Following on from our previous message about our response to the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, we wanted to update you on our own arrangements.
We’ve put in place sensible measures to ensure that we are well positioned to continue to support you and handle your work, whilst at the same time focusing on the health and welfare of both our clients and staff.
Our team members are now working at home through remote access to our systems within a secure IT environment as well as from the office, reflecting personal preferences and circumstances (risk groups) and a policy of rotation. Our IT infrastructure is working well, and it’s very much business as usual for us.
We are communicating primarily by telephone or email, but we will respond positively to requests for meetings subject to Government advice as this continues to unfold. We can facilitate meetings by telephone, videoconferencing, Team and Zoom. In the current circumstances, we believe that facilitating meetings by telephone or video conference is best practice.
We’ve cancelled all internal and external large meetings and events. We were due to hold our charity seminar at the end of April, but will probably hold just the one seminar in the autumn, although a webinar is possible but right now we’re focused on helping our clients at a really difficult time for us all!
Please also consider if you can move to electronic payments to us which is cheaper and much quicker to process for you and for us.
The coronavirus outbreak is clearly a constantly evolving situation but we want to reassure you that we are taking sensible precautions to minimise the potential impact of coronavirus on your business and our staff and operations while ensuring it is business as usual. Do please get in touch to discuss any coronavirus issues that may arise in your organisation
Like many, this has forced a fresh focus on our working practices as an organisation, and over the coming months we’ll be rolling out a lot of change to the way we work to make sure we are more resilient to challenges such as this. Some is more use of paperless software which we had been planning but not as a high priority, others more efficient use of space – hot desking and so on. If we can be of help to you in reviewing your own working practices, again please do get in touch.
We are focussing more heavily on helping our clients through R&D claims, raising fresh finance and remortgaging etc. If this is of interest, please do get in touch with me or Andy Oakes or your usual relationship manager.
We’ve been talking to a lot of clients about this and issues such as putting staff on shorter hours, less days, even redundancies, deferring capital investment, talking to landlords re time to pay the rent and so on. Again, please do ring us to discuss your own circumstances. The need for careful employment law advice hasn’t gone away; employment claims can still be brought, and staff morale maintained as one day we will get back to normal.
