As I am sure you will know due to the Coronavirus we took the decision on the 23rd March 2020 to close our office and ask our employees to work from home, which has been extremely successful. We are currently working at 100% capacity and still giving our clients the service that they have come to expect from us. However with how things are going at the moment, I thought I would write this little blog to give you an update on where we stand with moving forward from today.
It has been 50 days since we closed the office. 50 loooooong days. I know that this has affected some clients, with them not being able to come and visit us or drop off their paperwork. We have tried to encourage as many of our clients as possible to get their paperwork across to us digitally using tools like ReceiptBank.
On Sunday Boris Johnson announced that he was encouraging as many people to go back to work if they cannot work from home. This statement does not change our stance on our office being opened and I will explain to you why.
When we took the decision to close our office, we did this for the following reasons:
- To protect our employees and their families
- To protect our clients and their families
- To reduce the risk of exposure to the Coronavirus
- We have the ability to work from home
These reasons still stand and currently by re-opening our office we feel this will unnecessarily put people at risk of infection. For those of you that have been to our offices, you will know that it is quite small and it will be hard to follow social distancing rules advised by the Government. This is something that we are currently looking into to see what options we have. One other reason that we will not currently be opening our offices is due to an ongoing broadband upgrade that is happening in our office. Currently the broadband speeds will not be sufficient for us to continue to work due to us recently upgrading all of our systems to be in the cloud for the ease of home working.
However we are shortly going to be looking into some measures for our clients to be able to drop off paperwork to our offices. This should only be done if it is urgent and it is impossible for you to send your paperwork to us digitally. This will only be a drop off service and no clients will be allowed onto the premises. If you need to talk to use about the paperwork you are dropping off, then you should follow your visit up with an email or phone call. We are aiming to get this in place by June 2020, but we will make this known closer to the time.
I am not currently expecting our offices to be re-opening fully until at least mid-July 2020, but this is under constant review. Once our offices are re-opened and our staff are back working in the office, it is most likely that we will stick to not allowing any clients onto our premises and all accounts sign offs will be done on a virtual meeting. We will clarify more about this closer to the time.
I hope everyone is keeping safe.