The impact of Covid-19 on support teams

BACKGROUND: This paper investigates the pandemic remote work impacts and learning on onshore teams that support offshore activities. Wells construction and maintenance involve unpredictabilities, requiring support teams to help the crew onboard the rig to adapt the operations to the reality of the well. Ergonomics and Human Factors (E/HF) literature presented the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic remote work on knowledge workers’ health and well-being. Still, it lacked studies on the impacts on work activities of the industrial sector. OBJECTIVE: Since safety knowledge is continuously and collectively developed in the experts’ day-to-day work activities, the research objective is to identify the impacts and learnings of remote work on the support teams’ safety knowledge management. METHODS: The Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA) guided the problem understanding, activities observations, and data analysis. The Work System Model (WSM) was the framework for systematizing data from 117 interviews. RESULTS: The results indicate a significant reduction in interactions during the pandemic, making information and safety knowledge sharing more challenging and weakening team members’ cooperation. However, no impact on performance was reported. Working from home reduced interruptions and increased focus, facilitating individual tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The research identifies collective and individual strategies developed by the team to cope with remote work. The findings confirm Management Literature findings on reducing interaction, hampering nonverbal communication, and increasing the amount of data. However, communication applications used during the pandemic have expanded rapidly, allowing faster access to team members, improving connectivity onshore/offshore, and making it a valuable legacy of the COVID-19 lockdown.