January 2020 started off with great excitement at work, with a move to new premises close to my favourite part of Belfast, the place I call home. As a business we were excited with what lay ahead for us in 2020 and how we were going to be able to serve old and new clients better from the new office.

Around the same time, I started to hear more and more about this disease that was being called Coronavirus that was badly affecting Wuhan Province in China. To be honest I didn't think much of it at the time as we had lived through diseases like Ebola, SARS and Swine flu and they had never really impacted us here in the UK, so why should this be any different. As we now all know I couldn't have been more wrong.

At the start of March, it was becoming more and more obvious that this was a very serious disease and we would be impacted although I believe even at that point, we still hadn't grasped the true seriousness of it all.

We are a relatively small business we were not set up for homeworking. We didn't even have the ability to take calls from home at that point. That's where calm heads prevailed and we began to formulate a plan for what would eventually turn out to be the, "New Normal". As a management team we had 2 clear goals at that point,

    1. To protect our staff both in terms of the disease and their jobs.

    2.To be able to continue to provide a top-class level of service to our clients.

We had decided before lockdown measures were announced that the best way of achieving our goals was to immediately prepare the business for homeworking. We invested in web phone technology and various other systems so that we could continue to service our customers. We rewrote our processes and procedures to move all our day to day face to face interactions with each other to online platforms. We ensured that all our staff had the equipment they needed to be able to work from home. By the time lockdown was announced we were ready to go.

It was strange to begin with, face to face team huddles were replaced by Microsoft Teams video calls, office banter and chats with colleagues were replaced by WhatsApp groups and interactive fun topics for conversation. It has probably taken a while for our customers to get used to hearing dogs barking or children playing in the background of calls, but I believe as 2020 has gone on everyone has adapted to the new normal.

We rightly applaud and honour our key workers throughout this pandemic particularly our dedicated and amazing NHS staff, but I am also very proud of our team of people in Sprout who have worked throughout this crisis from home. It's very different working from home and it can be lonely at times, but I am proud of the team’s work ethic and ability to motivate each other on the difficult days. Ultimately what I am most proud of is that our staff have continued to provide our customers with the highest quality of service throughout all this, particularly our customers who have struggled financially due to the crisis.

Tom Patterson