Coronavirus latest updates at 34SP.com

As the current pandemic continues to disrupt lives around the world, I wanted to take a moment to touch on how we’re continuing to adapt at 34SP.com; both to ensure the safety of our staff and to ensure the smooth running of our services.

We first took the decision to allow indefinite work from home for our staff on March 13th. We’ve recently decided to extend that by several more months. How much more is still up in the air, but we’re certainly in no rush to return to our desks amidst the current fluid situation. Like most places of work we have employees (or extended family) that fall into the high risk category, and we want to ensure everyone’s safety as best we can.

We’ve learned a lot over the two months of lockdown life so far. Like pretty much everyone on the planet, we’ve had Zoom calls aplenty; our monthly staff pizza party moved online particularly well! We already use tools like Slack internally, plus we run our own VoIP system for calls. Most of this allows us to smoothly work from any location, and indeed, before all this began our team were allowed to work from home one day a week as a perk anyway.

For sure we’ve had some hiccups along the way. We can definitely improve our internal communication as well as that with our customers. As I write, we’re working on several new internal policies for better communication, review and collaboration; we’re also looking at how we can interview, hire and train new staff. Suffice to say, we’re trying to ensure that the rapid, high levels of support you expect from us are maintained throughout this period.

Manchester masks

A quick shout to another fine Manchester based company – Virustatic Shield. We recently took delivery of quite a few of these very cool face masks, for distribution amongst our team. We though the anti-viral material/design of these masks was quite exciting and we love to support other local businesses.

Again, while we’re not asking anyone to return to our office yet, people still need to head out into the world for essentials and hopefully this adds another level of reassurance and safety as our team go about their lives.

Covid-19 hosting

Lastly, our Coronavirus hosting scheme continues apace. We’ve already helped a number of new sites get online completely free of charge. If you’re helping others to get through the current crisis online, let us know and the hosting is on us. We’d love to help.