5y
Natalie Dunn, People Services
As the responsible leader within our People Services team, I have full overview of the people joining and leaving the company. We’re a mid-sized business which means that we’re big enough to have the breadth of capabilities and resources to invest in upskilling, coaching and caring for our staff, whilst being small enough to get to know and treat our people as valued colleagues and individuals.
In my view, this review is fake for two reasons. The first is based on the references to COVID and the timing that this person alleges to have left the company, because I know that no member of staff has been furloughed, made redundant or left for any COVID related reason. The second reason is that the company has diligently managed work priorities, individual workloads and staff wellbeing (using leading mental wellbeing triaging techniques) at daily team stand-ups and weekly meetings with their responsible director. Separately, People Services have called individual members of staff for relaxed, private chats whenever we sensed someone might be experiencing personal, home or work related problems. In these ways, we are checking-in with our people every single day to support their mental wellbeing and ensure they are coping with working remotely.
No one has reported experiencing any significant issues, including any of our graduates and young professionals, and in particular there have been no problems with unsustainable workloads or people struggling with the work assigned to them. Since implementing full remote working, the company has gone to very considerable lengths to ensure that no one is isolated and it has never been left to the discretion of any individual team leader to make decisions about assigned priorities, workloads, personnel related issues or maintaining communications with team members.
For all of the reasons outlined above, this post is in my opinion disingenuous.
James Cruddas, Lead Technical Consultant
Personally, I’m proud of the way that the company has come together as a whole to support each other and our clients through the challenges that COVID has bought us all. We’re a world class digital consultancy that has developed sophisticated digital work scheduling tools that enable all of our people to collaborate and support each other in an open, agile and adaptive way. These online tools have built-in safety features that alert us to and protect us from becoming overworked for lengthy periods of time. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when we are very busy – that’s when our daily team stand-ups and weekly director team catch-up meetings are used to re-balance the workloads, as well as renegotiate priorities and reschedule deadlines when necessary. Everyone is in the same boat, so both colleagues and clients have been very empathetic and supportive since COVID hit us.
These online collaboration and work management tools, as well as the daily and weekly team catch-ups, enable us to plan, assign, monitor and report on peoples’ workloads and how they are coping. Alongside this, we’re offered a wide selection of excellent wellbeing initiatives e.g. guided meditations, fitness classes. We’re also assigned a buddy, so we can check-in with each other and there are a wide variety of personal development and wellbeing masterclasses on offer. These things were in place even before lockdown. Since lockdown, staff have been asked to suggest improvements and this resulted in a number of key wellbeing modules being quickly enhanced and refocused to better support full remote working and being delivered online. Everyone at Informed has valued and benefited from this support.
If this post and review is genuine, I am very sorry you feel disappointed about your team leader and time at Informed. However, I cannot reconcile what you’ve said with the reality of 7+ years of working life at the company. We’re a medium sized business and most of us know each other even if we’ve not worked directly together, so it’s not like you can get completely lost within the company or nobody notices you, like you can within a huge corporation.
For those reading this response that are thinking about joining us, I can personally tell you that you that my colleagues are great people and very smart, capable, supportive professionals. You can build a very rewarding career here, working at a growing international digital transformation consultancy that regularly wins leading industry awards. Please get in touch, and we can arrange for you to chat with me or any of the colleagues who actually work here. We’d be happy to explain what it’s like to experience Informed Solutions ‘in real life’.
