With gender equality best practice being the prime focus of the work we do, we thought it would be interesting to highlight how businesses have adopted and adapted their approach to things such as flexible working during the Covid pandemic. So, we approached some of our Agile Nation2 Business programme clients to get their perspective on Covid-19 lockdowns. These are their stories:

Juliet Stephenson - Challenger Business Communications

Since the middle of March, most of the Challenger team have been adhering to government guidance of working remotely, as with the rest of the UK.

Thankfully, as a business that has experience setting up communication processes for many organisations that are ‘on-the-go’, we were able to adapt to this change very quickly.

Over the Summer we had a small number of staff still based in the office, able to maintain social distancing as it usually accommodates 60+ staff. The rest of the team were set up at home using Unity Mobile, remote desktop connections to the office and Office 365 to keep in touch with each other and with customers.

For our customers, we hope they have seen no change in our ability to deliver award-winning customer support, and we are able to stay in touch with them just as we would if we were still office-based. Our Account Managers and Customer Support team have been on-hand to talk to all businesses individually about what they need to do to stay operating.

Although our initial conversations saw many clients set up temporary solutions and contracts, we have already started discussing longer term solutions with many organisations looking at what processes they have adopted now that could continue after the pandemic has ended. With some businesses looking at keeping remote-working as an option and the global increase in users on Microsoft Teams, we are excited to support all our clients maintain reliable communications whilst adapting their way of working.