, construction work is taking a hard hit. Projects are getting delayed and even canceled as regions open and close to try to slow the virus's spread.

Social distancing may feel surreal in the beginning—coworkers avoiding physical contact, people separated by partitions, everyone wearing masks. It might even seem a little lonely with a lot of our coworkers still forced to work at home as organizations ramp up operations, allowing people to return to work in phases. Nonetheless, over time, we'll get used to a new "normal" as novel ways of working emerge.

While the construction industry has weathered the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic better than others like retail and hospitality, it hasn’t been all kittens and rainbows either. From February through April, the construction industry lost over a million jobs. To put that in perspective, during the Great Recession the industry lost about 2.3 million jobs. Through June, the industry has managed to gain back over 600,000 jobs.

The construction industry opened the year 2020 cautious but optimistic about the future, and then  COVID-19 swept the nation and the rest of the world. The crisis has prompted governments to implement strict lockdown protocols to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Four months after the first recorded case in the country, several places are starting to relax these safety measures in order for the economy to move forward. At this moment, construction business owners need to think about a business reopening strategy and how they can adapt to a post-COVID-19 construction environment. 

The spread of COVID-19 was all about uncertainty and distress. With people being strongly advised to follow social distancing protocols, the government had its focus on controlling the spread of illness by restricting travel and work. And just like any other industry, the construction world is also going through a tremendous struggle in sustaining the project pipeline and workflow.