The digital workplace strategy Affinity Water put in place from 2018/2019  has come into its own - over 800 Affinity Water staff are now working from home to keep vital services running during the Coronavirus lockdown.

Nick Burton, Affinity Water’s Head of IT and OT Service Delivery, has been working with a 20-plus team to facilitate 800 staff working from home as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The water company was able to mobilise the digital workplace protocols to set up all staff who didn’t already have them with laptops or converted desk top computers so that they could work from home.

Nick Burton commented:

“It was a real challenge. The issue we have had was that we had 800 office-based workers that we wanted to mobilise to work from home. Some others were already doing that. A lot of the teams such as community operations or production supply, have the where-with-all to work from outside the HQ, but if you are in the office you will need a laptop.”

“ We have enabled our digital workplace strategy, which facilitated that. We had quite a challenge to work out who had the equipment and capability to work from home and who we needed to help. The figures are about 800 staff and within a couple of weeks we were able to get them all to work from home and the business has been able to keep functioning as normal.”

Affinity Water already had an IT disaster recovery plan written and edited and ready, and an IT business continuity plan. The company had practiced the scenarios but not one where all the sites were off limits because of social distancing,

At any one time the utility has had more than 20 people from the IT team working on the task, including infrastructure teams, application teams, service delivery teams and desktop engineers. According to Nick Burton, the challenges came thick and fast – he explained:

“Our supply chains in China were starting to struggle to deliver to us, things like the headsets and the laptops. Every day we were on the line finding out from our suppliers what equipment was available to us.”

Affinity managed to get bulk orders of laptops in, with some still coming in during April. The teams also had to alter the standard desktop PC build to facilitate working from home, together with considering issues around cyber security and the usability of the systems.

Nick Burton continued:

“People did still come and expect face to face help, so we created an air gap and got them to leave their equipment in reception so a big change in the way we work.”

“The digital workplace strategy we put in place from 2018/2019 from the hardware to the software side has come into its own as it means you can work from home. That flexible way of working will be adopted in the future I am sure, it’s more environmentally friendly and saves people from travelling.

“The use of tools like Teams, will become second nature to us. This new way or working will become the new normal to us.”

“The team motto was ‘Tough times don’t last, but tough people do’! It won’t go on forever and we will understand the new normal. We are planning our way out of this as we speak.”