It’s been a long and unusual six months for everyone but we are pleased to say, that we are still here and still going strong.
We are continuing to work remotely for the foreseeable future as we want to ensure the safety and well-being of all our staff & we are lucky enough, at the moment, to be able to deliver our services remotely without there being an adverse affect on our client work or our short-course and apprenticeship delivery.
We are mindful of not becoming complacent as an organisation that are not based in one office, we all know how easy it can be to get used to homeworking. We have been busy re-engineering our services & offers to ensure that we can be agile enough to migrate seamlessly between potential future states of lockdown & being office based.
We are keen to support our local economy as well as getting UK PLC back on its feet, but we are living in novel times and we have to adapt.
Some positive news for our organisation is that although we have had to furlough a small proportion of our staff who have been working directly on contracts that have paused, we are very pleased to have grown our remote learning delivery and we have taken on 41 new hires over the last three months.
This is fantastic news for us and for our city as many of our new staff are from Wolverhampton, the Black Country & a few coming from further afield.
The challenge is to ensure that they feel connected and part of the business, as unlike our pre-COVID staff, our new colleagues, in most cases, have yet to physically meet any of the existing staff.
Collaborative technologies have been the key to keeping us all connected and video-based meetings have been imperative. It has been vital to have as many e-face-to-face conversations & internal meetings to ensure on boarding has been successful, but also because we all ultimately need a human connection when working within a team. It’s far too easy for people to feel like they are an island, which over such a protracted period, can be very isolating and detrimental.
We don’t have all the answers, I’m sure we’ve gotten some things wrong, I’m also sure we’ve gotten some things very right, we don’t know where things will go but we are not going to stop trying and we are not so entrenched in any one way of working that we can’t evolve or listen to our staff and clients to make changes that are needed or necessary.
I feel very lucky to still be working, as I’m sure those of us who are working, do.
We are very grateful to some of the government schemes that have greatly assisted our business & in particular, to those intermediaries that have helped us navigate some complex territory in order to be able to receive/draw down interventions.
We are very grateful to the clients that we are still able to serve but of course, more than anything, we are and always will be, very, very grateful to our wonderful & dynamic staff who have pitched in & gone above and beyond over these last six months.
They are the reason that We are LearnPlay Foundation.
– Ro Hands, Managing Director & Legal Counsel
