Overcoming the Project Communications Management Breakdown amongst Foreign Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Biophilia Inveigled Construction Projects in Malaysia

Abstract

The property sector is revitalised to incorporate sustainability, specifically the biophilic design, to encourage human interaction with nature. Thus, there is an urgent need to communicate the biophilic design elements amongst stakeholders, especially the foreign workers, to ensure the project meets the requirement. However, standard project communications management is no longer practical, as the construction industry worldwide has been severely impacted by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Hence, this paper evaluates the biophilic design elements to be communicated and examines the project communications management breakdown relating to the biophilic design elements in the Malaysian construction industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a systematic literature review (SLR), focus group discussion (FGD) and questionnaire survey on 147 foreign workers, this paper found that from 33 biophilic design element items, only 1 item is categorised as highly critical, whereas another 20 items are categorised as critical. In addition, 43 potential communications management breakdown items from a total of 66 items fall under the critical category. The finding suggests that communication breakdown is caused by the language barrier amongst foreign workers from different ethnicities as well as between foreign workers and the supervisors, since face to face communication is limited during the pandemic.

Knowledge management enablers and barriers: exploring the moderating effect of communication barriers

“…As a managerial implication, this study demonstrates that elements such as a competitive environment, unawareness of other people's work and lack of time and resources for knowledge sharing should be avoided (Belbaly Aissa et al, 2022;Subramaniam et al, 2021) influence KM but they are difficult to capture alone. The CBs play a moderate role, so trust, priorities, semantics and environmental barriers have a significant effect KSB and KM.…”

Şantiyelerin COVID-19 pandemisine uyumu: Türk inşaat sektörü için Güvenli Şantiye Sertifikası

“…To illustrate, wearing face masks is a challenging measure to apply in outdoor productions conducted during humid and hot weather. Therefore, it may be stated that construction workers generally work in COVID-19-vulnerable workplaces (Alsharef et al, 2021;Subramaniam et al, 2021).…”