The Covid-19 crisis has created a need for businesses to work with virtual teams, thanks to social distancing and work-from-home mandates from governments. For engineering organizations, this may translate to up to 50% of the employees working from home at any given time. As a result, productivity is being severely impacted. It will take some time for engineering companies to adjust to the new challenges thrown up in this situation. 

Business-related challenges

• Engineering designs are created by an engineering team, which gets reviewed internally and externally. The company needs a way to safely and efficiently exchange the designs between multiple people within the organization (multiple disciplines) and outside the organization (consultant \ client \ vendors), and at the same time ensure that the quality management process for review and approval is properly followed. This is difficult even without social distancing, at the best of times it is a struggle. The difficulty is compounded in an online environment.
• The file size of design drawings and models is large. This makes exchanging them over the internet difficult, especially in areas where internet connectivity is poor, which can be the case for some of the workforce, depending on where they live.
• Clients are always concerned about the security of their designs. The concern increases when work is done online. Companies will not find it easy to convince already-skittish clients about security in virtual work environment.
• Design drawings need to be issued on time to prevent delays in the project. This requires careful and usually hands-on monitoring. In a work-from-home situation, monitoring becomes even more challenging than usual.

People-related challenges

• The concept of working from home or telecommuting has been around for decades in some industries but in the engineering/construction industry it has still not caught on. Neither managers nor workers fully understand what exactly working from home entails or what it requires of them, or what they need to do differently; according to one study by SCIKEY MindMatch, only about 0.2% of this industry’s workforce is currently capable of working from home. 
• Morale is a big issue in close-knit engineering teams. Naturally, working from home becomes a challenge for teams that thrive on the social aspect of their workday, and for a large section of the employees the challenge is not in the technical or logistical difficulty but the sense of isolation they feel. So cultural factors play a big role in this challenge.
• Geographical factors have always been an issue with online collaboration. When team members  are located in different continents just coordinating time zones can be tricky, like for example, the difficulty of ensuring that all stakeholders be present online at the same time for an e-meeting.
• For a work-from-home model to succeed, good communication is essential. In the typical engineering company communication can be quite informal. People walk over to each other’s cubicles to exchange news, or catch up over the water cooler, and lunch time and coffee breaks are a welcome break that many look forward to. Without realising it, a lot of work transacts over such casual interactions. These informal and organic interactions are  impossible to replicate online (although attempts have been made to introduce chat applications and the like). People working from home have to learn to communicate differently, and that can be a challenge.

Technology-related challenges

• Apart from the psychological and cultural limitation of remote meetings, there are technology-related limitations as well. This is especially true of the more traditional engineering organisations which are slow to adopt technology. For example, video conferencing software like Zoom, Gotomeeting, Team etc can be very effective but there has to be a base comfort level and psychological readiness to adopt them ie everybody has to be equally on board, which is not always the case.
• The company’s business process is in itself a deterrent to going virtual. Typically, the situation is this: a  planning engineer works on Primavera on his workstation and the design engineer uses excel and common folders at a workstation and the construction engineer maintains a shared folder on the construction site. The activities include updating a Daily Progress Report, Monthly Report, Management Report, etc. Some use collaborative software like “Team” (which allows users to communicate information and track correspondences on various issues) but even so, the conventional workflow is largely inefficient and individual or role-driven. Even in 2020, most engineering companies rely heavily on older technology like email, dropbox or onedrive and excel. Porting all this to a virtual environment is daunting.
• The undeniable complexity of the engineering organisational structure and underlying process makes generic technology solutions unattractive. To a director or CXO of an engineering firm, the ideal system would have to place all information in a central and secure central server that can be accessed by all (authorised) employees from anywhere, at any time, which means that there would have to be extremely well-defined and comprehensive processes and workflows worked out before-hand, as well as a very high level of standardization to ensure that they would be followed as defined. This level of standardization simply does not exist in the typical engineering organization. So, the emphasis continues to be on people-dependent or role-dependent ways of getting things done.
• Security concerns are always paramount in project organizations, but also there is not much known about what security systems are actually available and enforce-able and this creates another barrier to companies who want to work online. On paper there are technologies like digital signatures, QR codes etc, but these are typically third-party applications which function outside of, or on top of, the company’s legacy software infrastructure and are not integrated with the other software used by the company. So the security concerns heighten, not lessen, with work-from-home scenarios.

Conclusion

In the foreseeable future it seems obvious that the pandemic will force the industry’s hand, when it comes to digitising their process.  Integration of people and process and data will become not a business benefit but a survival mechanism, and companies will have no choice but to change their hitherto manually-drive work culture, and become modernised. 

The question is not whether engineering companies should go virtual, it is whether they are willing to make the changes necessary for survival, and how quickly they can do so.

By Varghese Daniel
CEO,Wrench Solutions