Construction industry was one of the crucial industries in Sri Lanka specially after the end of civil war in 2009. Since then there has been a huge development in construction as many investors around the world have a strong interest to invest in various properties in this paradise island. As a professional construction employee, I have witnessed the sudden change in the construction industry in Sri Lanka after 2009 and sometimes there had been bottlenecks in carrying out construction work of high rises etc and the construction companies had to recruit in mass scale in order to meet the demand. As a result, there had been an enormous development in construction employment which had a significant contribution to the economy in Sri Lanka in reducing the unemployment percentage. As the commercial capital, Colombo had been the city with massive developments specially with world renowned hotel brands as well as “Port City” which is a city within a city. Since Sri Lanka was named as the “Best country to Travel in 2019” by Lonely Planet (One of the largest tourism guide book publishers in the world), tourism industry has had a massive growth with around one million tourist arrivals in 2019 and to cater to that demand, construction industry employees have given the greatest contribution from drafting the plan to the interior designing and final touch up. It was a highly fruitful era for the construction employees after 2009, and an enormous number of families lived happily as construction employees were well paid for their work.
The things have begun changing with the Easter Sunday terrorist attack in April 2019. By that time, a lot of developments were happening in Colombo for new gigantic hotels and the owners have halted operations suddenly as the terrorists have attacked five star class hotels in the area. This had shattered the construction employment up to some level, but after a while again it has started to grow as the temporarily halted construction sites began work. The country was doing better again until the first quarter in 2020. The whole world has to come to a “stop” due to COVID-19 outbreak and Sri Lanka began having the warning signs from February 2020. Subsequently, the government had decided to shut down the country with effect from March 2020 and this decision made an irreversible damage to the construction employment. Due to Covid 19, the construction was one of the hugely affected industries in the country. Not only they have lost the foreign currency income due to shut down of air ports and harbours, but also the employees had no option to go to work as the whole country had a lock down. Later also the government allowed the mobilization of essential services only and as a result, many organizations were compelled to make strict decisions on their construction operations as well as employment. They had to restructure their working schedules and nature of working. Thanks to the development of technology, the companies had the option of changing to digital work. As a result, many construction companies decided to shut down their office building premises and provide chances for employees to work online. While some construction companies were able to manage their costs (companies could reduce cost such as water and electricity bills, daily building maintenance costs, meal allowances, fuel allowances etc) and pay salaries to employees, some have fully shut down their operations making a whole lot of people to lose their bread and butter. Since the economic crisis followed the covid pandemic in the country, the companies had no other better option than digitizing almost all the possible work and let employees work from wherever they are.
Although the past three years were a nightmare to the citizens in Sri Lanka, some positive outcomes emerged were “digital employment, work from home concept and flexible work arrangements”. Still we cannot forecast a better economic environment for Sri Lanka. Therefore, as an eye witness to all positive and negative situations around the past fifteen years, I feel that this is the high time for construction companies to take the advantage of digitalization and make employees work online or with flexible working as much as possible other than compulsory physical work needs. They can use this marvelous opportunity to be in the market without being bankrupt. Employees in today's world, are highly concerned about having a great balance in their work life and personal life. Therefore, providing online work opportunities and flexible work arrangements for employees would be a far better chance for construction employers to have a motivated staff who are willing to give their fullest contribution to the company, which will give better profit margins even amidst bad times like this.
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