How are the Direct Air team staying safe during COVID?
As Lottie is demonstrating in the above right image, the first step we took as a company was getting as many people as possible working from home, leaving only a handful of staff on-site during higher cases. Now even with less restrictions, some staff choose to remain from home both permanently and at interchanging points to maintain the offices at a safe capacity. This includes employees who are significant to the foreground of the engineers work such as our Technical Support Manager Simon Thomas, Service Co-ordinator Ross Scimeca and Project Engineer Nemo Choudhary. Alongside them, many others have took upon themselves to create the safest environment such as Louise Yorke in Accounts, Contracts Administrator Martyn Edwards, Service Administrator Jill Dougan, Sales & Project Support Michelle Hooke and the Marketing department.
So what have we done for the staff still working on-site? Well, we continued to take the governments advice by putting up plastic screen dividers between desks for office based staff unable to work from home. Also for the warehouse where stores and engineers would be walking about, we displayed 2 meter distance precaution signs to remind everyone of the restrictions, as well as opening doors for ventilation and providing multiple hand sanitiser points all around the site. Although the restrictions for the pandemic are more lenient than ever, we’re keeping visits to Direct Air sites to a minimum for customers and suppliers where possible for the time being, in order to keep everyone’s safety as a priority.
With all of these new measures being put into place, we needed to ensure that even though we can’t be physically close, we remain connected as a team – both within working matters and the social side. Therefore, we rolled out better internal communication using new platforms including Microsoft Teams to conduct companywide monthly meetings which encourages every department from management, to engineers, to sales to join the call. They consist of updates on our enquiry rates, HSEQ objectives, customer feedback, internal shout-out’s and staffing news. To make sure nothing is missed and the people who can’t attend get all the important messages, a newsletter is sent out to follow the meeting. This process means that despite having to cut down on those corridor catch-up’s between colleagues on the way to the water fountain, all employees are still maintaining important communication.
The main thing Lottie noticed throughout this day was just how well all employees have adapted to working and helping each other despite the hurdles and restrictions they all faced.
And with that, we conclude this years #LottieTour at Direct Air. She’s now got a brief understanding about some of the key areas of our business, as well as how different types of engineers work alongside each other to complete a high quality, efficient job… and hopefully you have too!
