Remote Working in Architecture, Engineering and Construction

Instead of commuting to offices where IT can be controlled, staff have turned kitchen tables into workspaces and take conference calls from living rooms. How can modern IT make the transition to wholescale remote work that is workable now and fit for the future?

The rapid roll out of innovative technology to make working life easier and reduce costs has always been a concern for IT. Over 2020 this has become an imperative as staff work remotely, opening up new challenges.

You need to give workers the tools to be productive, so staff stay on top of everything despite people and devices no longer being a short walk down the hall.

The truth is that great work comes from collaboration. For construction projects this is doubly true, with architects, engineers and contractors working as a cohesive unit with clients and subcontractors to get projects over the line, on time and on budget.

Remote working is not just about connecting workers to others now,

but about connecting them effectively long into the future to address future business challenges now. The effects of the 2020 Covid lockdown have acted as an accelerant towards an increase in remote working for the AEC sector, and connecting workers has never been so important.

One thing that the spike in remote working over 2020 has shown every IT department is that lone people rarely produce ground-breaking work in isolation—you need collaboration, and IT has to make it work.

Over the 2020 lockdown, BCGi quizzed 12,000 employees about their work habits. The results are clear—workers want to continue working flexibly.

The research found four factors that correlate strongly with collaborative working: social connectivity, mental health, physical health, and workplace tools.

Almost 4 in 5 of those (79%) who scored highly on all four were found to collaborate productively while working remotely. For those that scored poorly on these same four factors, only 16% found they were more productive at collaborative tasks.

For those managing the IT for remote workers, social contact and workplace tools can be encouraged with the right software, which will increase collaboration and productivity.

Certainly, new technologies have made collaboration easier, with shared drives, documents stored in the cloud, so available anywhere, and visualisation tools like CAD feeding into modern Building Information Management (BIM) software so all players can work on live models.

However, businesses need the technology in place to allow workers to collaborate effectively. For example, supporting the many cloud services a business uses, whether intentionally or not, requires software-defined wide area networks to manage the data flows correctly.

In addition, many workers referring to the digital plans, so important to complex construction projects, find they can be read more effectively when printed. This may be the only way they can get sufficient detail and reduce possible errors, particularly when printers connect seamlessly with modern BIM software.

Once they are working from home, more than half (53%) of employees find their devices run slowly, whether due to too-narrow bandwidth or other factors according to report.

The human aspect remains one of the main sticking points to remote working—how do you physically manage the various remote devices efficiently? Many problems can be fixed remotely, but many cannot.

But these stats, while a worry, are not the whole story. Remote work will continue long into the future and the lessons learned from the 2020 Covid pandemic can be applied to your business challenges and show ways in which employees can work more effectively and productively.

Collaboration is important for the AEC sector because it helps individual members achieve more by learning from others in the team, and testing ideas and approaches —it’s a space for individuals to both push themselves and to find support and buy-in from the wider team.