Effect of Covid-19 Pandemic in Construction Labor Productivity: A Quantitative and Qualitative Data Analysis

Abstract

This research aims to identify and analyze the various factors affecting construction labor productivity covering the period from December 9, 2020 - January 31, 2021, a year after it was declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Due to the pandemic effect, the local government units in four selected study areas imposed intermittent Enhance Community Quarantine on all places to control the Coronavirus spread in compliance with the health department protocol. Fifty-five questionnaires returned out of 63 distributed are tabulated according to each group-related factor. The correlation analysis resulted in the highest coefficient value of 0.89 between the CTDEO and contractor groups. Meaning, most respondents have the same perception of the factors affecting construction's low labor productivity. Besides, results depicted that the absence of health workers on the construction site ranked 1st in the health & safety provision factor group with an RII of 0.97, followed by no safety engineers on the construction project sites with an RII of 0.93. From all the seven groups of factors, the health and safety group-related factors ranked 1st with an RII of 0.81, next, the schedule compression group with an RII of 0.78. Hypothesis testing asserted that working six days per week was one of the significant factors affecting labor productivity on the contractor's side, suggested by more than 50% of the respondents. The workforce group-related factors with an RII of 0.77 demonstrated a slight difference with the schedule compression group-related factors. Thus, the Covid-19 pandemic has a significant effect on the essential factors affecting construction's low labor productivity.

Factors Affecting Supervision Practice of Public Building Construction Projects in Dire Dawa Administration

“…Value can range from -1 to +1. Table 6 indicates the summarized correlation results [9]. It shows the summarized Spearman correlation coefficient suggested that there is a strong correlation between all groups of factors.…”

“…An effective supervisor dealt with several skills, including management, human and leadership skills, motivation, communication, and organizational behavior [8]. Supervision has been a less significant effect on the construction project implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic as per the respondents, according to [9]. These abilities can be improved through formal training.…”

Assessment on Materials Quality Control Implementation of Building Construction Projects and Workmanship: A Case Study of Ambo University

“…The measurement system was created to measure a specific concept by asking a group of people a series of questions (items). Internal consistency is defined as the extent to which all questions positively contribute to measuring the same concept or construct [12,13,14]. Besides, internal consistency is expressed as the proportion of the test variance attributable to a group of items, which measures the reliability coefficient alpha [13].…”

“…Where: = Number of Items 2 = variant items 2 = total score variant A high value of the Cronbach's alpha implies a higher internal consistency of the construct 2 . The higher the coefficient, the stronger the linear relationship of the items is correlated and the higher the internal consistency cited by [13,14].…”

“…The relative index methods were used to analyze the questionnaire data. Using the frequency analysis, the relative index ranked the importance and practicability of each performance measure using the given formula below [14,17].…”