Went out to one of our sites yesterday to do a report of where they were for if/when they have to stop works and close site. Ended up listening in on a few conference calls through the day and our work don't seem to be handling this situation well at all, some how seeming to take any bit of ambiguity or slight grey area from the government and rather than refine it to suit our situation they add a whole new layer of ambiguity and nonsense, further removing themselves from any sort of responsibility.
At the start of the day we had new guidance on working practices, generally have to keep 2m distance at all times so any activity that can't comply with that can't be carried out and anyone who tries to car share will be turned away from site (unless they're from the same household) so we communicated that to the subcontractors on site, only two firms at the moment but both agreed it was the sensible thing to do and arranged their own meetings with their labour to pass the message on. Already our management staff were getting a bit annoyed with one another, some people happy to carry on as long as the subbies think they can comply and others just thinking it was stupid to be coming anywhere near site, generally amicable discussions but one dissenting voice in particular going way over the top and annoying everyone else.
Around lunchtime have a conference call with our contracts manager and the site team at another job he's responsible for, basically saying to plug on following that guidance for the time being, few bits of advice to try and hammer the guidelines home like updating method statements to comply with the 2m distancing, perhaps re-inducting all site staff with extra content in there to cover the new guidelines so no-one can claim they haven't been told, all very much based on the individual sites taking charge rather than any overarching policy from head office. Told there was a board meeting that afternoon where they were reviewing the situation and we would have the outcome passed on to us once it had finished.
So then we spend most of the afternoon bickering about whether it should be down to us as a site team, subcontractors, client, our company, government or whoever else to make the decision to close, but no matter the level it all comes down to cost at the end of the day, at any level someone has a financial penalty as a result of closing sites. Eventually we get the feedback from the board meeting and it was about as inconsistent as it could have been, they'd reviewed jobs on a site by site basis and made decisions where they thought people could carry on or where it was best to bring things to a close for the time being, again our contracts manager broke the news to both his site teams simultaneously in a conference call, job in Sheffield to close all but immediately but us at Leicester to continue indefinitely, went down as well as you can imagine. The inconsistency is just annoying people, we've got head office closing some sites and not others, some subcontractors complying at not others, some management staff willing to work but not others, it's going to get pretty nasty between some parties if it isn't taken out of their hands and applied evenly soon.
There was further advice that if sites close people would be expected to work from home as long as they could be productive, once you run out of work to do you either use holiday or get furloughed, again an imbalance where some people will be able to remain productive longer than others maintaining their income, others will have more holiday remaining allowing them keep full pay for longer, this part was particularly badly received.
The only thing we could all agree on come the end of the day was the only way to make it fair was to close everything down, either maintaining everyone on full pay or furloughing everyone until sites get back up and running, but that's only going to happen if government closes all sites. Our company has a few hundred million cash in the bank, they could pay everyone full wages for about 7 years with no income and they still wouldn't run dry but we all know they've got no appetite to be the bigger man in this situation and close our sites before the government enforces it.
Hopefully the uncertainty doesn't continue too much longer otherwise I could see some relationships becoming very fractured.
