Grassroots Recruitment’s advice – Planning for home working

Despite sailing in unchartered waters, plans are being implemented around the globe to minimise the risk to health and the likely impact on the many thousands of businesses across the UK, either directly or indirectly, affected by the Coronavirus, Covid-19.

The current situation is unprecedented; first signs show that the transport and event sectors are among the first to be experiencing the direct fall-out. Only time will indicate the devastating effect this may have in the long term. But there are some businesses caught up in the crisis who could, with the assistance of their IT provider, continue to trade.

One such company is Grassroots Recruitment who have reported that their services will continue but be managed in a different way and are keen to share their experiences and advice with other companies:

Grassroots Operations Director, Caroline Patten, explains:

“We use a cloud-based hosted IT service that allows our team to work from anywhere with the highest-level data privacy and security. All our systems, including our telephone system and recruitment CRM tools, are web-based which means that we can access them remotely to carry on providing services to our clients.  All our data is backed up off-site and doesn’t rely on someone to be in the office to protect our data.

“We also have a comprehensive Home-Working Policy in place which ensures critical resource projects are managed whilst staff work flexibly around their family or personal commitments. All our team members are provided with laptops, mobile phones and additional software licensing so they can deliver quality candidates to your business as needed.”

So how can a company such as Grassroots offer additional support to overcome some barriers created by the current Covid-19 crisis?

Caroline continues:

“For those businesses who need to ensure staff levels are maintained to deliver vital services (from call operators to IT support, payroll specialists to warehouse and transport staff), we are able to provide access to flexible workers to be based in the office, work from home or operate remotely.

“This may include providing short-term, flexible temporary staff – from 1 day to 12 weeks or longer – who are cleared to work in the UK to support businesses and minimise disruption 24/7, to fill jobs at short notice and ensure businesses have the cover needed.

“As we employ all of our agency workers directly, we carry all responsibility for their liability, their insurance, their national insurance, holiday pay and pension contributions and invoice at the end of each week for the hours completed.

“In the event that staff are unwell or call in sick at the last minute, we have a bank of flexible workers ready to stand in and have a team of remote workers with the IT infrastructure and checks in place to enable them to work from home.”

At this testing time, Grassroots are happy to provide advice on putting the right revised policies and procedures in place for your existing staff and on cloud-based IT infrastructure to support home-workers.