COVID-19, Wednesday 25th March 2020

Today it is time, and apologies if people I should have done it on day one, to pay tribute to our staff. Now, in many ways we are very much like our clients. Our business is our staff. We have some office space, some phones, some IT and bits and pieces of kit here and there, the odd stationary cupboard (and still despite how much we spend on stationary I can never find a stapler?), but, in reality, the business is built on and a sum of the people who work within it.

And that is very similar to our clients who typically build teams of people to manage the build of projects. They are businesses with teams and departments of people, and those people are the significant asset in those businesses.

Now over the last 2 weeks, our staff have been tested like never before. We have asked everyone to work from home, (which as I mentioned earlier this week is alien to many), and that does not take into account their own isolation challenges beyond simply working from home. I live on the outskirts of London and have a family to keep me company and a garden for fresh air so my challenge is minor. Some of our staff rent in Central London; they are in flats with no outside space, some share with flatmates who aren’t necessarily friends but people you tolerate when you are passing by them to and from work, but not people you especially want to be stuck with 24/7. They are cut off from family that is based in other parts of the country and rightly don’t want to return to them for fear of potentially spreading infection to loved ones.

In this time, we have asked them to keep in touch with clients and candidates as much as they can but being mindful that recruitment needs are on hold, that people may want to put job searches on hold, so not being seen to pester people at a difficult time.

They have acknowledged that for those reasons, their own earnings will be affected, whether it is a new member of the team who came into recruitment with the expectation of a decent earning potential or our more senior members of the team who have families and mortgages and depend on a certain level of earning.

At CSC, we are working as hard as we can to protect the team and look after them and to try to give them hope in these most uncertain of times.

And I have been touched how everyone has stepped up and pitched in, from Fred who joined 3 weeks ago (and must still be trying to work out exactly what is going on), right through to our stalwarts, Dave Rumbles and Karen Lee-Jones, who have been at CSC since day one and are the very heartbeat of the company.

We don’t know what the future holds, but even though I am reduced to looking at a group of faces on Zoom, and not standing in front of the team, I am really proud of how everyone has worked through this situation and it is time to publicly thank them all.

I work with a truly great bunch of people and I believe many of them are successful because their clients and candidates think so too!