?Engineering Project Communications Management Challenges in Construction Industry during COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis via IBM SPSS Statistics 28.0

Abstract

During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, the workers at construction sites that involved various engineering works at a time were reduced up to 50 percent while various restrictions, namely social distancing, were in place as a preventative measure from possible COVID-19 transmission, thus miscommunication amongst the workers is expected, leading to delay, cost overrun and marred quality. Therefore, this paper aims to assess the challenges of engineering project communications management at construction sites involving the engineering works during the COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia based on the eleven channels of communication. Through the systematic literature review (SLR), a questionnaire was developed and tested via a pilot study before it is distributed at four construction sites of mixed development projects with a total of 392 respondents. Through the  relative importance index analysis undertaken via the IBM SPSS Statistics 28.0, this paper found that formal communication is the most critical channel due to the delay in formal information flow from the upper management, followed by the informal communication and project reports due to the inability to decipher the informal information based on site conditions and lack of details in the project reports, respectively. This paper concludes that the engineering project communications management in the construction site during the COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia faces many challenges, yet these are still manageable.