Case Study: Grace Personnel

We speak with our client, Grace Personnel, about how they have managed to work remotely during COVID-19…

Who are you?

I’m Lauren Hopkins, the Managing Director of Grace Personnel.

Introduce your organisation

We’re an independent business support recruitment agency based in Berkshire and we’ve been operating for 20+ years.

How has COVID-19 affected your organisation?

Quite significantly to put it mildly. I think recruitment has been one of the hardest-hit industries and so many of our clients have had to either shut their doors or downsize, opposed to expand.

Anyone that had hiring plans has had to put them on hold for the foreseeable and I think it would be like that for some time. Unlike the recession in 2008, where businesses couldn’t recruit due to a lack of funds, they now have had to cope with lockdown which has just added another level of complexity to it.

Have you struggled with working remotely?

Technically, at the beginning, yes. We were not set up at all to work remotely as this was completely new to us. We have a very archaic set up in the office where we house everything including servers on premises, so the team at Complete I.T. worked around the clock to get us set up and connected, allowing us to really operate as usual but from home.

How have Complete I.T. helped you during this time?

I don’t even know where to start. I think over the last few months I have spoken to every single member of the team whether that’s technical consultants, the helpdesk, account managers, sales, everyone.

They helped us right from the beginning, from sourcing a third party platform that allows us to connect to our server and access to our work, they helped to source hardware for the team so that we could physically work from home and we are currently in the middle of a project with them to migrate all of our data and accounts to the cloud.

There’s definitely been a few wobbly moments over the past few months, but the team have done everything in their power to help me.

What do you think your workplace of the future will look like?

For us, as a business, we certainly see the future workplace as more flexible. We’ve never worked remotely and it has been something that has been on my agenda for the last few years but this has given us the kick that we really needed.

Moving forward I would like us to be more flexible, whether that’s where we work or when we work, just to allow people to really pick and choose when they work and when they’re more productive.