How to manage a construction site in the age of COVID-19

EROAD’s Construction Site Management Strategy will help

Under Covid-19 Alert Levels, businesses must operate to the extent permissible by each state and territory, implement appropriate health and safety controls, and practise social distancing to mitigate the risk of spreading the virus and keep workers safe.

EROAD’s Construction Site Management Strategy gives guidance of all the steps that need to be taken while operating and how to use technology to work smarter and safer.

EROAD’s Construction Site Management Strategy

Before Arriving on Site

Provide the site owner with a COVID-19 Plan detailing the steps they will take to mitigate risks, including those who may present with COVID-19 symptoms. The site owner needs to ensure plan details are communicated to all contractors and employees before the work commences.

EROAD Driver Login
We suggest all drivers must PIN log in to their vehicles using EROAD Driver Login, creating a record of who was driving a vehicle, where they have been and at what time.

In-cab Communications
You can send in-cab messages to all, or specific drivers reminding them of COVID019 protocols. They need to answer these questions before commencing their journey.

Some examples could include: Are you fit to work? Has the cab been sanitised? Do you know the requirements of the site you are visiting? Questions some of our customers are already asking their drivers through In-cab Communications.

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EROAD Inspect
EROAD Inspect enables customisable pre- and post-trip inspections on a mobile or tablet. You can create a COVID-19 Pre-trip Checklist unique to every vehicle, or generic to part of your fleet, useful if multiple drivers use the vehicle.

COVID-19 Pre-trip Checklist questions could include:

Do you have alcohol-based antibacterial products?

Do you have the required PPE equipment?

hat are any additional passenger names?

Has the vehicle been sanitised?

Entering Site

Each worksite needs to be equipped with a sign-in register or QR code to document who entered the site, at what time. If the site is sizable, it would be wise to segment the site into zones creating a separate sign-in register or QR codes for each.

Site Operations

Co-ordinating work across trades that are working on a site to minimize interactions between different teams, is a great way to lower your risk, reduce the possibility of spread across your workforce.

The site owner/contractors need to ensure suppliers who will make deliveries to site throughout the day, are aware of the sign-in registry, are not coming into direct contact with site workers. Having your team equipped with appropriate PPE such as face masks also lowers your risk.

EROAD Driver Login

Login with Driver ID to allow for accurate and seamless tracking if required.

In-cab Communications

Pre-trip communications to the driver gives you clarity they are fit for work and have sanitised the cab.

EROAD Geofence Site Activity

Geofencing your own and customers sites enables you to access accurate information of the time on site for your vehicles (and therefore drivers). When you couple this with the notes you made in Inspect on additional passengers, it can really help to speed up contact tracing efforts if you need it.

Leaving Site

All personnel; site owner, employees, contractors, delivery personnel and visitors are required to sign out upon departing the site. In the instance an employee contracted COVID-19 and was present on the site while infectious, you can quickly know who was present and considered a ‘close contact’, and who entered the site later in the day, therefore, deemed a ‘casual contact’.

Useful information to include in the sign-out register could be:

name
time of departure,
next destination.

All this information is valuable in the instance contact tracing is required by the Government. The task is no longer retraced steps through memory but a detailed and accurate report readily available to whoever needs it, saving you valuable time and stress.

EROAD Geofence Site Activity

Get geofence notifications to dispatch and be emailed to the site contact, advising the departure time from the site to avoid any sign out errors. You can also get a geofence notification sent to the site contact of vehicles entering a “No Go” geofence site. “No Go” geofence sites can be particularly useful during higher alert levels when you are trying to reduce risk on a site by reducing casual contacts.

EROAD Inspect

Complete the Inspect template; site requirements and departure from the site.

Contact Tracing

In the unfortunate situation that you have a worker test positive, then contact tracing becomes a race against the clock, and an exercise in risk reduction. The site owner needs to identify all the areas that the worker/visitor in question has accessed and compile a list of all people that could be close or casual contacts. With the EROAD suite of products being used, you can do this faster than the Health Department is able to, and reduce the risk to your site quickly. With COVID-19, the quicker that close contacts can be identified and isolated, the lower the risk to your site of spread across your workforce.

The site owner needs to inform all those workers and their contracting companies that there could have been an exposure, whilst protecting the privacy of the individual where practicable.

Workers who may have had a suspected COVID-19 contact, need to stay at home in self-isolation until the case and contacts are confirmed or not in conjunction with the Health Department.

EROAD Driver Login

Track and identify where your vehicles (and therefore drivers) have been if required for contract tracing information.

EROAD Share

Connect with EROAD equipped subcontractors/suppliers to share accurate vehicle movements both in real-time and retrospectively of not just your staff, but your subcontractors.

EROAD Inspect

Use pre-trip checks before entering sites to check protocols are being followed, ensure Health and Safety protocols, and use the notes field in Inspect to include items or any additional passenger information so you have a record of them being on-site.

EROAD’s Contact Tracing Service

EROAD provides the tools to contact trace when needed seamlessly
In the unfortunate circumstance, one of your drivers comes into contact with a person who has a COVID-19 infection, rest assured that EROAD is here to help – we have tools and services to assist with broader contact tracing efforts. EROAD’s accurate GPS and telematics data collected by the Ehubo and transmitted back to MyEROAD means you can confidently know a driver’s movements via a free report available upon request.

EROAD can provide latitude/longitude location, geocoded address, geofence name (if within a geofence), and stop duration for a vehicle that is stationary for longer than 5 minutes at a time.

We can cross-reference other vehicles in your organisation which stopped in the same location.

For each stop, we provide a list of your vehicles (and therefore, employees) that have been in contact.

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Keep track of your assets too

Managing our businesses in the age of COVID-19 isn’t just about how we can manage risks around COVID-19 spread. It is also critically important that in this tough economic time we are optimising our operational efficiency. In the case of construction sites, this includes maximising asset utilisation, minimizing costs of asset loss, and improving site efficiencies . Our asset management tools can help.