How has the corona virus pandemic affected engineers? Part 1 – Business related.
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I asked six engineers in different industries how the pandemic has affected their work.
The first questions were business/company related. See Part 2 for more general/personal thoughts.
Who:
| Name | Photo | Job Title | Company |
| Emily Harford |  |
Principal Engineer for the Design Authority | UKAEA |
| Mark Mellors |  |
Freelance Engineer | Mechancially Minded (just me!) |
| John Grimshaw |  |
Engineering Manager / (Product Development Manager at start of pandemic) | iXtract Ltd (8 weeks) / (Elcometer Ltd) |
| Julie Winnard |  |
Director and Lead Sustainability Consultant | Haynard Ltd (just me!) |
| Mike D |  |
Design and Build Engineer | JD Controls |
| Andy Stanford-Clark |  |
Chief Technology Officer | IBM UK & Ireland |
How has your daily work been affected?
| Name | Response |
| Emily | I have been able to do my work reasonably happily at home. I'm sick to death of video meetings. |
| Mark | Often my work relies on making prototype or production parts, and then lab testing them to prove a design or test hypotheses. That work has obviously been impacted. On the whole, the teams I work with have managed to keep working and my work hasn't changed much. I'm grateful that as a 'cognitive worker' I can basically work anywhere. |
| John | Our in-person meetings switched to MS Teams - that was interesting to get started but worked out much better than in person as people felt more comfortable being in their own environment vs in an office in work |
| Julie | Less work overall but an unusually long steady part-time contract worked from home |
| Mike | Communications between component manufacturers and suppliers, especially on technical issues has been very slow, the use of home working communication lines need to improve. |
| Andy | My daily work pattern has changed significantly. I used to travel a lot. Now not at all. Those six hours commuting a day were productive time on trains. Now my day is a constant stream of Webex calls. We have moved to 20 minute and 50 minute calls to give a "breather" in between calls, but the context switching is quite draining. |
Have you used your skills / knowledge / equipment to help with the pandemic? Please explain.
| Name | Response |
| Emily | I've been helping people get their prescriptions or shopping and delivering food boxes. I had a car and time. I also helped repair bikes for key-workers |
| Mark | With the flexibility of my freelance work, I've been able to make time to support (or lead, in many cases) small scale PPE production. With my knowledge of prototyping, medical device requirements and regulations, and connections into both the making community and local industry, I've acted as a bridge between the need (the local hospital) and potential sources of supply, helping prototype PPE designs for feedback, select manufacturing methods, specifying the process to ensure quality and safety, and organising production. My team has made ~5,000 visors, 50,000 mask clips, 2,000 mask kits, prototype gowns and gown testing equipment, all to the appropriate standards and with technical files and documentation. |
| John |
To be honest, most of the first two months of the Pandemic was spent stopping people from 3D printing masks that offered no protection - giving people a false sense of security. I was asked by an NHS trust if I could 3D print a specific facemask at which point I had to explain that I wasn’t willing to risk that, face shields I’m ok with but I couldn’t justify the risk of printing a facemask that I didn’t believe would work effectively. I’m lucky enough to have friends in Makerspaces in Italy that were fighting the virus and doing some amazing things 4-6 weeks before the UK, so it allowed me to relay their information to the people I know in the UK to ensure that we did the things that worked and were proven rather than just trying everything and potentially wasting time/materials doing something that has already been proven to be incorrect. I feel like I didn’t actually “do” anything just tried to ensure that information was passed around and mis-information was challenged. |
| Julie | I helped companies think about preparing for lockdown by passing on the good practice I was seeing elsewhere and by looking ahead at what was likely to happen using personal networks and online info. I am helping my current client try to build in some resilience to business case arguments. Mainly engineering robustness techniques and risk assessment which work well repurposed as decision-support tools, and some project management; mostly minor stuff building in possible future business environments when making commercial or technical forecasts and arguments for certain projects |
| Mike | We developed and built a ‘no touch hand washing station’ for the more dirty type of hands that need sanitising. |
| Andy | I have been involved in a number of initiatives, from 3D printing PPE visors for NHS staff, through programming back-end data feeds for a global dashboard of cases and deaths from the pandemic, to giving advice on the Internet of Things devices and mobile application design to government organisations involved with "track and trace" type applications in various countries. |
Has the product / service your company made/offered changed? If so, how?
| Name | Response |
| Emily | No, we're a research organisation, and the research continues |
| Mark | Not really, although I hope that the connections I've developed with the hospital and PPE manufacturers will translate into new streams of work in future. |
| John | Neither of the businesses I have worked at through the pandemic has changed their product offerings due to the pandemic. |
| Julie | My offering as a consultant is quite broad - although my quality and ISO14001 focussed work was cancelled. However, for another client, I changed from a short term data entry person into a technical specialist on their energy analysis tools quite quickly. This might not have happened if they had not had crises to deal |
| Mike | No |
| Andy | IBM made a wide range of its products available for free use during the pandemic, the most popular of which was our chatbot agent which was used by many national health services to give advice on Coronavirus, to reduce the load on telephone call centres. |
Has the pandemic enabled you to introduce anything to the workplace that was resisted before?
| Name | Response |
| Emily | No, my department is very into home working and flexible hours. It's great for me. |
| Mark | We've experimented with online 'whiteboard-like' collaborative design or problem-solving exercises, but I'm not convinced they're going to be used again in future, they're a poor substitute for face to face sessions in my opinion. |
| John | More remote work. One of our software engineers actually said 'the pandemic advanced the business technology 120 years in the first 3 days', allowing the instantaneous setup of a remote workforce that seemed to be more effective at problem-solving, whilst using this opportunity to prove that they could be trusted to get things done whilst not being physically watched. It was definitely an eye-opener for senior management of the productivity gains that could be made when you eliminate peoples need to travel to work |
| Julie | The lockdown has shown how the public and organisations can be mobilised or even self-organise when there is sufficient motivation or perceived danger. A prime example is home working - considered a treat in many quarters and not as productive, hopefully, now this canard is proven wrong in many cases. |
| Mike | Different work shifts, to allow staff to work hours to suit non-contact. |
| Andy | We were well geared-up for home working - IBM has always supported and encouraged us to work some days a week from home, so there weren't many changes for us. I have seen dramatic, rapid transformations, though, in companies that have, for various reasons - operational and cultural - not been used to working from home, and that caused real problems while they scrambled to adapt to keeping their business running during the lockdown. |