Source: Leeds Federated Housing
Leeds Federated Housing made the decision to work in a more agile way nearly two years ago. The aim was to make the business work smarter for customers and staff. Staff have been given the opportunity to work remotely and provided with a number of technological solutions so that they aren’t tied to a single office location.
Because the company has been encouraging staff to work in this way for some time, we feel that staff are better prepared for the restrictions lockdown has placed on us and that the quality of our customer service has not been compromised.
We introduced a new VPN which has allowed our staff to work remotely as well as improved our cyber security. We also introduced Via telephony so that customer-facing colleagues can accept and deal with customer calls from a location that suits them and aren’t reliant on a single office location.
Our staff all have access to mobile and laptop versions of Skype, OneDrive and Outlook. They are all cloud based, removing our dependency on a local server and making our systems more robust. Our finance team have also been using Sun software to process payments remotely. Although some staff have experienced connectivity issues, solutions for these problems are being worked on.
Finally, Leeds Federated Housing’s leadership team has found Microsoft Teams to be such an invaluable tool for collaboration that we will be rolling out Teams across the entire organisation in the coming months.
