COVID-19 Crisis Management Left Tacit Knowledge Behind

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged throughout New York City and its surrounding suburbs, more than 500,000 positive cases and 30,000 deaths were recorded between early March and early May 2020. In response, built environment firms were forced to confront uncertainty, shift mindsets, and embrace new workflows to remain viable in the face of city and state mandatory stay-at-home orders and curfews. This required the creation of new internal processes for document dissemination. Firms focused on alleviating clients’ concerns and boosting productivity by providing information, a hierarchy of business processes, and new codes of conduct. Utilizing case study methodology, this evolution at one architecture firm was tracked. Semi-structured interviews before and after the early wave of the pandemic clarified and verified findings. Participants were asked probing follow-up questions to better understand the impacts, especially regarding tacit knowledge. The firm’s efforts were optimized, but tacit knowledge sharing disappeared. Once this form of knowledge sharing was highlighted, participants acknowledged the loss and speculated about how to address this critical activity moving forward.