At Flint, we’ve always been known for building strong relationships with our customers, employees, and Flint associates. The Coronavirus pandemic, although challenging and exhausting, has motivated us to deepen our relationships even further and find new ways to transcend physical barriers and connect and care for our partners within and outside the company.
The Coronavirus pandemic, which impacted the everyday lives of ourselves and our loved ones during 2020 and 2021, probably accelerated a positive change in working behaviours and practices, which was long overdue. The pandemic made us all stop and think about our own personal wellbeing. This is probably one of the main consequential benefits of being forced to work from our homes and having the time to assess how that work/life balance will work for us all. Now in 2022, as the world moves back to a new normality, we as businesses started to challenge the way we would have approached business prior to 2020.
Supporting Our Partners Through a Challenging Time
Flint, as a business, were well prepared for the pandemic, which in no small part was thanks to the processes and procedures of our ISO 27001 certification. Our business continuity planning had already moved the majority of our business processes and tools into the Cloud, and so the adaption to working remotely was on the whole easier than we’d probably have imagined prior to the pandemic.
As well as our operations, our attention also turned to our customers and our contractors who were supporting the delivery of critical projects. Due to the demand on the communications networks, those projects’ criticality also increased, and so we supported our contractors in meeting our clients’ needs. In some cases, this extended to providing face masks and hand sanitiser so they were still able to attend client premises to undertake those works taking as many precautions as we could to protect them.
Prior to 2020, we would have met up with our contractors in locations that were logistically sensible to be able to meet as many as possible. However, the pandemic demanded a change in approach by speaking with our contractors directly to handle their concerns and queries during a most difficult period in all our lives.
Learned Lessons and the Inception of the term Flint Associates
In mid-2021, whilst reflecting on this period, we realised that as a business, we had become closer to our resources. We, therefore, wanted to capture and harness these relationships further as life started to return to some degree of normality again.
We decided to change our approach and invest further in these relationships with our contractors. We wanted to make our resources not only feel more connected to our business but that they saw Flint as their partner in the fulfilment of that business for our customers.
Alan Bryant, Managing Director at Flint UKI
As part of this change, Flint did two things:
- In order to express the close working relationship that we strive to have with our contractors, we decided to change how we referred to them. We adopted the term ‘associate’. They are our partners in business and an important and valued part of the extended Flint family.
- We added an additional member of staff to our resourcing team who was dedicated to engaging with our associates. Rebecca Pellow joined in September 2021 to be the single point of contact for any issues they had during their time with us.
An Invaluable and Ongoing Journey
Though we’ve always been close to our associates and had allocated resources to care for and support them, Rebecca’s additional zeal and sole focus on these relationships have helped us to even better understand what our associates need. She will continue our ongoing initiative to ensure that all our associates feel cared for and supported by Flint by having regular catch-ups with our UK associates across our Resourcing and Administration teams. The feedback from our associates have been very positive, especially when excessive remote work has the potential to leave some of us feeling isolated.
This change, which came about following one of the hardest periods in all our lifetimes, has presented us with a wonderful opportunity of closer relationships with our associates and making them feel part of the wider Flint family.
Would you like to know more about our resourcing services and company values? Visit our Strategic Resourcing page and our About us page. Are you interested in joining us, or would you like to know more about the opportunities we can offer you? Check out our Careers page and job listings or take the initiative and send us your CV and a few words about you here.
Any more questions? Contact Us!
