At this point, well into the era of working with COVID-19, questions over remote work, remote collaboration and better awareness of the workforce on construction jobsites can seem like settled issues. But as the world seeks to move on from the pandemic and get from this new normal to the next normal, technology adopted to stay on track during the height of lockdowns is getting another look. Just because we can work this way, is this the new way to work?

“Things have changed,” notes James Barrett, chief innovation officer at Turner. While collaboration and monitoring technologies were already seeing use in construction prior to the pandemic, firms had to pivot quickly to stay in business amid new restrictions and regulations. “I’d say we [as an industry] accelerated the adoption of technology by five years or more in just the last year,” says Barrett.