27 Feb 2023
Fortus Response
3yThank you for taking the time to share your thoughts as a former member of our team. It’s obviously very disappointing for us to read.
Given the nature of your final point, we felt it important to respond to this first. As a business that cares deeply about its people, we have a zero-tolerance approach for any type of inappropriate behaviour. This is stated clearly within our company policies which are shared with every employee when they join Fortus. Thankfully, we’re pleased to say, we rarely receive any formal complaints against members of our team. Despite this, we’d always encourage inappropriate behaviour to be reported immediately to our HR/People team and/or a line manager in order that investigative action can be taken.
With channels available for any of our people to voice their concerns in confidence, we’d always reinforce the message that people should feel both comfortable and confident in voicing those concerns at the time of any alleged incident taking place, both inside and outside of the workplace.
On the point of employee turnover, in general, this has been a challenge for all professional services firms over the past few years. Given the competitive nature of recruitment often leading to the enticement of people away from the business, and those who decide to move on, our staff turnover’s where we’d expect it to be.
We’ll always champion inclusivity as an essential element of our culture and whilst the vast majority feel at home working at Fortus, we do of course recognise personal values and needs don’t always align with our own company values - that’s both natural and understandable. Our values were established ‘by our people, for our people’ back in 2020, and are simply there to ‘guide’ us both culturally and operationally.
With regular improvement opportunities being a key aspect of our business’s wellness and growth, it would be remiss of us to ‘pigeonhole’ our people - particularly with those who have ambitions, ideas, and skills beyond their existing role. In fact, we have numerous examples of team members moving into different areas who’ve taken on new responsibilities and roles within Fortus through the secondment/cross-working programmes we have in place, to help advance their own personal growth whilst supporting the evolution of the business itself.
When it comes to the knowledge, expertise, and support we continue to provide to our clients, we’re comfortable with the fees we have in place for quality of work and expertise we provide. At Fortus we’re sincerely invested in the success of our clients and their business/es, and so as business advisors (not just accountants), we simply wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t offer up or promote services we have that might be valuable to helping them achieve success along their business journey.
Although you’ve now left the business, we’d always encourage further discussion on the points you’ve mentioned. As with all former team members who’ve chosen to move on from Fortus, we wish you all the very best for the future.