As we settle into new ways of working by embracing technology, becoming accustomed to our new working environment and finding new rhythms, it’s important that we also try to retain a sense of normality and routine. Remaining connected with your colleagues is one way of doing this, as well as continuing the flow of some of your business-as-usual activities such as having regular 121s and team meetings.
As an SMT we meet 3 times a week to discuss key issues, risks and priorities. The rest of SMT and I also held a meeting with almost 50 managers from right across the business last week via Teams, to share our areas of focus, risks and how we intend to manage them. We also held a Q&A session.
These Q&A sessions will be held fortnightly, so if your manager is unable to answer your question, please ask them to bring it to this forum. In the meantime, your manager will share the information pack with you during your next team meeting.
Many of us are now feeling the impact of our new working environment. Whatever your circumstances, you are likely to face some challenges. Whether your preference is to spend time with others or spend time alone, there can be too much of a good thing! However, there’s several resources you can tap into which may help. Making mindful choices when it comes to taking care of your physical and mental health are extremely important and I encourage you to read the wellbeing tips we share in this newsletter.
Staying at home and continuing to observe social distancing when you leave your home is becoming increasingly difficult now that the sun has started to shine. Regardless, following government advice remains the best way of helping yourself and each other.
Because of the tougher measures on restricted movement in South Africa, we had to act quickly to ensure a degree of business continuity. We had only a few days to move from being an all office-based operation to all home-based.
Their operating environment, culture and lifestyle is somewhat different to ours here in the UK . From dealing with the issues concerning broadband coverage, building and mass mobilisation of equipment, to rapidly evolving our customer communications, the challenge has been great. Network connections remain a problem due to the higher levels of demand being placed on their services and the telephony channel at present remains closed to customers.
We now have 50% of our colleagues in South Africa successfully working from home with support from many of you here in the UK. Email is currently the only means of communication. However we have implemented a new ‘call back’ service for customers and we are working hard to improve the response times in this channel. We hope this will satisfy our customers and allow them options for contacting us on urgent matters.
Work continues on finding solutions to expand our remote working capability in Cape Town and to enable us to open up the telephony channel in due course.
Our IT partners, Cognizant, are similarly impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic and have had to invoke their own business continuity plan for their on-shore and off-shore employees. Since they had not needed to work from home prior to 2020, only 8-10% of their employees had home working capability so they also had to move quickly.
In mid-March Cognizant identified 60% of their employees who are critical to TGP - all located in the Indian cities of Chennai and Coimbatore. Similar to the UK, laptops were in high demand so Cognizant shipped desktops to employees' homes with double layers of encryption for additional security. By the end of week 1, they had enabled 95% of their employees who work for TGP to be set up at home, ensuring the support for our business continues.
In terms of protecting our business, I can assure you that all members of the SMT are working hard to address the new risks that we face as a result of the crisis.
We have always promised to send our customers accurate bills, and this has been identified as a risk. With most UK businesses either temporarily closing or consuming less energy than forecast, we’ve considered how best we support them while also being mindful of the impact on our own business.
We’re therefore analysing energy usage across the country to help us calculate estimated bills to non-AMR and non-Smart SME customers for their March consumption in the most accurate way. From April consumption onwards, we are withholding sending bills to those identified as non-consuming.
Our current promises to our customers, partners and each other may need to be tweaked where absolutely necessary to take into account our current operating environment. However, I remain determined that we will become the UK’s most trusted energy supplier and we will deliver what we promise.
Wishing you and your families a happy and safe Easter break.
Dave
