Abstract
The unprecedented scale and impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic have required organizations to adapt all facets of their operations. The impact on the UK water sector extends beyond engineering and treatment processes, with social, economic and environmental consequences. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with executives from 10 UK water companies to investigate the organizational response to the pandemic, and how their response impacted operational delivery. The Safe and SuRe framework was used to structure interview questions and analysis. Emergent themes of changes to customer behaviour, changes to operational practices and industry collaboration were mapped onto the framework and a ripple effect map developed. Lessons learnt highlight a failure to adequately prepare for the scale of the threat, the success of sector‐level collaboration and a need to embrace new ways of working.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to alter the way we live and work, with the need to ensure safe and reliable water and wastewater services becoming more critical than ever because of the pivotal role hygiene plays in mitigating the spread of the disease (Poch et al, 2020)
This study aims to analyse the organisational response of the UK water sector to the COVID-19 pandemic using the Safe and SuRe framework and assess how the initial response impacted operational delivery during the first wave of the pandemic
When applying the Safe and SuRe approach (Butler et al, 2016), COVID-19 can be classified as an external acute threat because of the fast and unexpected nature of the global progression of the virus
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to alter the way we live and work, with the need to ensure safe and reliable water and wastewater services becoming more critical than ever because of the pivotal role hygiene plays in mitigating the spread of the disease (Poch et al, 2020). Governments worldwide enacted restrictions on national and international movements, to stop the spread of COVID-19 (Nghiem et al, 2020). In the United Kingdom, national restrictions were initially imposed on Monday (23 March 2020) and began easing on Saturday (4 July 2020), with residents only able to leave their homes to travel to work where necessary, to shop for essential items, to exercise once a day or to access medical care (Iacobucci, 2020). As highlighted by Farquharson et al (2020), the resilience of the UK economy and wider society to the COVID-19 pandemic largely depends on the ability of key workers and organizations to respond to and adapt to maintain the performance of key services (Cotterill et al, 2020)
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