How are Solutions 4 IT embracing change since COVID-19?
Catching up with Andy Fletcher, one of our Directors.
We caught up with Andy, one of the company Directors about how things are changing for Solutions 4 IT and what the ‘New Normal’ means for the business at the moment.
How are Solutions 4 IT adapting to a new way of working?
We’re very lucky really as our systems are all cloud based and we were already big users of Microsoft Teams beforehand, so we’ve pretty much picked up our laptops and moved without any real pain. We do all the same meetings and our daily ‘huddle’ on teams to keep communication as a top priority both with our clients and team.
Our phone system is cloud based so again people have just taken handsets home, and we also have calling in through Microsoft Teams, even to the point we can answer and open the front door at Forge House via Teams. I think keeping a routine has been the bigger challenge for people and also missing the social interaction of the office, but as a whole we have adapted well.
What are your current working arrangements?
We started to prepare to work from home before lockdown was announced and have continued this way until now. We have had one person in the office during lockdown to take essential deliveries, Chris from the Sales team, did three days in the office last week and is now going to start working from the office permanently as Government guidelines are easing.
We are working on a plan to move forward as things become a little more eased but for now, pretty much all engineers will continue to work from home. Engineering has been as productive remotely as they were in the office before lockdown so while risk still exists it makes sense to keep the home working going, doing our bit to continue to keep people safe and the virus from hitting a second spike.
This also gives several individuals benefits for example one engineer would spend two hours a day commuting he now uses this for study time. Our print engineer uses his saved commuting time to run which is something he loves and we encourage to promote a good work life balance, especially during these unprecedented times.
How do you plan to move forward more permanently?
As mentioned before, nothing is confirmed yet but home working will stay in place until the end of the year, if not our new actual way of working. Angie will stay in the office as before and probably the sales team. It seems to be a lot easier for the engineers to home work than the sales team who often would benefit working together and not alone.
We have our Risk Assessment in place for Forge House and also for visits to sites. We are now back undertaking installations and call outs at various client sites, all projects have their own separate risk assessment. From here, we think a new way of working could benefit both our team and clients and are excited to see how we develop and learn through this process.
What the lockdown has shown is how prepared we can be for such a disaster, through our technology setup causing little to no disruption for any of our team and especially for our clients.
If you would like to discuss how your IT infrastructure and managed systems could be improved or tweaked to give you the best and efficient new normal way of working, please do get in touch and we would be happy to offer a FREE IT Review.
