Keeping the UK Working Safely (KUWS)
8 July 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed new risks in the workplace and severe challenges for particular sectors. New evidence will be required at pace to deliver approaches to define ‘new-normal’ operation required to enable a new resilient working world.
The Institute aims to undertake research across each of six challenges and have chosen the construction as a sector of particular focus. We have broad expertise across health and work, social care and ageing, engineering, stress/well-being and complexity theory to undertake cross-disciplinary tasks under each of the challenges to span questions across the sector.
Further, our wide reach will allow us to institute a representative sector panel to work collaboratively with us as we:
- Evaluate reactions to the pandemic to document regulatory and sector reaction and assess outcomes;
- Analyse the evidence collected using simulation and analytics to map the response across the six pillars;
- Understand principles for the assessment of issues of scale (from self-employed to multinational) across industry and supply chain and offer solutions for issues developing as the economy opens up or further outbreaks occur;
- Apply analysis of the evidence to building resilience by appropriate intervention in the construction sector whilst extracting common principles for other industries.
Finally, we shall cascade recommendations for the people, plant and processes involved in the construction and other sectors, to trade organisations national and internationally (through the HSE networks). Increased understanding of risk in management and workforce alike will forge a more resilient workplace post-COVID-19, through employee, employer and government identifying, managing and communicating risk more effectively.