The Timico car park is emptier than usual this morning as heavy overnight snow has prevented some staff making it in. In fact most of the country seems to have ground to a halt. In London the buses aren’t running, some airports are closed and the train service is limited. We are just not used to snow in the UK and the official advice is not to travel.
Of course the newpapers have the usual dramatic headlines. “UK business loses £600m a day due to weather.” The weather, I must say, has not made a blind bit of difference to Timico as most of our staff are already geared up for flexible working.
They can work from home just as easily as from the office (in some cases more effectively !!) because the business is fully IP enabled. Access to telephony (VoIP), intranet – CRM, billing and support platforms. In fact this infrastructure also makes it easy to offer a 24 x 7 round the clock support service.
It also means, and excuse me here I’m on a bit of a roll, we have lower absence due to sickness and with a high number of female staff can be much more flexible in our approach to maternity leave. So I don’t think the snow will have affected us at all.
My kids on the other hand are extremely disaffected. They had tuned in to the local radio station at the crack of dawn to listen out for school closure announcements. It seemed that practically every school in Lincolnshire was shut except for those of the Davies offspring! Bummer.