I joined Jacksons in September 2019 and I can’t quite believe that I have been here a year already.
Going from working 45 hours per week to 30 has been an absolute dream and I can never imagine going back to work full time now, taking the role at Jacksons was certainly the right decision for me.
When I joined Jacksons, getting to know the team and the business was my priority. Professional Services was a whole new playing field for me and I had to learn everything from the academic routes to becoming a solicitor to understanding what all the acronyms meant.
Jacksons is a really flexible, family friendly employer, who really listen to their staff. Issues are dealt with in a much more flexible manner to what I was used to which was a breath of fresh air for me.
The first few months flew by, I was getting to know the business, meeting recruiters, interviewing everyone from solicitors to secretaries and apprentices, I’d resolved a number of ER issues and made a start on updating the employee handbook. I really enjoyed getting to know the team and in particular becoming involved with our apprentices, I had attended quite a few internal and external networking events, been invited to speak on a number of panels and started to get to know other business leaders in our local community.
I really felt like I had established myself and at the beginning of March embarked upon an ambitious wellbeing month, where we had daily wellbeing activities from circulating information on wellbeing to handing out wellbeing gifts to bringing in various speakers to carry out sessions with our team.
Of course everything suddenly ground to a halt when COVID hit, all my wellbeing initiatives went out of the window and it was all hands to the pump to get us working from home.
As I look after the Reception team, assuming that lock down would only be for a couple of weeks, I picked up all the incoming calls when my team were furloughed. Whilst we were certainly not as busy as usual there was a steady stream of calls all day and I learned so much about the business during this time. Some of our clients have really interesting stories and I enjoyed talking to everyone.
I worked from home for about 12 weeks in the end and coming back into the office was a relief, I enjoyed home working but I was tired of the same 4 walls, I really looked forward to seeing everyone and reclaiming my dining room for dinners, rather than Zooms.
Furlough and furlough claims took up a lot of my time during lock down, but having got back to some sort of normality I was happy to be able to dive back into the projects I had been looking at pre COVID. I surveyed our staff on how they thought we had handled the COVID situation and I felt very proud of the Jacksons team when the feedback received was overwhelmingly positive, I’ve also been lucky enough to squeeze in a sunshine holiday.
With the second wave about to hit and some of the local areas under special lock down measures, we are encouraging people to work from home again where possible – though I should mention here that our offices are still open and fully operational. I’m mostly working from home and whilst I do spend a lot of time coordinating all things COVID, the process to get people home working again has been really easy, simply because we prepared so well the first time.
I’m hoping in the coming months to carry on updating our policies, to actually finish the wellbeing activities I had planned, get the apprentices back on track of their learning and to continue to immerse myself in the business, adding value where possible and helping to make our team even stronger than they are now.
Zoe Tweddle, HR Manager
