Well, where do we begin with 2020?

I usually do a round up of what we’ve been up to month by month, but things have been overtaken somewhat by the Coronavirus.

How could we even begin to image what a devastating impact this virus would have on our health, wellbeing and the economy. Our hearts went out to all our wonderful clients and we were determined to support you in the best way that we could.Here’s a little round up of what we’ve done during 2020:

January
This began like any other January with some strategic planning at TPP Towers, little did we know that would go out of the window all too soon!

We did have some great news though in that we were successful in winning a tender with our great friends, Latitude 7, to provide HR training for managers with 40% funding. That funding is still available, but we’ll tell you more about that in the New Year.

February
We concluded delivering our three year tender with the City of York Council on Attendance Management, Recruitment and Selection and Managing the Disciplinary Process. We’ve had great fun and great results working with all the managers over the last three years and hope to work with them again soon.

We also supported clients with work on their organisational values and dealt with some tricky employee relations issues too.

March – December
As the Coronavirus began to take hold in the UK and started to have a major impact on businesses as we entered Lockdown #1, we went into overdrive to ensure all our clients  had all the information they needed to help them manage their people and therefore their businesses effectively during this crisis.

Between March and December we have sent out over 50 emails to keep everyone updated with the latest information. This involved many late nights, early mornings and weekend working to ensure that we understood the latest Guidance before we disseminated it to you. Our aim was to support everyone as much as we could and we hope you feel that we achieved that.

We provided Furlough Agreements to any of our clients who needed them at no extra cost. This was important for us; our view is that we are in this together and we wanted to demonstrate this by doing as much as we could to support you.

Sadly, we’ve supported some clients with reviewing organisation structures and ultimately, redundancies. Difficult at any time, but made much worse by the fact that we were (still are ) in the middle of a pandemic and the ability for the employees to find alternative employment is limited.

Carrying out redundancy consultation meetings via Zoom or Teams is a new one for us all. We did it with dignity and appreciation of what you, our clients and your employees were going through.

We also supported clients in a total of nine disciplinary issues which ranged from written warnings to gross misconduct dismissals. We’ve never dealt with so many in such a short space of time. Again, carrying out these via Zoom/Teams and Facetime was all new, but we managed it and credit to everyone involved for making the process as smooth as possible.

One of our wonderful Associates – Kate Booth – was on hand to assist during this time and provided some much needed support to clients on TUPE, grievance and disciplinary investigations and disciplinary and performance related dismissal matters. We very much value our Associates and our business couldn’t function effectively without them.

We started to get used to ‘Home Schooling’ and luckily our son had a pretty full timetable which kept him busy. However, as we both ‘shared’ the kitchen to do our work, Charlie at the table and me at the Breakfast Bar (husband was in a spare bedroom), he often waved to many of you at the start of our Zoom/Teams Meetings and every single one of you waved back and took an interest in him and how he was doing – a heartfelt thank you!

We had a brief respite in early September when we started client visits again and we can’t tell you how delighted we were to see you all in your Covid-19 secure offices! It was such a treat to see everyone face to face. Sadly, this was short lived and we were all too soon ‘Zooming/Teams-ing’ again.

It’s been really important to ensure that everyone’s mental health was at the forefront of our minds and we sent out numerous links and updates to help support you and your employees.

We’ve been really lucky to be incredibly busy during the pandemic. We’ve not developed or delivered any online training as all our efforts have gone into our consultancy work. We’re hoping to start face to face training activities again and in the New Year as soon as we feel it’s appropriate to do so.

We are delighted to be working with four new clients and we are very pleased to welcome them on board.

We know that we have a difficult few months to get through, not only do many of our clients have the difficult and somewhat unknow (at the time of writing) impact of Brexit, but we also have to contend with the further impact of the Coronavirus. But, as always, we’ll be here to help.

Christmas gifts
We usually send Christmas gifts to all our clients as a token of our appreciation. However, this year we have a mix of clients being at home all the time, or partly in the office. We’ve decided it’s just logistically too tricky to guarantee gifts getting to you. So we decided to use some of our budget that we would usually spend on gifts to buy some Christmas (and other) goodies and donate them to our local food bank in Holmfirth. Here’s a picture of our shopping (with my son in the background!).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sadly, one of our close friends has been diagnosed with lymphoma and she started chemotherapy last week. So we’ve also decided to make a donation from our Christmas budget to Blood Cancer UK. 20th anniversary celebrations

The Personnel Partnership is 20 years old on 1 January! Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. Our planned celebrations have been somewhat scuppered, but we’re hoping to celebrate it at some point, so watch this space!

If you have any HR issues please do get in touch via email, helen@thepersonnelpartnership.co.uk  or via Helen’s mobile 07808 064099 and we’re always happy to assist.

We wish you  a much brighter New Year and we very much look forward to working with you in 2021 and hopefully seeing more of you in person too!

The Personnel Partnership Team